Thanks for bringing this up. It seemed that much of the feedback on the first post was that it was too much anecdote and too little content closer to the ultimately useful stuff, like results and methodology. This post has less history and more discussion of things like "okay, what's the result," so I think that that issue isn't so present (and for whatever these very small numbers are worth, this post seems to be doing a little better).

I do expect that this post puts the previous one in a slightly better context. Mostly, my intent with these posts is for them to be seen and for people to get a few ideas out of them - and while it would be good for all sorts of reasons to make these posts high quality in other ways, if people get some ideas out of them but don't think it's that great a post, or even down-vote it for valid reasons of style and content-type, that would mostly be a win.

I may well delay the next posts based on feedback and votes, but so far it seemed like the right move to go ahead.

At first when you mentioned that these posts looked like a sales pitch, I interpreted your use of the phrase as meaning an empty and deceptive claim. It was in that sense that I said:

FWIW (if this were a sales pitch, would I just say the same thing?) it seems that...

And the interesting idea I was surprised by was the extent to which the post seemed like a sales pitch for PUA.

In the sense of an empty and/or deceptive claim, these posts are not a sales pitch. I want to see rationality do better and I don't want people to waste their time, or to have less expectation of success when someone else would have later given some useful advice. I would also look really silly after people realized there was nothing in the ideas, and being accepted as a rationalist is important to me; most importantly because almost all of my friends are rationalists.

In the sense of attempting to create interest in something, these posts are most definitely a sales pitch. (At least these first two, then we get into the methodology.) As for what I'm selling, all I have to offer is ideas, and for free. As for why I'm trying to sell them, I suppose the biggest factor is that I care a lot about existential risk, I have for years, and I see the advance and flourishing of rationality as really damn helpful for reducing those risks. There are other people doing things that I very much want them to succeed at, and it seems in fact that these ideas might really be able to help them do those things. (For example, be more rational themselves and increase rationality in others, but there are other things as well.)

One of the reasons that I included many of the persuasive elements I did (and one of the reasons it would be great to have more than one person using these ideas - this gets easier if people observe group behavior outside themselves) is that it can be very hard to simultaneously express only true things. For example, if someone points something out that you could be doing better, or mentions that there is a more accurate way of seeing something, this may be true but it also forms a lot of Bayesian evidence that this person is trying to gain social standing at your expense, and is going to frame themselves as more intelligent than you, etc. It's very hard to express "that's wrong" and "I will not put myself above you" at the same time. And for good reason! Almost nobody does that without trying to put themselves above others, and they'd be likely to say that even if they were planning to put themselves higher.

All of this makes it difficult to show people that they can trust me to look after their interests - and again, not by any fault of theirs, it's just a matter of the particular epistemic situation. Eventually people will realize whether they can actually trust a person or not, but I wanted to make this as easy as possible by presenting information on what my actual goals and concerns are, how I see others and myself, etc.

So that's the reason for many of the persuasive elements in these posts. They are intended to persuade, but they're also very much intended to present actually true information.

I believe you will probably get to what you consider methodology. But that's how sales goes: build them up; hook them, present the idea.

And yeah, in terms of a basic sales pitch, that was the intended flow. I wanted people to have some evidence for why the later material was worth reading, and why there might be something to it even if it parts of it seem counterintuitive at first.