An alternative model:

“I could try to get myself to like broccoli. But it is impossible that I will succeed. It is quite possible, however, that I’ll convince myself that I’ve succeeded; that I’ll think I’ve succeeded; and so, armed with the new (and mistaken) belief that I now like broccoli, I’ll start eating it. This will be terrible, because I will then be eating a thing I don’t actually enjoy, and I’ll be suffering from the cognitive dissonance of thinking that I’ve successfully convinced myself to like broccoli, of deriving conscious pride and satisfaction from having convinced myself to like broccoli, while not enjoying it in the least. In the worst case, that pride and satisfaction in (allegedly but not really) successful self-modification will become a part of my identity; and my (fake) liking of broccoli will one day contribute to a major psychological dislocation (when that aspect of self-identity comes into conflict with reality), with catastrophic consequences; or the internal conflict will continually erode my psyche with nameless anxieties and other demons of the mind, with less-catastrophic, but no less horrible, consequences.”

I, for one, refuse to let broccoli destroy me.

I tend to have a sort of opposite problem to the Hufflepuff trap: I can run through the exercise and see practical actions I could take, but then do not find them compelling.

Often I can even pull myself all the way through to writing down the specifics of an exercise I could do within five minutes and then... I just leave it on the page and go back to playing phone games.

Some of the things you say about willpower at the end resonate more with me, but the place willpower needs to get used is different for me, and saying I need to use willpower doesn't result in willpower being used by me. Many posts in the past have discussed this problem and I don't want to derail the discussion (though I haven't really found any of them to help me much).

But moving forward from that, if there are people whose problems are more "flinch away from acknowledging the correct behavior" and my problems are more "fail to execute on the correct behavior" that suggests an interesting division of labor possibility for paired productivity. Unfortunately one of the important components in getting there is "hang out with other rationalists in a more personal setting" which is perhaps chief among my correct behaviors that I've failed to execute on.

Medium-note: I think I mostly understood what you were saying here, but this was the first time in your series I felt a sense of "this seems like a 201 level course that I've only taken the 101 level intro to, and am missing a fair bit of background."

If I understand this correctly, then I agree with the premise that an error lies in identifying too strongly with a current set of preferences. In situations where right now "I want y, but y first requires x and I don't want x" it's easy for me to fall into a default mode of inaction; instead of examining/testing my preferences and maybe finding that x isn't such a nuisance after all. If my preferences are equally weighted, then I just choose one or the other. If it turns out that I have a higher order preference for y it makes sense for me to supplement attempts to get y with technqiues like ITC mapping and Trigger Action Planning despite the cost of x. Future selves may or may not assign positive value to x, and if it still turns out that in fact u(¬x)>u(y) then often it's trivially easy for me to revert to the original set of preferences. [Edit: Unless of, course, as Said pointed out, some kind of social pressure has led me to believe that the cost of x is not as large as it really is.]

[Edit: I don't think it's very likely that a person is going to fool themselves into liking x if they really, totally, utterly hate the thought of x, and it would be a bad thing to persist with x if it would lead to suffering in the long term. This is what I mean by a higher order preference, ie: that if the net gain from y outweighs the cost of x then clearly, obviously, absolutely: do x! This is obvious in the case where y = ¬x. Just try the damn broccoli. If you fail, your identity is not and should not be at stake. Nor should it be a herculean feat of willpower to test the water.

One example where my suggestion might break down: replace eating broccoli with smoking tobacco in the original formulation. This 'bug' seems perfectly reasonable now, right? Here, smoking may be more pleasurable than the health costs, but most people have a higher order preference for longevity. If I were to begin smoking, I might find it pleasurable, and come into conflict with my higher order preferences. In this case, is it better to reorder my preferences, to ignore them and remain in conflict with myself or to quit (with some difficulty)? Clearly reordering preferences would be a bad thing for my health, and thus an irrational choice. Ignoring my preferences would lead to so some severe psychological problems eventually. Also it may not be so easy to revert to the original preference but there are tools (nicotine replacement/vaping) that make it significantly easier. I'd argue that in most cases, we come out better for the experiment, as it gives us an opportunity to update on potentially ill-founded preferences. If you end up making a u-turn then at least there is some more solid evidence for your original desire to avoid the broccoli.

In the spirit of espistemic rationality we should always be willing to test cherished beliefs and update them if they turn out to be useless. Like you say, "push through the partial objections" but I would add: only up the point where these internal objections start to become real problems.]

I just wanted to say that I've had the "broccoli error" response before, and the phrasing was almost identical to the one in my head.

I definitely have had the experience of trying to live up to a standard and it feeling awful, which then inhibits the desire to make future attempts. I think that feeling indicates a need to investigate whether you're making things difficult on yourself. For example, I would often attempt to learn too many things at once and do too much work at once because I thought the ideal person would basically be learning and working all the time. Then, when I felt myself breaking down it sent my stress levels through the roof because if I couldn't keep going that meant I was just unable to be the ideal I wanted to be. Instead of asking, "okay, the way I'm doing this is clearly unsustainable, but the standard is still worthwhile, how do I change my way of thinking or going about this thing?", I would just try to force myself to continue on, feeling constantly stressed about not failing.

But when I began to ask the question, I saw that I could decrease the work I was putting on myself to something I could actually manage all the time and that would be actually most productive in the long run. And I recognized that sometimes I'll just be exhausted and unable to do something and that doesn't make my whole attempt to live up to the standard a failure. This, it became easier to live up to the standard, or rather, my ideal standard shifted organically to the standard of how I think I can become the best me instead of the standard I ascribed to an unspecified ideal person who I am just not capable of being.