Third in a series of short rationality prompts.

My opening rationality move is often "What's my goal?".

It is closely followed by: "Why is this hard? And, what can I do about that?".

If you're busting out deliberate "rationality" tools (instead of running on intuition or copying your neighbors), something about your situation is probably difficult.

It's often useful to explicitly enumerate "What's hard about this?", and list the difficulties accurately, and comprehensively[1], such that if you were to successfully deal with each hard thing, it'd be easy.

Then, you have new subgoals of "figure out how to deal with each of those hard-things." And you can brainstorm solutions[2].

Sometimes, those subgoals will also be hard. Then, the thing to do is ask "okay, what's hard about this subgoal, and how to do I deal with that?"

Examples

I'll do one example that's sort of "simple" (most of what I need to do is "try at all"), and one that's more complex (I'll need to do some fairly creative thinking to make progress).

Example 1: Bureaucracy while tired

I'm trying to fill out some paperwork. It requires some information I don't know how to get. (Later [...]

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Outline:

(01:04) Examples

(01:17) Example 1: Bureaucracy while tired

(06:58) Example 2: Getting an LLM to actually debug worth a shit

(12:00) Recap

(12:37) Exercise for the reader

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
November 3rd, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AQSwzEgLjM4dyWuAh/what-s-hard-about-this-what-can-i-do-about-that-recursive

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“What’s hard about this? What can I do about that? (Recursive)” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma)