Follow-up to: Boring Advice Repository
Many practical problems in instrumental rationality appear to be wide open. Two I've been annoyed by recently are "what should I eat?" and "how should I exercise?" However, some appear to be more or less solved. For example, various mnemonic techniques like memory palaces, along with spaced repetition, seem to more or less solve the problem of memorization.
I would like people to use this thread to post other examples of solved problems in instrumental rationality. I'm pretty sure you all collectively know good examples; there's a comment I can't find from a user who said something like "taking a flattering photograph of yourself is a solved problem," and it's likely that there are other useful examples like this that aren't common knowledge. Err on the side of posting solutions which may not be universal but are still likely to be helpful to many people.
(This thread is allowed to not be boring! Go wild!)
I'd wager you've never been overweight. Strap a few dozen lbs around your waist or don them as a vest, see what it does to your daily routine. We've done that once in some class or other, and I've bordered the 30 myself as well, from time to time. You're affected constantly, we're as of yet embodied agents, not free floating minds. What's the likelier explanation for a lack of action, expected value calculations or - here it comes - 'akrasia'.
Depends from whose point of view. E.g. passing away in the knowledge that you've contributed to the eventual creation of FAI (which gives you fuzzies, or at least utilons) can be outweighed by living decades with more mental energy (which also contributes to your development efforts) and a better self-image.
That aside, that a task is a complicated problem/puzzle to be solved can be an incentive to solve it in and of itself, especially for certain kinds of people.
Assuming the increase in productivity, self image and quality of life (consider the metabolic syndrome, preventing decades of injecting insuline can have quite the impact on your QALY) to be fixed/constant for an individual, "true" or "false" does depend on how easy/hard it would be for that individual to efficiently attain and keep a lower BMI. For metabolically priviledged people, or just those with an easy to fix problem such as hypothyreodism, the statement is probably true. For someone who for whatever reason cannot lose any weight whatever he tries (within his motivational reach given his current energy levels ... there's a catch-22 present), it would be false.
Pretty sure most people involved in FAI efforts are fatoring in more than warm fuzzies in their EU calculations.