What are the higher utility per unit effort things you could be doing instead during that time? Did you stop doing a gratitude journal? If so, did you do those other things instead?

I ask that because I have often found myself making the opposite mistake of one you describe: There's something I'm considering doing (usually because someone suggested it), and I think to myself that that's not the optimal thing for me to do, so I decide not to do it, but instead of doing something higher-value, I end up doing nothing in particular and would have been better off doing the moderate-value thing.

This is perhaps a bit off topic, but why translate using a general purpose LLM rather than a tool that's specifically for translation like Google Translate?

Take a fixed number of humans with a fixed intelligence (both average and outliers) then let mathematics advance. It will advance to the point that there is a vanishingly small number of people who can even understand the state of the art

This ignores the possibility of advances in the teaching of math (or physics, or any other discipline). If improved teaching methods lower the level of intelligence required to reach a given level of knowledge, then a field can advance considerably.

Not to mention that the human population has been growing, and average intelligence has been increasing.

Finally, there's specialization. It doesn't take much intelligence to know everything that was known about genetics when Darwin was alive, but probably nobody is smart enough to know everything that was known about it in 2000. But there have still been make advances since then thanks to people specialized in subfields like DNA sequencing.

if you think the plant manager should be exonerated because he folowed the rules, you are siding with deontology, whereas if you think he should be punished because a death occurred under his supervision, you are siding with consequentialism

This is missing the point. Consequentialism is about making decisions, not about judging past decisions. Consequentialism says that if punishing the manager would (in expectation) have better consequences than not punishing them, then they should be punished, and otherwise they shouldn't. Deontology says that if the rules say to punish the manager, they should be punished, and if the rules say not to punish the manager, they shouldn't be punished.

Does this still work? I've often heard it referred to as the "shit sandwich method" (by STEMish non-rationalists), so I wonder if people are sufficiently inoculated to it for it to no longer work

This whole time I thought it started with a capital I. TIL.

Border adjustment taxes generally consist of an X% tax on imports coupled with an X% subsidy on exports, so that would already increase exports.

Making the import tax and export subsidy the same is also more economically efficient, because it doesn't impose a net tax on cross border supply chains (imagine manufacturing a car in the US, attaching the wheels in Canada, and then selling it in the US)

Are those genuine flaws with the model, or is the terminology just suboptimal? Put another way, if you know someone's 5 factor conscientiousness and agreeableness scores, how useful is that for predicting their behavior?

I like what you're doing, but I feel like the heresies you propose are too tame.

Here are some more radical heresies to consider:

1. Most people are far more bottlenecked on some combination of akrasia and prospective memory, not on the accuracy of their models of the world. Rationalists in particular would be better off devoting effort to actually doing the obvious things than to understanding the world better.
2. Self deception is very instrumentally useful a large fraction of real world situations we find ourselves in, and we should use more of it.
   1. Mormons seem to be especially good at coordinating on good lifestyle choices, so we should all consider becoming Mormon.
3. Among groups of 10+ people, it's usually more useful to get everyone all working on implementing the same plan than it is to come up with the best plan.
4. Intelligence (of the sort measured by exams and IQ tests) is only moderately important to success.

I generally watch videos I enjoy while doing physical therapy exercises. I didn't conceptualize it as hiding the "reward" from myself as an incentive for exercising; I conceptualize it as making the rather boring, sometimes aversive activity less salient by focusing my attention on something else.

As an example, I find it much easier to hold a plank when I'm focused on the video I'm watching than when I'm just starting at the timer counting down.