Maybe "degrees VNM"?

Upvoted. This is a quite interesting thought experiment, and maybe even worth a post of its own. I encourage you to write more on this subject.

In a democracy, who enforces the right of the people to vote? The question is analogous. To an extent, the answer is that the elected officials enforce the right of the people to vote, and in your question, the benevolent dictator enforces the right of the people to leave. Yes, if it is a true dictatorship the dictator has the power to ban leaving, but it is also true that the elected officials could just choose to never hold another election. Then in both cases the people are screwed, and probably will have to resort to a civil war or something to get out of the sticky situation they are in, but the point is, that applies also to a democracy.

Anyway, as we are positing a benevolent dictatorship, this really shouldn't be an issue. Yes,the dictator could choose to disallow leaving, as he could also choose, say, to torture people. But in this hypothetical, he is a benevolent dictator, so this isn't an issue.

True enough. Still, it is one of those "hacks" that are very useful and efficient, and anyone who seriously wants to munchkin their way to success should certainly take heed. Sometimes the simpler tricks are the most effective. But yes, true, this would probably be more at home in with the category of boring advice.

This is a well known one, but I only recently got around to actually doing it, so I suspect that there are others that also haven't done it yet.

Learn to touch type. The kind of person you probably are if you are reading Less Wrong spends a remarkable fraction of the day typing at a computer. As such, even a small increase in typing speed and skill can save you huge amount of time and effort. And it is not at all hard to learn. This investment of a small amount of time and energy to learn to touch type pays back huge dividends in time saved.

One other point: If you are going to learn to touch type, there is no point whatsoever to doing so in the Qwerty keyboard layout. It is just as easy or easier to learn a better layout (like Dvorak or Colemak), which also will give you a bigger boost to your typing speed and efficiency.

FYI, this is a good example of a case where rot13ing doesn't help at all. The instant I glanced at gwern's comment I got what was being said, simply from length considerations. In this case it's more or less OK, as it's not a major spoiler point and one would need to unrot13 Morendil's comment in order to actually get what you were saying "Lrf" about, but had gwern written the comment unrot13ed, I would have gotten exactly the same information from glancing at it.

(But maybe other people would not automatically infer the message from, say, the length? For me, it was something perfectly natural that my brain did automatically, but who knows, that might just be my brain. I am curious: do other people's brains also automatically react like that in situations like this?)

Also, the lines

Carnap wants concreteness, Godel's incompleteness

Tarski, Popper, dasein, late and early Wittgenstein

Ryle, Turing, Sartre thinks life is boring

Ayer, Quine, rights for blacks, trolley car is off its tracks

Are all mixed up.

Using "a tad" to mean "very" is understatement, not hyperbole.

One could call it hypobole.

Yes, of course. That's the reason why the identity model exists in the first place. It is quick and easy to make a decision using it, and it often gives the correct answer, or nearly so. Nice and simple heuristics like this one are very useful in our day to day lives. However, to the extent that it differs from the consequences model, it is wrong. As such, we should do our best to minimize our reliance on it.

Or put it this way: The phrase "heuristics and biases" exists, and paints out a natural part of conceptspace. In the same way that we want to reduce biases in our thinking (to the extent that it is possible to do so, of course), we want to reduce the use of heuristics in our thinking. (Again, to the extent that it is possible to do so, of course.)

One man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens. That's all. It's a perfectly reasonable conclusion.