Ugh.  This massively oversimplifies human desire or self-knowledge.   
 

Procrastination is the broad fuzzy description of a phenomena where a person says he wants to do X, but does not do X.

Right.  Or that parts of him want to do X, but other parts don't want to do the elements that make X maximally likely.  Or that he doesn't want ONLY X.   Or that X is the thing that is emotionally salient at the moment, but that won't last.   Or that X is what they want to be seen as wanting, but they don't actually want it.  

This feels a lot like the weight loss debate - Calories in < calories out is true, but useless.  Defining "want" as "what you pursue wholeheartedly and consistently" is also fine, but useless.  

procrastination is actually a broad label for seeming mismatch or contradiction of internal desires

Agreed, and that is real and difficult to deal with for most people.  The solution (of integrating this self-knowledge and identifying/creating more consistent wants) is only ever achieved by a small subset of humans, and often takes decades of practice.

Interesting exploration, but I fear you're selectively treating some preferences/beliefs as objective and not others.

Objectively, it doesn't matter if her makeup washes off. There's no one there that would judge her, and even if someone did judge her it'd just make them a jerk, which would be their problem. She doesn't see it this way, obviously.

Incorrect.  It is an objectively different world-state if her makeup is on or off.   It's less objective, but still true, that she will feel judged if she's in public without makeup.  It's PROBABLY true that at least one person will treat her slightly differently, though is a question of weights and preferences whether that's important.

It's also quite possible that she doesn't want to swim for other reasons, and is using her makeup as a means to avoid revealing those reasons.  
 

The challenge is this: What do you say, and do, such that by the end of it she sees the truth here and is able to enjoy swimming with her friends?

Mu.  There is no truth that I know better than her.  There are framings and weights that I think may make her overall happier with the day (though they do have some risks that they won't), and I'd likely try to help explain why I weight such considerations differently than she does.

I suspect there's a LOT of handwaving in trying to apply theory to actual decisions or humans.  These graphs omit time, so don't include "how long spent in worse states, and how long the preferred state lasts" in their overall preference ordering.  In known agents (humans), actual decisions seem to always include timeframes and path-dependency.

I think more technicallly-oriented history would benefit a lot of students.  And more stories generally - not just facts, but world models of how individuals who were gifted in some ways and damaged in others navigated their society in order to produce lasting value.

But really, one size doesn't fit all, and never has.  Some students will bounce off some or all aspects of adulthood and competence, no matter how it's presented.  Some will be great, happy people regardless of classes.  The really good teachers/professors and a well-fitting curriculum for a lot in the middle will be pivotal for them.

I think with modern interactive navigation support, the static implication of "map" is probably going away anyway.  But to be clear, the POINT of the map-territory metaphor is that the map CANNOT be perfect, both because it's less detailed, but also because it can't change at the same rate as the world.

The real world is quite dynamic.  Our mental models and descriptions of the world are less dynamic than the world itself. 

I don't mean to require perfect coherence - humans don't have it, and if that's required, NOTHING is conscious (note: this is a defensible position, but not particularly interesting to me).  There's enough difference between humans and the other examples that I'm not convinced by the analogies I've seen, and I believe this is the one important dimension of difference, but since this is all abstraction and intuition anyway, others are free to disagree.

In humans, there's a lack of viability of independent subsets.  It's almost certainly the case that a partial brain still has some consciousness, and likely some differences from the whole being, but it's not very divisible into truly independent segments.   This is a kind of coherence that I don't see in the other examples.  Organs are not a good analogy for constituents or sub-organizations of a country, as organs DON'T have volition and world-models.  

If we take that critique seriously, we have to stop saying that corporations launch products, or that teams win matches.

No, that's an isolated demand for rigor.  We can definitely make different entity-analogies for different questions.  When it matters, as it sometimes does, we can break the simplification and prosecute the officers or employees who are ACUTALLY responsible for a corporate action.

Under what conditions does it become useful or predictive to model a system as being conscious?

This is a GREAT framing for the question.  Let's not talk about "consciousness" as if it were a useful label that we agree on.  Taboo the word, and the holistic concept, and let's ask "when is it more useful to model a country as an entity that thinks and plans, as opposed to modeling it as a collection of groups of humans, who individually influence each other in thinking and planning"?

Both of these are quite believable.  It took me a LONG time to get to a maturity/confidence level where I can say (still not comfortably, but I recognize that it must happen for good outcomes) "I'm just getting to this now, and I'm sorry I didn't notice earlier that I don't fully understand X and Y.  Can you help clarify what's the purpose/expectation/methodology for this?"

Good exploration, but I'm not agreed on some of the conclusions.  I love Hofstadter, but remember his anthill is fiction, and one shouldn't use it as evidence for anything.   I don't think anthill or country fit into my model of "conscious entity".   Though I suspect my main sticking point is "entity" rather than "conscious".  There's a missing element of coherence that I think matters quite a bit.  LLMs are missing coherence-over-time and coherence-across-executions.  Countries are missing coherence-between-subsets.

When you say "countries do X", it's always the case that actually, some numbers of individual humans do it, and other numbers either don't participate or don't stop it.   Countries do NOT state their right to exist.  Humans state their right to be collectively recognized as a country.  The preferences of the individual speakers may differ, but the actions don't.   

This is quite a different thing than noting "a human doesn't say something, their chest, throat, and mouth muscles say the thing".   There are almost no muscle groups that act coherently without a brain to help coordinate.   

 

Then I'm even more confused about the lack of cooperative-problem-solving between managers and employees.  In fact, with fewer than 20 employees, why even HAVE a formal manager?  You need some leaders to help prioritize and set direction, but no line-management or task breakdowns.

 

I think the "noticing" part can vary a LOT based on the implied reason for the manager's request, and the cost/reward function of how close to "correct" the predictions are.  There's a whole lot of tasks in most corporate environments that really make no difference, and just having AN answer is good enough.  An interested, conscientious employee would be sure this was the case before continuing, though.

The real puzzle is what is the blocker for just asking the manager for details (or the reason for lack of details).  I didn't work in big, formal, organizations until I was pretty senior, so I've always seen managers as a peer and partner in delivering value, not as a director of my work or bottleneck for my understanding.  This has served me well, and I'm often surprised that much less than half of my current coworkers operate this way.  "I need a bit more information to do a good job on this task" is about the bare minimum I'd expect someone to say in such a situation, and I'd usually say "do we have more functional requirements or background information on this?  I can make something up, but I'd really like to understand how my answer will be used".

Especially for the estimating parameters for a model question, I don't understand why one wouldn't ask for more information about the task and semantics of the parameters.  If it were a coworker of mine, I'd mention it in a 1:1 that they need to take more ownership and ask questions when they don't understand.