Reading this after some months it looks like the majority of the commenters interpreted the post as being "I found a bunch of things that increase IQ," but it feels like the point of the post is more like "Anyone can increase their IQ by trying a bunch of plausible things."

If I am right, for your purposes, a better experiment would be other people trying different batches of interventions at a similar intensity for a similar length of time. Does that sound right?

I was absolutely certain I had responded to this, because I had taken the trouble to search for and locate a description of the procedure used in particle physics, which appears to be the central place where likelihood functions are the preferred tool.

Seems I wrote it but never submitted it, so in this here placeholder comment I vouchsafe to hunt that resource down again and put it here in an edit.

Edit: As I promised, the resource: https://ep-news.web.cern.ch/what-likelihood-function-and-how-it-used-particle-physics

This is a short article from by a person from CERN, Robert Cousins. It covers in brief what likelihood is and how it is different than probability, then a short description of three different methods of using a likelihood function (here listed as Likelihoodist, Neman-Pearson, and Bayesian), and then on to a slightly more advanced example. It has references which include some papers from the work on identifying the Higgs Boson, and some of his own relevant papers.

Suddenly more poignant: 

Out of curiosity, were any patterns discovered during this process? For example, were the writing styles similar among the ones the AI could convert into successful music, or did ones by the same author churn out songs with specific similarities, or what have you?

This is great, bookmarked for future warm and fuzzies. I've just had my second, a son, on February 8th. My first, a daughter, is six next week.

Let it be known to all and sundry that kids are fantastic and fatherhood is wondrous. It is much work and a high cost in money and sleep, in exchange for which you are endowed with glorious purpose and wireheaded to the future.

Also there is the love. Strongly recommended.

Some relevant details for the American government case:

Popular election of the Senate began in 1913. Before that each state’s Senators were elected by the state legislature. This means factional dominance of the Senate was screened off, and actually determined the state level.

This is because the dominant group analysis at the time the constitution was written was people, state government, and federal government, and the conversation was about how to prevent a single group from gaining control over all of government.

The slave vs free grouping played out at the state level. Continuing the group analysis, state level politics is viewed as having been largely between urban and rural interests. In the South the rural interests - plantation owners - usually won, and in the North, urban industrialists usually did. The canonical example of the legacy of this divide is that state capitols are rarely the largest city in the state. The capitols - and therefore the state capital - are normally a much smaller city.

This brings us down to the local level, which in the US is where most of the competition between traditional divisions like race, religion and ethnicity played out.

I think at least in the American case, I model the key development as the creation of more and different groupings through federalism, rather than a veto mechanism for traditional groups.

On the other hand, separately I have heard the idea that traditional groups were weaker in the US than in Europe because of the disruption caused by the US’ colonial structure and immigration, so I could be mislead by these peculiar circumstances. I would need a much better understanding of the democratization of other European countries and preferably some outside of Europe. Unfortunately the data is pretty sparse there, as these democracies are usually very young and don’t have many cycles of competition to compare.

A few years after the fact: I suggested Airborne Contagion and Air Hygiene for Stripe’s (reprint program)[https://twitter.com/stripepress/status/1752364706436673620].

One measure of status is how far outside the field of accomplishment it extends. Using American public education as the standard, Leibniz is only known for calculus.

there is not any action that any living organism, much less humans, take without a specific goal

Ah, here is the crux for me. Consider these cases:

• Compulsive behavior: it is relatively common for people to take actions without understanding why, and for people with OCD this even extends to actions that contradict their specific goals.
• Rationalizing: virtually all people actively lie to themselves about what their goals are when they take an action, especially in response to prodding about the details of those goals after the fact.
• Internal Family Systems and related therapies: the claim on which these treatments rest is that every person intrinsically has multiple conflicting goals of which they are generally unaware, and the learning how to mediate them explicitly is supposed help.
• The hard problem of consciousness: similar to the above, one of the proposed explanations for consciousness is that it serves as a mechanism for mediating competing biological goals.

These are situations where either the goal is not known, or it is fictionalized, or it is contested (between goals that are also not known). Even in the case of everyday re-actions, how would the specific goal be defined?

I can clearly see an argument along the lines of evolutionary forces providing us with an array of specific goals for almost every situation, even when we are not aware of them or they are hidden from us through things like self-deception. That may be true, but even given that it is true I come to the question of usefulness. Consider things like food:

• I claim most of the time we eat, because we eat. As a goal it is circular.
• We might eat to relieve our stomach growling, or to be polite to our host, and these are specific goals, but these are the minority cases.

Or sex:

• Also circular, the goal is usually sex qua sex.
• Speaking for myself, even when I had a specific goal of having children (making explicit the evolutionary goal!), what was really happening under the hood is I was having sex qua sex and just very excited about the obvious consequences.

It doesn't feel to me like thinking of these actions in terms of manipulation adds anything to them as a matter of description or analysis. Therefore when talking about social things I prefer to use the word manipulation for things that are strategic (by which I mean we have an explicit goal and we understand the relationship between our actions and that goal) and unaligned (which I mean in the same sense you described in your earlier comment, the other person or group would not have wanted the outcome).

Turning back to the post, I have a different lens for how to view How To Win Friends and Influence People. I suggest that these are habits of thought and action that work in favor of coordination with other people; I say it works the same way rationality works in favor of being persuaded by reality. 

I trouble to note that this is not true in general of stuff about persuasion/influence/etc. A lot of materials on the subject do outright advocate manipulation even as I use the term. But I claim that Carnegie wrote a better sort of book, that implies pursuing a kind of pro-sociality in the same way we pursue rationality. I make an analogy: manipulators are to people who practice the skills in the book as Vulcan logicians are to us, here.

A sports analogy is Moneyball.

The counterfactual impact of a researcher is analogous to the insight that professional baseball players are largely interchangeable because they are all already selected from the extreme tail of baseball playing ability, which is to say the counterfactual impact of a given player added to the team is also low.

Of course in Moneyball they used this to get good-enough talent within budget, which is not the same as the researcher case.  All of fantasy sports is exactly a giant counterfactual exercise; I wonder how far we could get with 'fantasy labs' or something.