The point of this post feels almost too obvious to be worth saying, yet I doubt that it's widely followed.

People often avoid doing projects that have a low probability of success, even when the expected value is high. To counter this bias, I recommend that you mentally combine many such projects into a strategy of trying new things, and evaluate the strategy's probability of success.

1.

Eliezer says in On Doing the Improbable:

I've noticed that, by my standards and on an Eliezeromorphic metric, most people seem to require catastrophically high levels of faith in what they're doing in order to stick to it. By this I mean that they would not have stuck to writing the Sequences or HPMOR or working on AGI alignment past the first few months of real difficulty, without assigning odds in the vicinity of 10x what I started out assigning that the project would work.
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But you can't get numbers in the range of what I estimate to be something like 70% as the required threshold before people will carry on through bad times. "It might not work" is enough to force them to make a great effort to continue past that 30% failure probability. It's not good decision theory but it seems to be how people actually work on group projects where they are not personally madly driven to accomplish the thing.

I expect this reluctance to work on projects with a large chance of failure is a widespread problem for individual self-improvement experiments.

2.

One piece of advice I got from my CFAR workshop was to try lots of things. Their reasoning involved the expectation that we'd repeat the things that worked, and forget the things that didn't work.

I've been hesitant to apply this advice to things that feel unlikely to work, and I expect other people have similar reluctance.

The relevant kind of "things" are experiments that cost maybe 10 to 100 hours to try, which don't risk much other than wasting time, and for which I should expect on the order of a 10% chance of noticeable long-term benefits.

Here are some examples of the kind of experiments I have in mind:

gratitude journal
morning pages
meditation
vitamin D supplements
folate supplements
a low carb diet
the Plant Paradox diet
an anti-anxiety drug
ashwaghanda
whole fruit coffee extract
piracetam
phenibut
modafinil
a circling workshop
Auditory Integration Training
various self-help books
yoga
sensory deprivation chamber

I've cheate

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