The second in a series of bite-sized rationality prompts[1].

Often, if I'm bouncing off a problem, one issue is that I intuitively expect the problem to be easy. My brain loops through my available action space, looking for an action that'll solve the problem. Each action that I can easily see, won't work. I circle around and around the same set of thoughts, not making any progress.

I eventually say to myself "okay, I seem to be in a hard problem. Time to do some rationality?"

And then, I realize, there's not going to be a single action that solves the problem. It is time to

a) make a plan, with multiple steps
b) deal with the fact that many of those steps will be annoying
and c) notice thatI'm not even sure the plan will work, so after completing the next 2-3 steps I will probably have [...]

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Outline:

(04:00) Triggers

(04:37) Exercises for the Reader

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
July 5th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XNm5rc2MN83hsi4kh/buckle-up-bucko-this-ain-t-over-till-it-s-over

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.