Valentine comments on Compartmentalization in epistemic and instrumental rationality - Less Wrong
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I've been wondering about this lately. I don't have a crisp answer as yet, though for practical reasons I'm definitely working on it.
That said, I don't think your golfer example speaks to me about the nature of the potential danger. This looks to me like it's highlighting the value of concretely visualizing goals in some situations.
Here are a few potential examples of the kind of phenomenon that nags at me:
I also faintly remember having heard of some research showing that people who think that a puzzle has been solved are better-able to solve it than those who are told it's unsolved. But I could be misremembering this by quite a bit. I do know that some people speculate that the Manhattan Project might owe a lot of its success to rumors that the Nazis already had the bomb and that the Americans were playing catch-up before the Nazis could build one.