To me the piece of writing that most seems like a rationalist guide to achieving goals is Nick Winter's "The Motivation Hacker". While I think Nick Winter didn't post on LessWrong, I would count him among the top ten people of the Quantified Self movement.

A few years later Nick Winter managed to go into YC without going to formal YC interview. He went to an onstage office-hour session and Paul Graham liked what he saw so much that he declared he directly accepted them into YC (and that's not something that Paul Graham did previously).

(Excuse my english)

This is, so far, the list of books that have contributed to my enrichment as a rationalists:

[*] midly related to rationalism

[**] slightly related to rationalism

On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkins

What Do You Care What Other People Think? -Richard Feynman

**Allegro ma non tropo - Carlo Cipolla

Descartes Error - Antonio Damasio

** Sherlock Holmes Complete Canon - Arthut C. Doyle

** Freakonomics - Steven Levitt

You are not so smart - David McRaney

*Moonwalking with Einstein - J. Foer

*Mastermind - Maria Konnikova

*What Everybody is Saying - J.Navarro

*Louder than Words - J.Navarro.

**Ender's Game - Orson S. Card

**The Martian - Andy Weir

*The Future of Mind - Michio Kaku

Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely

Spent - Geoffrey Miller

Why Everyone else is a Hypocrite - R.Kurzban

The Moral Animal - Robert Wright

*Our Inner Ape - Franz de Waal

All Sequences - Eliezer Yudkowsky

Sequence - Science of Winning at Life - Lukeprog

The Archaeology of Mind - J.Panksepp

Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari

Sequence - Living Luminously - Alicorn

Sequences - Yvain's Excellent Articles

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers - R.Sapolsky

All LessWrong - Kaj Sotala's Posts

Origins of Human Communication - Tomasello

The Selfish Gene- Richard Dawkins

The Joy of Game Theory - P. Talwalkar

What Intelligence Tests Miss - Stanovich

The Third Chimpanzee - Jared Diamond

The Handicap Principle- Amotz Zahavi

The Mating Mind - Geoffrey Miller

The 10,000 year explosion - G.Cochran

Superintelligence - Nick Bostrom

The Body Keeps the Score - Van Der K.

Facing the Intelligence Explosion- Luke Muehlhauser

Intelligence: All That Matters. Stuart Ritchie

**Hackers and Painters. Paul Graham

Surfaces and Essences. Douglas Hofstadter

*Inside Jokes - Hurley Matthew

All Melting Asphalt Blog Posts K.Simler

The Psychology of Social Status- Cheng, Tracy

All Luke Muelhauser LessWrong Posts

The Replacing Guilt Series - N.Soares

Metaphors We Live By - George Lakoff

**Deep Thinking - Garry Kasparov

Blog -Mindlevelup - The Book

Conor Moreton 30 days of Rationality - LessWrong

Dark Lords’ Answer. E. Yudkowsky

Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters - A.Miller

Influence. Robert B. Cialdini

The Art of Thinking Clearly. R. Dobelli

Inadequate Equilibria. E. Yudkowsky

*Never Split the Difference. Chris Voss

The Elephant in the Brain.Simler.Hanson

Hive Mind-Garett Jones

**If Universe is Teeming with Aliens Where is Everybody - S.Webb

*The Edge Effect. Eric Braverman

Crystal Society. Max Harms

*Our Mathematical Universe. M.Tegmark

Visual Introduction Bayes. Dan Morris

Bayes: The Theory that would not Die. S. B. C

*Skin in the Game. Nassim Taleb

Smarter Than Us. Stuart Armstrong

Language in Thought and Action - Hayakawaw

I would like to read more books! I am ready for suggestions.

Could you share your list of Eliezer recommended books?

I've been thinking about this too, and I'm not sure guide suffice. Getting in shape or learning about a topic are simple problems (not that can't be challenging in their own right) compared to the complexity of actually achieving something.

At this point, we don't even have good theories or hypotheses on why these things are hard. It's lot of small issues that aggregate and compound. Motivation is a big class of these issues. Not seeing clearly enough - failure to perceive danger, opportunities, alternative ways of doing things.

To achieve you have to get the strategy, the tactics and the operations right. There's a lot you can screw up at every level.

One key issue, I think, is that it's damn hard to hack yourself on some fundamental levels. For instance to "be more perceptive". You can't really install a TAP for that. I guess some mindfulness practice can help (although I'd be wary of prescribing meditation -- more like mindfulness on the move). Consuming self-help, insights, news, etc etc only seems to move the needle marginally.

So yeah, I don't know. Just throwing some ideas out there.

Something like this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qwdupkFd6kmeZHYXy/build-small-skills-in-the-right-order [LW · GW] might be a nice starting point. Maybe, just maybe, we're trying to lift heavy weights without having built the required muscles. Worth investigating and expanding.

How about A Rationalist's Guide to Early Retirement?

Or, If you're so rational, why ain'cha rich?

OK, so some of you got lucky with the Bitcoins. Can we do any better than buy-and-hold the index? (Like Wealthfront etc.) Option spreads? Tax liens? Arbitraging junk on Ebay? Do you have to start a company, or can you do just as well as a consultant? Are there easy ways to start up passive income or do you need a rich uncle?

I'd like A Rationalist's Guide to Signing Up for Cryonics.

Suppose you've made the decision and have the finances to do it. How do you go about it? Which institution would have better expected outcomes? Neuro or full-body? Which life insurance company? What do you tell your family? How can you best ensure that you actually get froze before your brain rots in case of your unforeseen accidental death, as opposed to a more convenient death due to age or disease in a controlled setting like a hospital? (Which we might expect in a younger-aged group.)

I would like to have A Rationalist's Guide to Reading Science.

Particularly, how to benefit from existing scientific publications and understand them well enough to write a Rationalist's Guide to X or Much More Than You Wanted to Know About X, where X is some field without common knowledge consensus, like medicine or diet or exercise or psychology.

Reading science news headlines seems suboptimal. How confident can we be in any particular study? We know there are some perverse incentives in science. Publish or perish, new discoveries more valued than replications, p-hacking, etc. What should we be wary of? How much training do we need in the field? Is this impossible without a degree in statistics?

I would like A Rationalists Guide to Personal Catastrophic Risks.

We like to think a lot about Global Catastrophic Risks (especially the EA folks), but there are smaller problems that are just a devastating to the individual.

Should we wear helmets in cars [LW · GW]? Should we wear covert body armor? Own a gun? Get a bug-out bag [LW · GW]? An emergency cube? Learn wilderness survival?

And by how much should we be concerned about those "survivalist" topics vs less obvious longevity steps like flossing your teeth [LW · GW]? Not everyone's risk profile is the same. How do we assess that?

How should we measure that? Dollars? QALYs? Micromorts? Should we use hyperbolic discounting? Do we expect to reach actuarial escape velocity (or be granted near-immortality after the Singularity) and how would that change the calculus?

Do anthropic effects matter to subjective survival? In the multiverse?

Consider also other catastrophes that don't kill you, like losing a limb, or going blind, or more social risks like identity theft or getting scammed or robbed or sued, etc.

This also interests me. Some of my hopes for the Ottawa Rationality Dojo are that we can assemble people who are interested in skill development, and that we can build curricula that are useful to similar groups. I'm not convinced that I'm the kind of person who could follow these curricula alone or with an online community, so I'm trying to build it locally.

One major concern that I have with trying to build a curriculum for instrumental rationality is that the art must have a purpose beyond itself. I believe that it is for this reason that CFAR has realigned itself from teaching instrumental rationality to teaching instrumental rationality for AI alignment.

At the upcoming local SSC meetups, I will be asking "For what purpose do you intend to develop the art?" If I get answers, I'll post them to LW.

First of all, I'd just like to take a moment to say that I quite appreciate your username.

Second, to take your initial question literally, I don't think there are that many rationalists who actually want to rule the world. The position sounds like it would involve paperwork and talking to uninteresting yet obstinate people, so speaking for myself I don't think I'd actually want the job. There are probably many rationalists who would take the position for instrumental reasons, but because it's an instrumentally useful job, the competition for it is fierce. I'm not saying you meant it literally, but I think the distinction points at something important; what is it we actually want?

I'd like to be more in-shape, to work on more interesting programming projects, and to go on more successful dates. I'd pretty cheerfully read a guide on those subjects, and would probably be amenable to contributing to such a guide. Somebody else might want to save more lives, or have a higher class lifestyle, or lead a more interesting and exciting life. Some skills are generically useful to a large range of goals (financial management, persuasion, etc) but something that might be crucial to my goals might be irrelevant to yours. In addition, the format of whatever we're learning from matters; when learning to work out a youtube video is probably more useful than text. I would love to see more essays in the vein of SSC's Much More Than You Wanted To Know, but audio lectures, videos, or illustrations are good too. (Have you ever tried learning martial arts from a textbook? It's not ideal.)

Lastly, something worth thinking about. We all have the internet, and can all ask google for information. What advantage does a rationalist repository of teachings have? I'm confident we have some (offhand, we have common jargon, possibly a willingness to do experiments, and the occasional dedicated specialist) but if we want to do more than toss a lot of blogs in a pot and stir, it might be good to keep the comparative advantages in mind.

The rationalists are winning. You are not looking carefully enough.