I get the feeling a large portion of this story can be classified as learned helplessness.

Several studies(google for cal newport) have shown that base talent has little effect on how good you can be at something, the real variable is deliberate practice, pushing the limits of what you can handle a tiny bit to slowly keep improving. ( obviously your swimming example does have harder limits imposed by the limits of your body, this does not seem to apply to fields outside of sports though and in sports like boxing there are different classes because of the differences in bodies)

When I learned about grade signalling I started making mistakes on purpose to lower my average (which was around 9.5 at the time). That was a terrible tactic in hindsight and it still causes selfdoubt on exams today.

I think this is a discussion about what the best order is in which debiasing should occur.

Project management seems to be an implementation of debiasing strategies and they first teach you to make more accurate predictions and then later teach you how to prevent the sunk cost fallacy from not cancelling a failing project.

Because of this i think debiasing should occur in a kind of logical order, one that prevents someone from cancelling all projects due to a good grasp of sunk cost and a bad grasp of utility calculations.

Apostrophes are not used to form plurals. (Some style guides give some exceptions, but this is not one of them.) The plural of "typo" is "typos". "Typo's" is a word, but it's the possesive form of "typo" (so it's not the word you want here).

(Ninja edit: better link.)

there are many typo's

Murphy's law: a sentence criticising typos will contain a typo itself.

Sometime ago you believed, correctly IMO, that you need a way of testing rationality skills first, and only then get busy on the exercises. What made you change your mind? (I hope it wasn't something like "we need to push ahead asap".) What's the current plan for preventing the slide into epistemic viciousness? (I hope it isn't something like "we will be smart and won't let it happen".)

I would like to have this as an interactive application. It's not always so easy to get into a teacher student situation.

There are applications out there for developing this curriculum in a better way than the regular approach. Like the app these guys are selling http://www.knowledge-values.com/ I use apps like this on a daily basis to create the training content at work.

I don't need a whole game or anything, something as simple as the math exercises on khan academy will do the trick. And i would prefer each skill told as separately and atomically as possible/logically.

People tell me SI is arrogant but I don't see it myself. When you tell someone something and open it up to falsification and criticism I no longer see it as arrogance ( but I am wrong there for some reason)

In any case, what annoys me about the claims made is that its mostly based on anecdotal evidence and very little has come from research. Also as a regular guy and not a scientist or engineer I've noticed a distinct lack of any discussion of SI's viewpoints in the news.

I don't see anyone actively trying to falsify any of the claims in the sequences for example, and I think it's because you cannot really take them all that seriously.

A second problem is that there are many typos, little mistakes and (due to new experimental evidence) wrong things in the sequences and they never get updated. I'd rather see the sequences as part of a continually updated wiki-like lesson plan, where feedback is reviewed by a kind of board and they change what the texts accordingly.

The nitpicks mentioned on rationalwiki also contribute to the feeling of cultishness and arrogance:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong The part about quantum mechanics could use some extra posts, especially since EY does explain why he makes the claim when you take the whole of the sequences into account. He uses evidence from unrelated fields to prove many worlds.

EDIT: for some unknown reason people are downvoting my comment, if you downvote(d) this post or see why please tell me why so I can learn and improve future posts. Private messages are ok if you don't want to do it through a response here.

Due to a lack of focus I could not read the whole document, but it does look pretty good to my untrained eyes.

The moderating factors seem to be pretty important, I was unable to collect them all but they should sum up nicely to a how to do writing therapy guideline.

Note that the matrix-style learning aspect is only in the news bulletin, the actual study has no such information. In fact the skill they learned was not even useful.

But it is nice to see proof that subliminal messaging can work.

we decide we have an incurable disease called "akrasia" instead of doing that which is known to fix akrasia.

I find this to be one of the most annoying of your recurrent comments. I suspect it is the same thing that annoys EY when someone suggests to him "doing that which is known to fix" weight issues (i.e. diet and exercise). Or when someone tells a clinically depressed person to just stop being depressed, because "it's all in your head".

As a rationalist, you would not deny that real people do have a real problem with procrastination. Given that these people are not stupid, and do not actually enjoy procrastinating, you better admit that there is no simple solution to it, otherwise nearly everyone on LW would have been cured by now.

So, how about publicly admitting that your statement that akrasia can be easily fixed is not a rational one?