Huh, I’ll try to fix that. Yes, it’s a pdf of the book on Robert Trivers’s Research Gate page.

Consequently, it may be the case that a tremendous amount of negative subjective experience is transpiring without being remembered... One can imagine that many people go to hell for some period of their slumbers, migrate to subsequent dreams, and they have no memory of many of the horrid experiences they had.

Makes you think-- it's at least 1.66x as important as we usually think to be mentally healthy and able to flexibly and skillfully respond to distress if we need those skills when we're asleep too. Maybe more important than that if we deal with more extreme and less reality-constrained challenges in sleep!

What if someone made a free website or app that walks people through the steps of imagery rehearsal treatment? Seems relatively low effort with a potentially high payoff. 

I've always heard that it was hard to get what you called imagery reversal therapy because not many are trained in it, so I like this idea! Maybe you could persuade people who want to make yet another meditation or CBT app to try this instead, or for this to be added to an existing CBT app.

And I love that you started with the most rough and ready possibility, literally just describing the steps and making them available. Is this something you could do? Could you oversee a bright high schooler as they did it over the summer?
 

(I have a lot of karma because I've been on here a long time)

I second this-- a lot of prominent EAs don't look at the Forum. I check the Forum something like once a week on average and rarely post despite this being where my research reports are posted. A lot of EA social engagement happens on facebook and Discord and discourse may take place over more specialized fora like the Alignment Forum or specific Slacks.

Exactly, it's an issue if people think the posts on here are all aimed at a general EA audience 

It's tempting to think that criticizing an entire system or paradigm is higher leverage because the scale is larger, but I agree with this take that that usually just blunts the ability of the criticism to do anything and diffuses responsibility.

Another frame that may be comforting is that the expected value of all of these plans seems like it was positive. I'm sure there are things you could have done differently to improve your odds, but it doesn't sound like a better you would have chosen not to pursue these angles or not tried to maximize your positive impact.  Nobody has a guarantee that their plans will succeed-- all we can do is try to maximize EV, knowing that p < 1. Kudos to you for shooting your shot. I think you should get as much credit for that part as if you had succeeded. 

Yeah I would still love to see something like ethnographies of EA: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YsH8XJCXdF2ZJ5F6o/i-want-an-ethnography-of-ea

Another issue here is that the EA Forum is used sort of as the EA research journal by many EAs and EA orgs, including my employer, Rethink Priorities. We sometimes post write-ups here that aren't optimized for the average EA to read at all, but are more for a technical discipline within EA.