This is a special post for quick takes by J Bostock. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Type 1: takes a lot of prioritization. Going to the gym four times a week falls into this category. It's not particularly difficult, but it does take a lot of effort.
Type 2: takes a large amount of skill, where your skill is capped somehow. There are some things I'm just not skilled enough to do, even if I really had to. I could not land a Boeing 767 if everyone else on the plane was unconscious.
Type 3: induces a lot of suffering. I used to feel an enormous amount of discomfort and suffering when taking finger-prick blood tests. They only took ~half an hour to do at home, but it was some of the strongest discomfort I ever felt.
Practice, to a point, moves type 2 difficulty into type 1 difficulty. At the tail end, type 1 difficulty shades into type 3 difficulty, because prioritization becomes unpleasant (if I had to pay £3000/mo to service some debt, that would be one thing, if I had to sell my house and live on the streets, that would be another thing).
Most of the time, being a good person is type 1 or occasionally type 3. If you're in a situation where doing the right thing is type 2, then you're in a bad, bad spot. I think lots of people in the AI ecosystem are in situations where doing the right thing morally is type 2, which is unusual.