Hm. You seem to have edited the comment after I responded to it, in such a way that makes me want to take back my response. How would we tell whether the former group needs to more actively combat procrastination?

I would be surprised because it's significantly at odds with my experience of the relationship between procrastination and insight.

I don't believe I can answer these questions correctly (as I'm not Eliezer and these questions are very much specific to him); I was already reaching a fair bit with my previous post.

Upvoted for not backing away from a concrete prediction.
I would be very surprised by that result.

It seems to follow from this model that if we measure the tendency towards procrastination in two groups, one of which is selected for their demonstrable capability for math, or more generally for deep, insightful thought, and the other of which is not, we should find that the former group procrastinates more than the latter group.

Yes?

are you deliberately vague

Outside of postmodernism, people are almost never deliberately vague: they think they're over specifying, in painfully elaborate detail, but thank to the magic of inferential distance it comes across as less information than necessary to the listener. The listener then, of course, also expects short inferential distance, and assumes that the speaker is deliberately being vague, instead of noticing that actually there's just a lot more to explain.

I've tried to share the reasoning already. Mostly it boils down to "the problem is finite" and "you can recurse on it if you actually try". Certainly it will always sound more convincing to someone who can sort-of see how to do it than to someone who has to take someone else's word for it, and to those who actually try to build it when they are ready, it should feel like solider knowledge still.

Going meta is not only what we love best, it's what we're best at, and that's always been so.

Do we love going meta? Yes, we do.

Are we good at it? Sometimes yes, sometimes no; it also depends on the individual. But going meta is good for signalling intelligence, so we do it even when it's just a waste of time.

Has it always been so? Yes, unpracticality and procrastination of many intelligent people is widely known.

You know, the funny thing is, there are transhumanist themes in the drafts and deleted materials for Evangelion. For example, parsing the SEELE discussions in the EoE draft and comments by Gainaxers, one has the impression that originally the plan of Gendo and Yui was to upload humans into immortal Evas so they could colonize other worlds, the human body being too frail and short-lived for space travel! (Like many of the explanations and details, I think they were cut by Anno to focus on the psychology themes that interested him more.)

I'm curious. Have you ever lost a loved one due to someone else's actions? The closest experience I have to this is a cousin who was killed about a year ago by a speeding driver. My cousin Brandon wasn't that old. He hadn't been a great student in highschool but had really shaped up and become a lot more responsible in college. Brandon was working to become a chef, something he was clearly good at and clearly enjoyed. My cousin was on his bike and never even saw the car. He had on a helmet. It saved his life, for a few days. His grandmother, my aunt, was on an airplane flight when the accident happened. She was on her way to the funeral of another relative who had killed himself. She found out about the accident as her plane taxied to the gate.

At first, after a few days in the hospital it seemed that Brandon was going to make it. Then he took a sudden turn for the worst and his organs started to fail. The end was so sudden that some of my relatives saw in their inboxes the email update saying that Brandon wasn't like to make it right under the email saying he had died.

Then, it turned out that the driver of the car had a history of speeding problems. He received in a year in jail for vehicular homicide. A small compensation for the entire life Brandon had in front of him.

If someone came up to me, and gave me the choice of making that driver die a slow painful, agonizing death I'd probably say yes. It would be wrong. Deeply wrong. But the emotion is that strong; I don't know if I could override it.

But I can still understand that that's wrong. The driver was an aging Vietnam vet with a history of medical problems. He had little family. He was so distraught over what happened that when initially put in jail before the trial, there was worry that he might kill himself. He seems to be an old, lonely, broken man. Harming him accomplishes little. And yet, despite all that, the desire to see him suffer still burns deeply within me.

How much more would I feel if I thought that someone had killed a relative, or even my own child? And if the court had repeatedly agreed and told me that that was the guilty person. How could I ever emotionally acknowledge that I had been after the wrong person, that not only had I persecuted the wrong person, but the person who had done this terrible deed was still out there, and free? I'd like to believe that I'm a rational person so that I could make that acknowledgment. But the fact that even when it is just a cousin I still deeply desire someone to suffer in ways that help no one at all... I doubt I could do it.

To call the Kerchers evil or their desires evil is a deep failure of empathy.

We're not in disagreement about that. But your assumption that emotions are necessary for goals to be formed is still an untested one.

There's a relevant factoid that's come up here on LW a few times before: Apparently, people with significant brain damage to their emotional centers are unable to make choices between functionally near-identical things, such as different kinds of breakfast cereal. But, interestingly, they get stuck when trying to make those choices - implying that they do attempt to e.g. acquire cereal in the first place; they're not just lying in a bed somewhere staring at the ceiling, and they don't immediately give up the quest to acquire food as unimportant when they encounter a problem.

It would be interesting to know the events that lead up to the presented situation; it would be interesting to know whether people with that kind of brain damage initiate grocery-shopping trips, for example. But even if they don't - even if the grocery trip is the result of being presented with a fairly specific list, and they do otherwise basically sit around - it seems to at least partially disprove your 'standby mode' theory, which would seem to predict that they'd just sit around even when presented with a grocery list and a request to get some shopping done.