I make an effort not to indulge the urge to optimize for impressiveness,

Interesting point. I don't have much trouble getting things done and my goals are mostly not of the impressive kind. I only recently learned to optimize impressiveness as a tool for 'winning at life'. Reconsidering this and rereading Kays post I notice that I do aim for impressiveness (or at least visibility) of my work to some degree.

I wonder whether the impressiveness optimization desire can be hacked to work for actual goals. I'd think that impressiveness measured by actual effort seems to do the trick. The hard part being of course the measuring outcome. If our scientitic system already fails at that it presumably is a hard problem.