To boost your intelligence, learn how to self-soothe

You got it, but then you missed it.

Every single one of those great, useful, true steps is hindered by emotions. There are well-known cognitive biases and behavioral patterns (Dunning-Kreuger, Motivated Reasoning, Confirmation Bias, Learned Helplessness) that will affect your outcome while trying to conquer each of these steps. These aren't bad per-say, but a result of our biology and millions of years of evolution. If I were wagering on my own arrogantly assumed competence vs. my evolved biology.... man, I'm putting it all on Red.

It is such great advice that, as you correctly state, "[Emotions] often times distract one from making progress" but this is not easy to achieve, an obvious course of action, and it feels wrong when you're in it. Even if someone told you and you believe them.

Take a contrived example--PTSD. In WWI this was called "Shell Shock", and a lot of people up until yesterday and beyond are still smacking people on the back, giving the misguided, but sincere pep talk: "Walk it off, kid! Power through it! Get ahold of yourself! What's wrong with you? Why can't you take the win?"

The truth of the matter is that the solution is obvious, but even if something is obvious, easy, and effective, people often simply require someone to tell them the answer and more than that, be trusted enough to let them coach them through it. Once you know, maybe it really is easy, maybe it still takes a lot of work, luck, perhaps counseling or therapy (EMDR therapy sounds like bullshit but it sure is real)

This blog post is clearly telling an anecdote from the author's own personal life experience. From these experiences they have formed their hypotheses about behaviors that may affect intelligence. This blog post presents their experiences and conclusions.

There's nothing unscientific about this. Perhaps you think that it is important for the author to attach a disclaimer that this blog post is not asserting definite scientifically proven truths about reality. But it's fairly obvious to me that the author was speaking from their own experience and opinions rather than attempting to share scientifically proven facts (why even write a long blog post to do that? The research would speak for itself).

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If we control for those guidelines, your comment reduces to a verbose, and frankly rather nasty "citation needed," which is a shallow dismissal in its own right (not to mention an internet cliché), so in fact it reduces to nothing. Please don't post like that in HN threads.

There's nothing at all wrong with someone writing a speculative blog post based on their personal experience. There's lots of curious conversation to be had about such things.

If it doesn't gratify your personal curiosity, that's ok—there are lots of other links to look at—but please don't post like this. It ends up poisoning the conversation for others, especially once it attracts the swarm of upvotes that angry rants usually do. I'm sure that wasn't your intent, but it happens all too easily anyway.