So this may be other-optimizing if you heed my anecdote, but contemplating my own swiftly approaching death (an idea I take from Stoicism) helps my procrastination. In the context of this article, I think it works because it decreases my impulsiveness by forcing me to view my time as a finite resource, thus reducing some (not all) hyperbolic discounting of rewards. When I get up in the morning, if I say to myself something like "I probably have less than 20,000 days left to live, and this is one of those days," I find it easier to do tasks that my rational brain knows are more valuable to me, versus tasks that generate immediate reward chemicals in my animal brain. This visualization idea drives the point home even harder. When I am dying, I don't want to look back on my life and see that I wasted days binge watching House of Cards or reading interesting articles instead of doing something worth writing an interesting article about. I think this technique gives an immediate reward through my recognition that I spent an extremely scarce resource efficiently, thus giving some immediacy to long-term goals.

To get a meaningful answer I think you also have to look at all of the high-IQ people that don't generate a lot of wealth. What you really should look at is the correlation between IQ and wealth generation on average. My intuition says that there is a correlation but not a super duper strong one. (For instance I doubt having a 180 IQ results in more wealth generation than a 150 IQ.) I think cognitive empathy, or the ability to understand others' feelings and how they would react in a given circumstance, is just as important for wealth generation, if not more so. There are and have been functional autistic savants with very high IQ but low cognitive empathy that have not generated a lot of wealth.

I believe the ability to delay gratification, or think long-term, or whatever you want to call it, is more important than IQ for self-actualization. If you can't override your impulses and force yourself to follow your rational conclusions, what good is your reasoning faculty? To put it in Daniel Kahneman's terms, if you have difficulty getting your System 1 to use or go along with your System 2, it doesn't matter how powerful your System 2 is. The Marshmellow Test experiment is a good indicator of this. The children that had inherent abilities to delay gratification did better later in life by many different measures, including wealth generation.

I'm 99% confident that dust specks in 3^^^3 eyes result in less lost utility than 50 years of torturing one person.

You (the reader) do not exist.

EDIT: That was too punchy and not precise. The reasoning behind the statement:

Most things which think they are me are horribly confused gasps of consciousness. Rational agents should believe the chances are small that their experiences are remotely genuine.

EDIT 2: After thinking about shminux's comment, I have to retract my original statement about you readers not existing. Even if I'm a hopelessly confused Boltzmann brain, the referent "you" might still well exist. At minimum I have to think about existence more. Sorry!

I suppose my actual belief is that flush toilets are a mistake outside of urban areas, I don't have much experience with urban living or what other poop strategies could work with it.

Advantages, flush toilets:

• Provide easy long distance transport of human waste in urban environments.
• Exchanges weekly-to-yearly chores for purchased services.

Disadvantages, flush toilets:

• Create additional dependency on water (and by extension outside water districts, electricity).
• Turn (vast amounts of) drinking water into black water.
• Create a waste product from human manure, which is a valuable resource (fertile soil) when dealt with properly.
• Adds significantly to the cost of housing (especially outside sewer districts).

if a consumer hypothetically had access to the 1960 basket of consumer goods produced using 2014 technology

Can you elaborate on what this means. Do you mean that if we had more consumer goods of the year 1960, we would be as happy as the current middle class?

Irrationality Game:

Non-healthcare related personal quality of life advances since around 1955-1965 (improvements in food, clothing, entertainment, transportation, communication, etc.) do not increase personal happiness due to the hedonic treadmill, and most of the advances have come about as a means to capture consumers' median increase in real wealth due to a more efficient economy caused by technological advances. Furthermore, if a consumer hypothetically had access to the 1960 basket of consumer goods produced using 2014 technology, a consumer could live at or above the current middle-class level of happiness by spending about $15,000 annually for an average household of three. ~85%.

Please note I am referring only to personal consumer goods and NOT business or technological improvements such as manufacturing techniques, computing power, automation, etc.

Irrationality Game: (meta, I like this idea)

Flush toilets are a horrible mistake. 7b/99%

IME people take to high bar squatting pretty well with minimal instruction. Really the only issue people run into is the ankle/lower back problem. Get them in shoes and their form is good enough that I am confident they won't hurt themselves. About the youtube vids, yeah, I am not really satisfied with the guides on squatting (other exercise videos are fine). I might write a guide to highbar squatting.