Before I get bogged down in reading all the comments, I just want to say: nursing is one of the most admirable and versatile professions in existence. There are very few people I'd rather have available in any generic critical situation than an experienced and competent nurse. Good on you.

I think that might be the source of the somebody's wrong on the internet thing.

me! me! I'll be there! I've wanted a meetup here for a long time, but was pretty sure nobody was here.

SPRs can be gamed much more directly than human experts. For example, imagine an SPR in place of all hiring managers. In our current place, with hiring managers, we can guess at what goes in to their decisionmaking and attempt to optimize for it, but because each manager is somewhat different, we can't know that well. A single SPR that took over for all the managers, or even a couple of very popular ones, would strongly encourage applicants to optimize for the variable most weighted in the equation. Over time this would likely decrease the value of the SPR back to that of a human expert.

This has a name in the literature, but I can't remember it at the moment. You see this problem in, for example, the current obsessive focus on GDP as the only measure of national well-being. Now that we've had that measure for some time, we're able to have countries whose GDP is improving but who suck on lots of other measures, and thus politicians who are proud of what they've done but who are hated by the people.

Yes, in some cases, this would cause us to improve the SPR to the point where it accurately reflected the qualities that go into success. But that's not a proven thing.

That said, I'd really like to see a wiki or other attempting-to-be-complete resource for finding an SPR for any particular application. Anyone got one?

Program something.

Although I have no idea whether programming actually is suitable cross-training for rationality, surely practice at analyzing a problem and breaking it down to bite-sized abstractions and interfaces will help form good habits. Those habits should become a standard tool in your mental toolbox.

We have competing feelings in our minds, and sometimes those feelings are stronger than our "rational sides". Facing our fears might be a good exercise. Facing legitimate fears (fears where the danger is real) might be useful too, but I'm specifically thinking about irrational fears.

Fear of "monsters" a la Bloody Mary in the mirror would be a good one. (Do it).

Fear of bad luck or divine retribution. (Break a mirror, step on a crack, say the forbidden thing).

Fear of the dark in your own house. (Walk around in the dark, make it fun).

Fear of social situations. (Purposefully put yourself in situations you are uncomfortable in but that won't hurt you).

Fear of heights (Safely).

Fear of failure. (Fail at something and make no excuses).

The goal of this exercise would be to acclimate yourself to these strong emotions so that they don't override your other instincts/thinking when it is important. Part of the challenge might be identifying fears you are unaware of.

The thing I've noticed about high status people is that they're only interested in associating with other high status people. But low status people are interested in associating with high status people. So high status people seem to spend a lot of time assuming that the person who just came up to talk to them is only interested in shining in their status. So a hypothesis:

• More time defending status than low status people need to spend
• Energy spent identifying need to defend status prevents engaged interaction with many of the people who come up to them.

To test this hypothesis, I would argue that high status people are more intelligent when they are in either contexts where they only interact with high status people or contexts where no one knows they are high status than they are in contexts where they interact with low status people who know who they are.

I've seen this with people who have high community status -- they're more intelligent in communities that they're not usually members of.

Thanks for reminding me about flow. Flow lets you dynamically generate algorithms and solutions, and there is no real substitute for it for solving certain problems.

Yet flow depends on your activity being neither too easy nor too hard. Taskification is still applicable to problems that require flow, just not in the same way. You cannot consciously taskify your entire procedure, but you can do the following:

1. You can taskify some of the component tasks involved, such that you can flow. For example, you cannot taskify the entire problem of salsa dance, but you can taskify the process of learning the component steps such that you are able to flow. Without having technique at a certain level, flow is impossible. Taskification can get you the necessary technique. Sometimes doing a task in a conscious, clunky, non-spontaneous way will build the skills necessary to do that task from flow on the fly. That's how musicians and dancers typically learn.

2. Taskify the process of getting into flow, at which point you let the flow take over.

I was just lamenting this morning how my todo list, a set of tasks for the next few days, was depressing me. When I wrote it, it was a great joy to get all these things out of my head, but now that all I had to do was follow them, it felt mechanical and boring. I could rewrite the list and gain some excitement about a few of the tasks that way, but instead I've been trying to figure out the why of this feeling, and your post gets me right back into it.

I think there's an ideal working state -- perhaps the state of Flow is describing it, or perhaps that's simply some peoples' ideal working state, and there's a more general form of it (I'll use flow for this comment). In this ideal working state, we're constantly encountering problems that are within a known scope. So they're problems -- we don't immediately know how to handle them -- but they're scoped problems, so we know how to figure it out. This is fun, because there are problems, but they're solvable problems.

Dating advice you describe as useful does the opposite of flow -- it creates tasks. Tasks, because they don't require the overcoming of scoped problems, are boring. Taskifying things make them routine, easy, and boring. Taskifying itself can be in flow. Re-taskifying recreates the sense of flow and allows a task to fall within that flow.

What I would want isn't taskified advice, it's the experience that would allow dating to feel flowful.

(I've italicised to try to mark flow as a technical term. Please let me know if I should change the format.)

When you talk about pain being good, you're talking about the information it sends being useful to survival, not about the method of signalling (pain).

Just as you looked at CIPA patients to ask what's good about pain by looking at those who don't have it, you can look at people who suffer from chronic pain to look at what's bad about it.

People with chronic pain have the method all the time without the useful information, and their lives suck. Chronic pain suffers are exhausted and depressed because they're fundamentally unable to do anything without it hurting.

Worse, because people without chronic pain don't highly dis-value chronic pain, it's not respected as being as bad as it is -- most people, when asked, would prefer chronic joint pain to a broken arm, yet most people with one of these conditions have the opposite preference, for good reason.