It’s critical to distinguish between ease/convenience and pleasure.

Absent conscious intervention, we don’t optimize for pleasure -- we optimize for a combination of pleasure and non-effort. For example, TV is for many people easy to choose, and work and exercise are hard to choose, despite TV having low-average enjoyment ratings, exercise having average ratings, and work having high-average ratings (see e.g. p. 243 of this book).

Patri’s concept of “shiny/fun”, insofar as it is correct, seems to be about low effort activities more than about high reward activities. To attain high personal growth, we need to learn to exert effort toward the highest-value learning and productivity tasks. As Patri emphasizes, this involves learning to direct our attention, learning to resist shiny, low-effort distractions, and to get through relatively boring local drudge work when needed. It does not, AFAICT, involve choosing less rewarding tasks on average; peak growth and productivity are often more rewarding (though also harder to choose) than clicking repeatedly on the “next comments” button.

(The ideas in this comment are stolen from Michael Vassar.)