"if I procrastinate on $goal or if I don't enjoy doing $maximallyeffectivebutboringactivity, then I probably don't really want $goal", but that just leads into deeper madness.
If I understood this correctly (as you procrastinating on something, and concluding that you don't actually want it), then most people around here call that akrasia.
Which isn't really something to go mad about. Basically, your brain is a stapled together hodgepodge of systems which barely work together well enough to have worked in the ancestral environment.
Nowadays, we know and can do much more stuff. But there's no reason to expect that your built in neural circuitry can turn your desire to accomplish something into tangible action, especially when your actions are only in the long term, and non-viscerally, related to you accomplishing your goal.
It's not just akrasia, or rather, the implication of strong akrasia really weirds me out.
The easiest mechanism to implement goals would not be vulnerable to akrasia. At best it would be used to conserve limited resources, but that's clearly not the case here. In fact, some goals work just fine, while others fail. This is especially notable when the same activity can have very different levels of akrasia depending on why I'm doing it. Blaming this on hodge-podge circuitry seems false to me (in the general case).
So I look for other explanations, and signalin...
So after reading SarahC's latest post I noticed that she's gotten a lot out of rationality.
More importantly, she got different things out of it than I have.
Off the top of my head, I've learned...
Where she got...
I've only recently making a habit out of trying new things, and that's been going really well for me. Is there other low hanging fruit that I'm missing?
What cool/important/useful things has rationality gotten you?