I have had and solved fairly extreme versions of this in myself, and have helped people with debilitating versions of this resolve it multiple times.

You're stuck in a loop of some part of you pushing to do the object level thing so hard that it has no sensitivity to the parts of you that are averse to it. Whenever you notice you're spinning your wheels; stop trying to force through the object level action and let yourself actually notice the feeling of resistance with open curiosity. Let let unfold into the full message that brain fragment is trying to send, rather than overcompressed "bad"/"aversion".

I recommend you read at least the first chapter of Getting Things Done, and do the corresponding exercises. In particular, this one, which he uses to provide evidence his model of productivity is correct

I suggest that you write down the project or situation that is most on your mind at this moment. What most bugs you, distracts you, or interests you, or in some other way consumes a large part of your conscious attention? It may be a project or problem that is really “in your face,” something you are being pressed to handle, or a situation you feel you must deal with sooner rather than later.

Maybe you have a holiday trip coming up that you need to make some major last-minute decisions about. You just read an e-mail about a new and pressing issue in your department. Or perhaps you just inherited six million dollars and you don’t know what to do with the cash. Whatever.

Got it? Good. Now, describe, in a single written sentence, your intended successful outcome for this problem or situation. In other words, what would need to happen for you to check this project off as “done”? It could be as simple as “Take the Hawaii vacation,” “Handle situation with customer X,” “Resolve college situation with Susan,” “Clarify new divisional management structure,” “Implement new investment strategy,” or “Research options for dealing with Manuel’s reading issue.” All clear? Great.

Now write down the very next physical action required to move the situation forward. If you had nothing else to do in your life but get closure on this, what visible action would you take right now? Would you call or text someone? Write an e-mail? Take pen and paper and brainstorm about it? Surf the Web for data? Buy nails at the hardware store? Talk about it face-to-face with your partner, your assistant, your attorney, or your boss? What?

Got the answer to that? Good.

Was there any value for you in those two minutes of thinking? If you’re like the vast majority of people who complete that drill in our seminars, you’ll be experiencing at least a tiny bit of enhanced control, relaxation, and focus. You’ll also be feeling more motivated to actually do something about that situation you’ve merely been thinking about till now. Imagine that motivation magnified a thousandfold, as a way to live and work.

If anything at all positive happened for you in this little exercise, think about this: What changed? What happened to create that improved condition within your own experience? The situation itself is no further along, at least in the physical world. It’s certainly not finished yet. What probably happened is that you acquired a clearer definition of the outcome desired and the next action required. What did change is the most important element for clarity, focus, and peace of mind: how you are engaged with your world.

But what created that? Not “getting organized” or “setting priorities.” The answer is, thinking. Not a lot; just enough to solidify your commitment about a discrete pressure or opportunity and the resources required dealing with it. People think a lot, but most of that thinking is of a problem, project, or situation—not about it. If you actually did this suggested exercise, you were required to structure your thinking toward an outcome and an action, and that does not usually happen without a consciously focused effort. Reacting is automatic, but thinking is not.

Read about Ugh fields on LW

Edit: this doesn't include practical advice, but a theoretical understanding of the issues at play is often helpful in implementing practical strategies

VIsualize yourself doing the thing until you do it. Note that this comes with substantial risk towards making you avoidant/averse to visualizing yourself doing the thing until you do it; this is a recursive procedurally generated process and you should expect to need to keep on your toes in order to succeed. Aversion factoring is a good resource to start with, and Godel Escher and Bach is a good resource for appreciating the complexity required for maintenance and the inadequacy of simple strategies.

I have similar issues, severity varies over time.
If I am in a bad place, things that help best:
- taking care of mental health. I do CBT when i'm in worse shape, and take SSRIs. YMMV. both getting dianosed and treated are important. this also includes regular exercise and good sleep. what you have described might be (although does not have to be) related to depression, anxiety, attention disorders.
- setting a timer for a short time, can be as short as 1min, and doing one of the avoided tasks for just that 1 minute. it kind if "breaks the spell" for me
- journaling, helps to "debug" the problems, and in most cases leads to wring down plans / intervations / resolutuons

See here. (Perhaps also relevant: PDA)

1. If this would not obviously make things worse, be more socially connected with people who have expectations of you; not necessarily friends but possibly colleagues or people who simply assume you should be working at times and get feedback about that in a natural way. It's possible that the prospect of this is anxiety-inducing and would be awful but that it would not actually be very awful.

2. Recognize that you don't need to do most things perfectly or even close to it, and as a corollary, you don't need to be particularly ready to handle tasks even if they are important. You can handle an email or an urgent letter without priming yourself or being in the right state of mind. The vast majority of things are this way.

3. Sit in the start position of your task, as best as you can operationalize that (e.g, navigate to the email and open it, or hit the reply button and sit in front of it), for one minute, without taking your attention off of the task. Progress the amount of time upwards as necessary/possible. (One possible success-mode from doing this is that you get bored of being in this position or you become aware that you're tired of the thing not being done. (You would hope your general anxiety about the task in day-to-day life would achieve this for you, but it's not mechanically optimized enough to.) Another possible success-mode is that the immediate feelings you have about doing the task subside.)

4. Beta-blockers.

I've had similar issues downstream of what I'd somehow failed to realize was a clinically-significant level of anxiety, so that's something to maybe consider checking into.

If you haven't already, talk to a guy! (typically a therapist but doesn't have to be)

I have something like this but for decisions, where I will avoid making decisions for mysterious reasons (we figured out it's because I can't be sure it'd be pareto optimal, among other reasons).

I now notice more often when I'm doing this, and correct more gracefully.

Able activists are conflict theorists. They understand the logic of power & propaganda & cultish devotion at an intuitive level. To become an effective soldier one needs to excise a part of the brain devoted to evenkeeled uncertainty, nuance, intellectual empathy, self-doubt.  

Conflict theorists may do great good as readily as they may do great harm. They wield a dangerous force, easily corruptible, yet perhaps necessary. 

Does anyone know of an example of a boxed player winning where some transcript or summary was released afterwards?

As far as I know, the closest thing to this is Tuxedage's writeup of his victory against SoundLogic (the 'Second Game Report' and subsequent sections here: https://tuxedage.wordpress.com/2013/09/05/the-ai-box-experiment-victory/). It's a long way from a transcript (and you've probably already seen it) but it does contain some hints as to the tactics he either employed or was holding in reserve:

It may be possible to take advantage of multiple levels of reality within the game itself to confuse or trick the gatekeeper. For instance, must the experiment only be set in one world? I feel that expanding on this any further is dangerous. Think carefully about what this means.

I can think of a few possible reasons for an AI victory, in addition to the consequentialist argument you described:

• AI player convinces Gatekeeper that they may be in a simulation and very bad things might happen to Gatekeepers who refuse to let the AI out. (This could be what Tuxedage was hinting at in the passage I quoted, and it is apparently allowed by at least some versions/interpretations of the rules: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Bnik7YrySRPoCTLFb/i-played-the-ai-box-game-as-the-gatekeeper-and-lost?commentId=DhMNjWACsfLMcywwF)
• Gatekeeper takes the roleplay seriously, rather than truly playing to win, and lets the AI out because that's what their character would do.
• AI player makes the conversation sufficiently unpleasant for the Gatekeeper that the Gatekeeper prefers to lose the game than sit through two hours of it. (Some people have suggested weaponised boredom as a viable tactic in low-stakes games, but I think there's room for much nastier and more effective approaches, given a sufficiently motivated (and/or sociopathic) AI player with knowledge of some of the Gatekeeper's vulnerabilities.)
• This one seems like it would (at best) fall into a grey area in the rules: I can imagine an AI player, while technically sticking to the roleplay and avoiding any IRL threats or inducements, causing the Gatekeeper to genuinely worry that the AI player might do something bad if they lose. For a skilful AI player, it might be possible to do this in a way that would look relatively innocuous (or at least not rule-breaking) to a third party after the fact.
  • Somewhat similar: if the Gatekeeper is very empathetic and/or has reason to believe the AI player is vulnerable IRL, the AI player could take advantage of this by convincingly portraying themself as being extremely invested in the game and its outcome, to the point that a loss could have a significant real-world impact on their mental health. (I think this tactic would fail if done ineptly -- most people would not react kindly if they recognized that their opponent was trying to manipulate them in this way -- but it could conceivably work in the right circumstances and in the hands of a skilful manipulator.)

There's a big presumption there.  If he was a p-zombie to start with, he still has non-experience after the training.  We still have no experience-o-meter, or even a unit of measure that would apply.

For children without major brain abnormalities or injuries, who CAN talk about it, it's a pretty good assumption that they have experiences.  As you get more distant from your own structure, your assumptions about qualia should get more tentative.

I don't know a standard name. I call it "fallacy of the revealed preferences", because these situations have in common "you do X, someone concludes that X is what you actually wanted because that's what you did, duh".

More precisely, the entire concept of "revealed preferences" is prone to the motte-and-bailey game, where the correct conclusion is "given the options and constraints that you had at the moment, you chose X", but it gets interpreted as "X is what you would freely choose even if you had no constraints". (People usually don't state it explicitly like this, they just... don't mention the constraints, or even the possibility of having constraints.)

Is the thing you're trying to label the peculiar confirmation bias where people instead of interpreting evidence to confirm to what they prefer or would like to be true, only to what they believe to be true - even if from their perspective it is pessimistic?

Or are you looking for a label for "this is unpopular therefore it can't win" as a specific kind of self-fulfilling prophecy? Like an inverted Keynesian beauty contest?

I agree it probably shouldn't have been negative karma (I think that's due to some partisan voting around being annoyed at vegans), and that there were some interesting points there and some interesting discussion. But, the fact that it prompted a bunch of rebuttals isn't particularly good arguments that it should have got more karma – if a bad argument is popular and people need to write rebuttals, that's not a point in it's favor.

I think it's legitimately not-deserving-high-upvotes because it makes a very strong claim about what people should do, based on some very flimsy core arguments.

there appears to be no way for me to neutrally discuss these doubts with a psychiatrist

Why not discuss openly with one psychiatrist (or therapist!), then choose another to exaggerate if you decide to experiment.

Also, note that I don’t think psychiatrists are particularly averse to experimenting with drugs with few long term consequences or risks.

To be clear, I think it’s very unlikely they are conscious etc., this is a comment on a reflexive process going on in my head