Extreme Rationality: Still Not That Great

The tl;dr has spoilers, so I've put it at the end.Also feel free to skip any of the chapters because the post turned out to be very long. I think you can read almost any of them on their own, and you can skip to On practicality if you want the big picture.The title is stolen from Scott Alexander's post Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great. Basically, it will be my opinion on applied rationality and its successes and failures. The title speaks for itself: I think there are few successes. A few weeks before Scott's post, Eliezer wrote A Sense That More Is Possible where he urged developing training for rationality; and though he thought rationalists were just ordinary people back then, he believed they could become much more. Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) was created in 2012 with the goal of developing such an Art. So I will discuss rationality's basic values, where I disagree with them, and where they led. But first, let me start with my personal story.I was one of the main organizers of LessWrong events in Saint Petersburg, Russia, for two years. I started by reading HPMOR and the Sequences and running discussion groups about them. But then I took a CFAR-like workshop at Kocherga (Moscow) and became obsessed with applied rationality: I tried to practice Hammertime and CFAR handbook. After some time I decided I had enough knowledge to teach rationality, and together with a friend I developed an educational program, which failed for multiple reasons. I also studied bioinformatics and worked for two years at Gero, an anti-aging research company, precisely because I had read HPMOR and been inspired by transhumanism (I still am).Time passed; I was in psychotherapy and realized that a lot of the things I had been trying to achieve were very unhealthy. I started to criticize applied rationality for that—partly because it is quite comforting to blame a group's ideology instead of your own personal problems. Since I was aware of that bias, I was curious to actual