Awesomely summarized, so much so that I don't know what else to say, except to perhaps offer this complementary anecdote.

Yesterday, I was giving a workshop on what I jokingly call "The Jedi Mind Trick" -- really the set of principles that makes monoidealism techniques (such as "count to 10 and do it") either work or not work. Towards the end, a woman in the group was having some difficulty applying it, and I offered to walk through an example with her.

She picked the task of organizing some files, and I explained to her what to say and picture in her mind, and asked, "What comes up in your mind right now?"

And she said, "well, I'm on a phone call, I can't organize them right now." And I said "Right, that's standard objection #1 - "I'm doing something else". So now do it again..." [I repeated the instructions]. "What comes to mind?"

She says, "Well, it's that it'll be time to do it later".

"Standard objection #2: it's not time right now, or I don't have enough time. Great. We're moving right along. Do it again. What comes to mind?"

"Well, now I'm starting to see more of what I'd actually be doing if I were doing it, the visualization is getting a lot clearer."

"Terrific, do it again. Now, don't try to actually do the task, just pay attention to what you're seeing and feeling, and you may begin to notice some of your muscles beginning to respond, like they're trying to actually do some of the things you're picturing, like starting to twitch..."

And she burst out laughing, because, she said, her legs had already started twitching and she was feeling like, "well, the files are right over there we could just go and get started..."

Had she given up at standard objection #1 or #2, she wouldn't have learned the technique or gotten the result. But it's not the content of the objection that matters, it's that ANY objection that stops you from actually trying something useful, means you fail. You lose. You are not being a smart, rational skeptic, you're being a dumbass loser.

In the workshop, I explained how our own objections and doubts are also doing the Jedi Mind Trick... but on US. "It's not time now..." they say, and like a hypnotized stormtrooper we nod and agree, "It's not time now." And it doesn't matter if those doubts are saying, "It's not time now" or "It's not peer-reviewed" -- because you still lose, either way.

However, if you simply ignore those doubts and objections, and continue what you're doing, they cannot stop you. If the objection you think is real, is in fact real, well, then you've only lost a little time by trying. But if you believe an objection that isn't real, then you've lost much, much more than that.

Much of the time, the primary function of a (good) personal coach or teacher -- whether in pickup, personal development, or even business and marketing! -- is simply to drag someone (kicking and screaming, if necessary) past their objections into actually doing something the teacher or coach already knows will work.

And when that happens, what the student usually finds is that it isn't really as hard as they thought it would be, or that, yes, that crazy mumbo-jumbo actually works, no matter how irrational it might have sounded before they had any personal point of reference.

The woman on the call only needed about two minutes, to try a technique four times in a row and get a result. If she'd been doing it on her own, she might have given up after only one try. And a lot of folks on LW would likely not have tried even that once!

On LW, I mostly bide with polite patience those people who talk about the stuff I teach as if it's a matter of variation from person to person as to whether stuff works, or that things sometimes work and sometimes not, or whatever, blah blah fudge factor nonsense they individually prefer. That's all well and good here, because those people are not my clients.

But if I were to accept that sort of bullshit from one of my clients, then I would have failed them. It's all very well and good for the client to come to me believing that his or her problems are special and unique and that, in all the world, they are the worst person ever at doing something. But if they leave me still thinking that, then I have not done my job.

My job is to say, fuck that bullshit. Do this. No, not that, this. Good. Do it again. Again. That's better. Now do this.

Dunno about rationality, but ISTM that's how a dojo is actually supposed to work. If the master sat there listening to people's inane theories about how they need to punch differently than everybody else, or their insistence that they really need to understand a complete theory of combat, complete with statistical validation against a control group, before they can even raise a single fist in practice, that master would have failed their students AND their Art.

Just as EY fails his students and his art by the public positions he has taken on his weight and akrasia. To fail at solving those problems is fine. To excuse his failure to even try is not, even by the rules of his own art.

(And remember, "I don't have time" is just standard objection #2.)

It might be worth separating the claim "Eliezer is wrong about what changes he, personally, should try" from the claim

"It is generally good to try many plausible changes, because:

1. Some portion will work;
2. Trying the number of approaches it takes to find an improvement is often less expensive than being stuck in the wrong local optimum;
3. Many of us humans tend to keep on doing the same old thing because it's easy, comfortable, safe-feeling, or automatic, even when sticking with our routines is not the high-expected-value thing to do. We can benefit from adopting heuristics of action and experimentation to check such tendencies.”

The second claim seems fairly clearly right, at least for some of us. (People may vary in how easily they can try on new approaches, and on what portion of handed-down approaches work for them. OTOH, the ability to easily try new approaches is itself learnable, at least for many of us.) The first claim is considerably less clear, particularly since Eliezer has much data on himself that we do not, and since after trying many hacks for a given not-lightcone-destroying problem without any of the hacks working, expected value calculations can in fact point to directing one’s efforts elsewhere.

Maybe we could abandon Eliezer’s specific case, and try to get into the details of: (a) how to benefit from trying new approaches; and (b) what rules of thumb for what to try, and what to leave alone, yield high expected life-success?

When you spend time trying out the 1000 popular hacks doing you no good, then you lose. You lose all the time and energy invested in the enterprise, for which you could find a better use.

How do you know anything works, before even thinking about what in particular to try out? How much thought, and how much work is it reasonable to use for investigating a possibility? Intuition, and evidence. Self-help folk notoriously don't give evidence for efficacy of their procedures, which in itself looks like evidence of absence of this efficacy, a reason to believe that you'll only waste time going through the motions. My intuition agrees.

A deep theory is both a tool for constructing unusually powerful techniques, and a way to signal a nontrivial probability of viability of the techniques even prior to experimental testing.

I think that if there was such a straightforward hack like EY was looking for, he would know about it already. I just don't really believe that a hack like that exists, based on my admittedly meager readings in experimental psychology. Further, I think the idea of a "mind hack" is a cute metaphor, it can be misguided. Computer hackers literally create code that directs processes. We can at best manipulate our outside environment in ways that we hope will affect what is still a very mysterious brain. What EY's looking for would be the result of a well-funded and decades long research project. Unless there truly is a Dharma Initiative looking into these things while staying behind the scenes, I don't think there's going to be a journal article that will provide the profound insight he's looking to fin.

I do want to mention something about Seth Robers, which he sort of casually mentions in the Shangri-La diet. He wrote something along the lines that he was eating much less frequently, eating probably one full meal a day. That's something referred to as intermittent fasting. What the Shangri-La Diet book misses, I would postulate, is how Seth used the no flavor calories to transition to that kind of diet. IF is something being suggested as a way to control calories because people's bodies cue hunger to when their accustomed to eating. If you aren't accustomed to eating, you eat a bit less (since you're only filling your stomach the once, or so goes the idea). I certainly don't think I have the complete picture from noticing that on how diets should now be constructed. But I do feel that Seth Robers, attentive as he is, did not fully consider all the changes he had made, and was considering he reduced meal frequency solely as an aftereffect. In writing his popular book, he did not consider all the hacks that he had put into place for himself.

Akrasia-conquerors will need to find the ways to win against their lesser but still powerful drives. Teachers of akrasia-conquering will need to be able to honestly detail everything that they did, which will probably entail very keen observers as peers and students. The need for a perfect system to be in place before on attempts to overcome akrasia is an example of akrasia.

Wow, I came late to this party.

One takeaway here is, don't reduce your search space to zero if you can help it. If that means that you have to try things without substantial evidence that they'll work, well, it's that or lose, and we're not supposed to lose.

I can think of a few situations where it'd make sense to reduce your search space to zero pending more data, though. The general rule for that seems to be that if you do allow that to happen, whatever reason you have for allowing that to happen is more important to you than the goal you're giving up by not looking for solutions. In situations where you're choosing not to look for solutions to avoid danger, as an example, that makes sense, or if trying the solutions would mean taking resources away from other projects that were also important.

On your reaction to "a way to reject the placebo effect", it's important to distinguish what we are trying to do. If all I care about is fixing a given problem for myself, I don't care whether I solve it by placebo effect or by a repeatable hack.

If I care about figuring out how my brain works, then I will need a way to reject or identify the placebo effect.

I am wondering, what are the good reasons for a rationalist to lose?

The approach laid out in this post is likely to be effective if, your predominant goal is to find a collection of better performing akrasia and willpower hacks.

If, however, finding such hacks is only a possible intermediate goal, then different conclusions can be reached. This is even more telling if improved willpower and akrasia resistance is your intermediate goal - regardless of whether you choose hacks or some other method for realizing it.

Another bad reason for rationalists to lose is to try to win every contest placed in front of them. Choosing your battles is the same as choosing your strategies, just at a higher scale.