“problems” are just situations where the cost of the actions you’re considering are too high for their probability of success.
I think it may be a bit more than that. An example of what Alicorn is calling a “problem” might be where you can’t even figure out what actions you should be taking in the first place. Or you lack resources or knowledge to actually carry out those actions.
Hmm, I may need to find better words to express this idea. each possible action you take has some probability of being part your desired future world-state . You may not assign a high probability to any action you’ve considered, but that just rolls into the decision of what to do.
For EVERYTHING you’ve labeled “problem”, there are actions you might take and/or goal changes you might make. Same for “tasks”. Many times, that action is “research”, which has sub-actions like “find an interweb terminal” or “ask someone”, or “complain on Less Wrong”, which has sub-actions, which have sub-actions, etc. You might categorize some of these as “tasks” or “problems”, but that categorization is arbitrary.
Lacking knowledge vs lacking a sandwich is NOT a binary distinction. It’s a distinction in costs, duration, and probability of success of various actions you might take.
Lacking resources is even more obviously not distinct: task: get resources. subtask: find someone to pay you. subtask: learn a valuable skill. etc… So: not a problem, right? It takes time and is not guaranteed to work, but both of those are true for “acquire bread to make sandwich” too.
The continuum of cost of actions and probability of success has no obvious inflection point to objectively call “problem” vs “task”.
I think it may be a bit more than that. An example of what Alicorn is calling a “problem” might be where you can’t even figure out what actions you should be taking in the first place. Or you lack resources or knowledge to actually carry out those actions.
Hmm, I may need to find better words to express this idea. each possible action you take has some probability of being part your desired future world-state . You may not assign a high probability to any action you’ve considered, but that just rolls into the decision of what to do.
For EVERYTHING you’ve labeled “problem”, there are actions you might take and/or goal changes you might make. Same for “tasks”. Many times, that action is “research”, which has sub-actions like “find an interweb terminal” or “ask someone”, or “complain on Less Wrong”, which has sub-actions, which have sub-actions, etc. You might categorize some of these as “tasks” or “problems”, but that categorization is arbitrary.
Lacking knowledge vs lacking a sandwich is NOT a binary distinction. It’s a distinction in costs, duration, and probability of success of various actions you might take.
Lacking resources is even more obviously not distinct: task: get resources. subtask: find someone to pay you. subtask: learn a valuable skill. etc… So: not a problem, right? It takes time and is not guaranteed to work, but both of those are true for “acquire bread to make sandwich” too.
The continuum of cost of actions and probability of success has no obvious inflection point to objectively call “problem” vs “task”.