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.

Moral rules are about actions, but in consequentalism are judged strictly according to their consequences. Real world is what connects actions to consequences, otherwise we couldn't talk about morality at all.

If you assume some vast simplification of the real world, or assume least-convenient-world, or something like that, the connection between actions and consequences completely changes, and so optimal moral rules in such case have no reason to be applicable to the real world.

Also if the real world changes significantly - let's say we develop a fully reliable lie detector and start using it all the time (something I consider extremely unlikely in the real world). In such case the same actions would have different consequences, so consequentialism would say our moral rules controlling our actions should change. For example if we had lie detectors like that it would be a good idea to get every person routinely tested annually if they committed a serious crime like murder or bribery - something that would be a very bad idea in our real world.

Together with A Tale Of Two Tradeoffs and Missing the Trees for the Forest, this post sheds some light on the nature of mind-killing properties of adversarial debate. If adversarial debate is about status, and status-arguing is done by the signaling subsystem of the mind, in the far mode, this explains why the debate is often so myopic. The signaling system of the mind is optimized for deceiving a small group of people to one's advantage, as opposed to making actually good decisions and making accurate estimates where it's possible. It's just bad at seeing the truth, and so the truth gets ignored, while the fight goes on.

Ignoring, for the moment, the deeper metaphorical question of how many of us are any given brain failure, does anyone know whether anosognosics actually think that they're using their paralyzed arm? Because I have a very strong sense of using my arms, and I suspect from the earlier description that anosognosics deny their arm being paralyzed, but wouldn't claim that they are actually typing with two hands, for example. Anybody know more on that?

"Not causing people to make choices they will regret" is a pretty simple ethical principle.

Actually, it's contradictory. If they actually have autonomy, then you can't truly "cause" them to make a particular choice. So choosing to "not cause" them to make a choice is actually admitting they're not autonomous.

Ergo, given the definition of "objectifying" in use here, you are objectifying someone merely by trying not to influence them.

I think this makes sense...

Another factor may be that for controversial and polarizing works, fandoms are more necessary, because the fans need to band together.

In the case of works that are universally recognized as good, there is no need for fandom, because there is no need for solidarity of the fans in the face of criticism or being made fun of.

Well the fact of eating is clearly done mostly for non-signaling reasons, but since eating is social the details of how we eat are greatly influenced by signaling. So our beliefs about why we pick those details are unreliable, to the extent we tend to not be aware of signaling influences on behavoir.

Anything habitually done alone and considered pointless, embarrassing, unwise, or revolting to discuss publicly is a candidate. Most things that go on in the bathroom count. Clipping one's toenails (if one does not wear open-toed shoes); little doodles, drawn with no one watching, to be thrown away after completion; doing laundry in a private washing machine; selecting a toaster setting when preparing breakfast alone.

It's possible that I'm underestimating the sorts of things people subconsciously expect others to pick up on, but I also doubt anyone is signaling when: they (publicly) eat (their own) package of M&Ms with a particular color order in mind; they change lightbulbs; they skip one short story in an anthology; they pick at lint on an article of clothing. Choosing to do these things or not isn't obtrusive, and when they are done at all, there isn't much meaningful variation in how they're done. (Which short story you skip might matter, but out of an entire anthology, it's unlikely that one worth skipping would come up in conversation individually, and I don't think the story-skipping party would be likely to bring it up first.)