I wonder if there's something like Goodhart's Law for community quality and range of topics that can be discussed. Is the community higher quality BECAUSE we're more constrained in the kind of advice we're willing to give?

The thing about filing is not that your nails are too long. For some people the trigger for biting their nails is that they notice a piece of a nail sticking up far enough to be bitten. If they file the nails as short as they bite them, but completely even, then that trigger never happens, so they stop biting their nails.

Pretty much substitute filing for biting, because that looks nicer and is easier to modulate into something that does make sense.

I believe there is a transparent nail polish explicitly made to teach people not to bite their nails -- it tastes horrible, by design.

This is not that kind of country.

That cycle happens to anyone with limited priors who's reading the writing of competent debaters who are consistently disagreeing with each other. That is, you need to gather more data. Eventually you will see through the fog and see who's right, for you will have seen it with your own eyes.

In the meantime, note that where rationality is lacking there will always be an inflated sense of disagreement. In rationalist communities, people tend to recognize a higher proportion of miscommunications. In instrumental-mode communities (e.g., PUA, paleo), talking past each other is generally taken as genuine difference in belief. There are plenty of memes that the original Heartiste spread throughout the community which have a positive effect on particular groups of men, but would be emotionally uncomfortable for the average woman to adopt. Who do you expect to argue for these memes, and who do you imagine would be likely to argue against them?

What should you do? Find the people who's lives seem most similar to yours, and try to apply their advice. If it produces the results you were looking for, then continue wading through their writings. Eventually you'll know what works for you.

One idea: have a system for meeting the kind of women you want to meet on a regular basis (ex: a particular dating site, a particular set of bars with a particular friend, going to dog parks with your dog, going to yoga classes, etc.) and try to meet lots of women through that system. Volume gets you two things: first you can habituate yourself to rejection because as it happens repeatedly it hurts less, and second your brain will start to notice & catch on to patterns in your interactions if they occur close to one another. By sticking to a particular way to meet women, you can ideally develop a system that works for that particular type of woman in that particular situation. (This is a generalized version of the common PUA advice to either concentrate on day game or night game at any given time. Choose a way to meet women that has a high density of the sort of woman you want to meet.) Read dating advice for ideas for things to try out. Discard the things that don't seem to work, continue using the things that do seem to work. Keep a log of all the women you meet. Try to notice patterns in your failures. Where is the weakest point in your "dating funnel"? Generate hypotheses for each failure and see if hypotheses appear consistently. Do you need to be more aggressive? Less aggressive? Which cues did you miss? Which cues did you misinterpret?

If you're not already comfortable making conversation with strangers, work on that first.

Another option is to try to read research related to relationship formation, e.g. this book.

Whatever works better for seduction :-P