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:
- If you want a peanut butter sandwich, and you have the tools, ingredients, and knowhow that are required to make a peanut butter sandwich, you have a task on your hands. If you want a peanut butter sandwich, but you lack one or more of those items, you have a problem.
- If you are sad, and you know that this is because you have not seen your favorite cousin in a while, and you have the wherewithal to arrange to have your cousin over, then arranging to have your cousin over is a task. If you are sad, and you don't know why, then the sadness is a problem.
- If eight of your friends are involved in massive unpleasant social drama, but you have a forty-three-step surefire plan to calm down the angry and smooth over the ruffled and chew out the misbehaved and bring back the normalcy, you have forty-three subtasks of one big task. If you have no clue what the heck is up with the drama but it's on your last nerve, problem ahoy!
- If you are a mortal creature, you may already be a problem-haver.
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:
- Lacking resources. Resources include tools, materials, cash, space to operate, cooperative other persons, time, physical capacities, and anything else that will contribute directly to the bringing about of the outcome. For instance, if you can't afford the milk you need to buy, carry it home once you've bought it because you have injured your elbow, or fit it into the fridge because the fridge is full of blueberry trifle, that's a resource problem.
- Lacking propositional knowledge. For instance, if you don't know where Zanzibar is, that's a propositional knowledge problem.
- Lacking procedural knowledge or skill. This overlaps somewhat with propositional knowledge, but roughly, it's data about how to go about applying your resources towards your goal. For instance, if you don't know how to best approach your exchange student's learning style, that's a procedural knowledge problem.
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.
Thank you for clarifying what you mean by extreme compatability. I did not misinterpret what you meant.
Consider all the women between 22 and 60 in the eastern part of Marin County, California. Note the extremely broad defintion of "my age range." (Again I'm 49) Not all the single women, but all the women, single and looking, single and not looking or married. My next girlfriend will come from this set with probability .9 or more unless I move, which is very unlikely. (Of course she is more likely to come from the subset of those not now married.)
Now (using Pearl's language for causal models) do surgery on my model of reality so that I am already in a sexual relationship with one of these women picked at random. Do additional surgery so that she and I already know each other at least as well as couples usually do. Acquiring this knowledge is very time consuming and entails costs like dinners and entrance fees to cultural events. Note that this second bit of surgery allows me to consider the merits of the woman picked at random without regard to whether those cost (again, mostly my time and attention but also entrance fees, etc) are better spent on a different woman.
Marin County is among the top 3 most affluent counties in California. Demographics similar to Silicon Valley, but replace the nerdy component with earthy-crunchy and new-age components. Probably .1 (10%) of these women work out with weights regularly and a significant fraction employ personal trainers to help them keep in shape. (An ordinary trip to the supermarket is often a very distracting and very vivid experience for me )
There is a higher than .5 probability that I would choose to stay in the relationship until she dumped me or 36 months have gone by. The only reason the 36 months is in there is so that I do not have to consider the effects on my attractiveness to women (and consequently, my dating options) of a significant change in my circumstances.
The most likely reason I would choose to dump the woman is that her thinking is significantly distorted by some ideology, and I consider progressive political beliefs an ideology -- in fact, it is IMHO the most common ideology in these parts.
Or maybe what I am reacting to is just a high amount of the Big Five personality trait agreeableness. (I am quite low in agreeableness.) Speaking of Big Five, I am an extreme introvert, so strong extraversion is probably something else that would drastically lower the probability that I would choose to try to keep the relationship going as long as possible (inside this 36-month interval that defines our current universe of discourse). I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
Would I prefer that she has read all of Eliezer's writing on the art of human rationality? Of course.
But I would be delighted, overjoyed, elated if she just knew the correct definition of "sexual selection" or understood that the poor people in the England of Charles Dickens were in fact materially better off than almost any other poor population at that time or at any previous time in history. (Define "poor population" as the first seven deciles of individuals distributed by material welfare in some natural category of people, e.g., residents of a nation state or linguistic community.) In other words, delighted, etc, if she had enough rationality, basic knowledge of things like the timing of the Industrial Revolution, and curiosity to seek out the hard numerical data which contradicts and overrides the fictional evidence of dramatizations on PBS of Charles Dickens novels. I just ended a 5-year relationship with a woman who did not know these 2 things. (She dumped me.)
I think it's pretty relevant that the pool I was talking about was in rural northeast Texas. I'd say the selectivity would be much smaller in a liberal metro like Austin (where I now live). I'm not even including things like being even familiar with the words "transhumanism" or "rationalism". My standards are even less than you talk about having. (Which is why selectivity numbers suck as a way of communicating about this subject.)
Additionally, I'm on the verge of resigning myself to the possibility of remaining single indefinitely. This definitely has the effect of raising my standards.