I thought that everything in this article was obviously both true and important - enough that I promoted it as soon as I saw it, instead of waiting for it to be upvoted further. To clarify: It's not about low-level versus high-level goals. It's not about what you can do immediately versus later, or with or without further resources, or with or without breaking it down further.
It's about what you know how to solve, versus what you don't know how to solve; and the feeling of internal panic when you confront something you don't know how to solve; and the worst possible thing you can do to deal with that internal panic, which is to instantly propose a solution that turns it into a "task" but one that won't work. And HughRistik has an incredibly good point about the external converse, when people who are already good at something give advice that completely fails to turn a problem into a task. Alicorn's post is true and important because making the explicit distinction may help people on both the internal and external problems.
I encountered this over the Summit weekend. 1.5 hour lunch with a couple of people who could not stop solving the Friendly AI problem.
I suggest there's a third major way to fail, especially among smart people: crunching the problems into tasks and stopping. Not actually doing the tasks.
If you follow your intuition and good things never happen, it's time to take the Romantic view and put it on a rocket ship and fire that rocket ship into the Sun.
If eight of your friends are involved in massive unpleasant social drama
... then my first step is to admit that they have a problem. In times past, I may not have noticed that distinction, to the detriment of my decision making. I say this to emphasise just how important the step of identifying the problem is. If I neglected this step I may jump straight into 'dramatic' tasks without thinking.
Once I realize that my problem is "something is getting on my nerves" I can begin looking for solutions. Whether that be quashing social conflict or reassessing my personal boundaries.
I like the definition given in Gause and Weinberg's "Are Your Lights On", a book I'd recommend to anyone thinking about the topics in this post: "A problem is a difference between things as desired and things as perceived."
Sometimes the resolution involves bringing "things" (i.e. reality) in line with our desires, after we (correctly) perceive it to be different from the desired reality. This will normally involve tasks. (We usually speak of a "project" if we envision many tasks, in particular if they have a hierarch...
This is an interesting idea, though I'm not sure if it's terribly useful.. Here's a summary that may make more sense for some readers. The examples are entertaining, but they may obfuscate the central point a little.
-A "task" is where you have some goal, D, and some series of operations, A, B, and C that will result in the attainment of this goal. All you have to do is actually carry out those operations and you should attain your goal.
-A "problem" is where you have goal D, but you do not know any series of operations that you could pot...
Short summary:
As far as I understand, all the rest is examples. Did I miss anything?
The second sentence of the article should answer, why is it a critical faculty to consciously distinguish tasks from problems. The answer comes much later ("Because treating problems like tasks will slow you down in solving them.") and still isn't satisfactory. My first reaction is "never happens".
In other words, I've never thought about it like that before, but I'm not convinced I should have.
This was originally part of my summary, but it didn't make sense there.
I take issue with "lack of resources" having its own category. It seems like a special case of a lack of procedural knowledge.
If I don't have bread, it's only a problem if I don't know how to get bread and I don't know how to figure out how to get bread. If my elbow is broken and I need to get milk home, the problem is not my lack of working elbows so much as my lack of knowing how to get the milk home without using the elbow. Having a working elbow would also solve the probl...
Even if you know of possible solutions to a problem, it doesn't become a task until the solutions are good solutions.
That is, if you have all the knowledge to complete a task, you still have a problem if your actions will lead to negative side effects.
1) Problem X
2) Task "Think on a solution to the Problem X until it taskifies to some Task Y" + Task Y
Is (1) -> (2) a valid transition?
What I'm wondering is whether the problem-task distinction represents different categories? Or different points on the ends of a continuum?
Some types of problems may resist being completely taskified, particularly unstructured socializing and other improvisation-heavy tasks. Successful execution in those areas requires being more in-the-moment rather than following pre-defined procedure. You could say that the end of the procedure is to "be in the moment," or "act on your feelings," but that's still awfully general and would stretch the...
But for every task, person wants to perform it as efficiently as possible, thus rendering that task into a problem in the sense that it was used in this post. This is why I think distinguishing the two like that might be misleading.
I think lot of people indirectly follow the things written in the post--I certainly do. What we actually try to do all the time is: Not try to control things which cannot be, we have to accept certain things are beyond us, and we deal with things which we think we can deal with, isn't it?
This an amazing paradigm that can be used in project management.
Take a problem break into tasks and sub-problems, keep breaking until sub-problems can not be reduced into tasks. Then we can measure the risks involved, etc.
I think the terminology that's familiar to many LW readers calls "problems", "goals", and "tasks", "subgoals". Framing it that way, there isn't a difference between tasks and problems as such - a task/subgoal is merely what you get when you break down the problem/goal to smaller parts.
It seems to me you can move between the two framings by simply changing the way you describe the top-level objectives. If the top-level objectives are undesirable things that you want to change, they're problems. If they're desirable things you want to see happen, they're goals.
Thanks! I'd been contemplating a post about "The unreasonable importance of procedural knowledge", now I don't have to write it. Eagerly awaiting the sequel. Also, thanks HughRistik for the examples.
I think it might be more useful to use the term "goal" instead of "task", since task implies a series of steps -- a sequence of operations that change the state of the world, whereas a "problem" is a state of the world.
IOW, task = goal state - problem state. (Except it's not really subtraction, because there are potentially an infinite number of task sequences that will get you to the goal state from the current state... which is another reason why I think that maybe "goal" is a better word here.)
Goldratt's "T...
I'm not sure I agree with this distinction as any more than one of degree. Both tasks and problems are differences between the perceived state of the world and a desired state of the world.
As you describe it, "tasks" tend to be plans of action which you expect to have acceptible cost for their probability of success in moving the world state to the desired one. "problems" are just situations where the cost of the actions you're considering are too high for their probability of success.
I believe that both cost of planned actions an...
pdf23ds writes:
I broke up with her after a while--I wasn't lucky enough to get someone extremely compatible, but I look back on it now and appreciate that we were pretty damn compatible, and in many more ways than could be expected just by updating on a few surface-level signals, which was all I had available at first.
I would not break up with a woman just because we are not "extremely compatible". (I might break up with a woman because I met someone else who is more compatible, but that is different. One reason that is different is that I tend to think that it is a lot easier to interest woman # 2 in a relationship if you are still with woman # 1, and part of the reason for that is that a man in a relationship exhibits subtle non-verbal signs that women can pick up on that are very costly or impossible for most men to learn to exhibit at will for the duration of the courtship phase. Or so it seems to me.)
A large challenge for young people is to get to a place where their social connections, income, net worth and general knowledge of the world provides a nice cushion or source of resilience. A significant proportion of young people get stuck along the way to that place of resilience with the result that they never reach the destination or, if they do, they languish for years or decades in poverty, depression, social isolation or in some other form of unpleasantness.
Having a girlfriend or a wife makes a man significantly more resilient. This is because when a woman loves a man, all or almost all of the woman's "ego skills" (a term used or formerly used by the psychotherapy profession to mean something like what writers on this site mean when they say "instrumental rationality") are available to the man. In contrast, the ego skills of a doctor, social worker, psychotherapist or such are generally mostly not available to the patient or client even if the patient or client is paying the doctor, psychotherapist or such $100 or $200 an hour (though that would definitely increase the expected rate at which the ego skills transfer). In other words, the rationality, the intelligence, the cognitive skills (particularly those having to do with the mind or with human society) of a person are available to the individual owner of those skills, but not in general to the persons the owner is trying to help -- and training, e.g., M.D. programs and Ph. D. programs in clinical psychology generally does not change that very much in my personal experience and in my interpretation of what I have read. But the sexual bond does drastically change that -- not always, but in a significant fraction of ordinary relationships. And having the knowledge of a few yares of experience -- knowledge about, e.g., which sort of woman is likely to bond strongly to you and how to create and maintain that bond -- brings that probability up to at least .7 or .8 if you're smart enough to follow along on this site.
In other words, the expected helpfulness of a person in your life can be modeled as the product of the rationality of the person (where "rationality" is defined as the ability to achieve the goals the person is expected to want to achieve multiplied by how much the person really cares about you. And the medical profession, the social-worker profession, the psychotherapy profession and such do not have a lot more control over that second factor than anyone else does.
But you know this already pdf23ds! You wrote a comment on it just today or yesterday. Sex changes that general rule. As soon as a woman starts having sex with you, well, then all of a sudden you are the most wonderful person in the world, or one of them anyways, and what happens to you is some significant fraction as important as what happens to the woman herself (according to her way of assigning importance).
I have gone without the love of a woman for 24 of the 32 years since I left home at the age of 17. (I am 49 now.) So, what I said above is not the usual lazy human after-the-fact justification or rationalization of a decision or a life strategy decided on through other, unspoken means. Also, like you, pdf23ds, I have had some significant handicaps which have caused me to need all the resiliency I can get.
So, pdf23ds, now that you know a little about how I think about these things, could you explain your policy of requiring extreme compatibility and breaking up if that requirement is not met?
OK, another thing. I now remember that a bigger reason than the lack of compatibility that I broke up with my girlfriend was that I had almost no respect for her, possibly quite unfairly (but nevertheless), and I felt that with this asymmetrical situation, staying together was not at all fair to her. I still don't see how I could possibly have enough respect for a person to not feel this way unless they're very compatible with me.
This is part 1 of a sequence on problem solving. Here is part 2.
It is a critical faculty to distinguish tasks from problems. A task is something you do because you predict it will get you from one state of affairs to another state of affairs that you prefer. A problem is an unacceptable/displeasing state of affairs, now or in the likely future. So a task is something you do, or can do, while a problem is something that is, or may be. For example:
Problems are solved by turning them into tasks and carrying out those tasks. Turning problems into tasks can sometimes be problematic in itself, although small taskifications can be tasky. For instance, in the peanut butter sandwich case, if your only missing component for sandwich-making is bread, it doesn't take much mental acrobatics to determine that you now have two tasks to be conducted in order: 1. obtain bread, 2. make sandwich. Figuring out why you're sad, in case two, could be a task (if you're really good at introspecting accurately, or are very familiar with the cousin-missing type of sadness in particular) or could be a problem (if you're not good at that, or if you've never missed your favorite cousin before and have no prior experience with the precise feeling). And so on.
Why draw this distinction with such care? Because treating problems like tasks will slow you down in solving them. You can't just become immortal any more than you can just make a peanut butter sandwich without any bread. And agonizing about "why I can't just do this" will produce the solution to very few problems. First, you have to figure out how to taskify the problem. And the first step is to understand that you have a problem.
Identifying problems is surprisingly difficult. The language we use for them is almost precisely like the language we use for tasks: "I have to help the exchange student learn English." "I have to pick up milk on the way home from school." "I have to clean the grout." "I have to travel to Zanzibar." Some of these are more likely to be problems than others, but any of them could be, because problemhood and taskiness depend on factors other than what it is you're supposed to wind up with at the end. You can easily say what you want to wind up with after finishing doing any of the above "have to's": a bilingual student, a fridge that contains milk, clean grout, the property of being in Zanzibar. But for each outcome to unfold correctly, resources that you might or might not have will be called for. Does the exchange student benefit most from repetition, or having everything explained in song, or do you need to pepper your teaching with mnemonics? Do you have cash in your wallet for milk? Do you know what household items will clean grout and what items will dissolve it entirely? Where the hell is Zanzibar, anyway? The approximate ways in which a "have to" might be a problem are these:
So when you have to do something, you can tell whether it's a problem or a task by checking whether you have all of these things. That's not going to be foolproof: certain knowledge gaps can obscure themselves and other shortfalls too. If I mistakenly think that the store from which I want to purchase milk is open 24 hours a day, I have a milk-buying problem and may not realize it until I try to walk into the building and find it locked.
Part 2 of this sequence will get into what to do when you have identified a problem.