That's sort of it, but it was specifically talking about certain types of self-deceptive behavior that appears to be instrumentally rational. The problem being is that once you've deceived yourself, you can't tell if it's a good idea or not.

Thanks for the support. I'll try and work a bit more on my first post in the coming days and I hope it will be up soon.

I think you did a really good job so far of setting up a series of clear exercises for techniques. The key issue I had with Hammertime was that it often seemed a bit disorganized in terms of changing plans and switching what it was talking about a lot.

My most recent post on LessWrong (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yj2hyrcGMwpPooqfZ/a-proposal-for-iterated-interpretability-with-known), which is also my first post proposing a novel avenue for AI alignment research, took me a total of 30 minutes.

Probably for me, the main thing that helped was Yoda Timers. Then again, that was probably just a function of getting to practice it much more than anything else. Next up is probably TAPs.

I have something very similar to the second felt sense given when I've spent too much time on my computer and get kind of vaguely sleepy and disoriented when I try to stop even for a moment. The term I use is similar to the one my parents used to describe the tangible expression of this feeling, and it's "video game poisoning."

One rationality technique that I can infer from my past experiences is one I'm not really sure how to name; possibilities include "path divergence analysis," "counterfactual defaults," "adjacent life heuristic," "near-miss solutions," and "reality branch mining." The idea is to look at what common actions for you would be if your life had gone slightly differently (e.g. you went to a different school, were born in a different country, etc.), see what sort of actions you would commonly take under these conditions, and see if these actions have value in your current life circumstances. One example that I applied was in terms of realizing that if my college major were slightly different, I'd have learned to code in C++ by now, realizing that learning C++ has significant advantages for me even with my major being what it is, and finally learning C++.

The closest I've come to a true "factory reset" was when I realized, a few times, that school clubs I was a part of were becoming toxic and unproductive. However, I can't really point to a single button; more just a gradual stream of one bad impression after another, at which point I started to slowly disengage.

Set a Yoda Timer and share the most important idea you haven’t had time to express. Five minutes is all you get.

I really think that a lot of modern AI alignment research is being done within the academic system, but because it's done within the academic system it's fairly ignored by the independent/dedicated nonprofit research community when compared to independent/dedicated nonprofit research. On the contrary, it likely gets much more attention within academia.

I don't think the dynamic here is "each team likes their own people best." I think it's due to an unwarranted degree of skepticism of the academic system, which may be warranted in non-emergencies but which is less warranted when facing truly apocalyptic threats. The academic system has produced a lot of valuable research on climate change and nuclear risks, and I'd expect its research on AI to be similar broadly speaking. 

The fact that the first few successful researchers weren't academics isn't really a point against the academic system here, any more than Priestley and Lavoisier not being academics is a point against academic chemists. The supposed pre-paradigmaticity of the field also isn't really a point against the academic system here, given that many protosciences (e.g. Freudian psychoanalysis) were able to grow into sciences within the academic system, and this pattern can be seen continuing in fields such as astrobiology.

My greatest ambition is to create a fully trainable art of rationality that’s so good it gets taught to every high schooler in the country and bankrupts multiple industries that prey on irrational behavior in the process. Although it may seem impossible, the success of anti-smoking efforts against an extremely addictive product with a massive advertising industry suggests that it's achievable, and the fact that the Internet exists now and didn't exist then suggests it's even easier than that was.