1 and 3 seem too easy to inflate, but 2 is a good idea. Instead of blocking specific websites, write a program that passively measures how much time you spend there, and compete with other people to get a low score. Maybe everyone puts some money in the prize fund...
2 will still lead to some strange behavior. For example, when composing a comment on a forum, rather than typing directly into the textarea you’ll switch to a text editor and copy-paste when you’re done.
Yes. Even as wrong as downloading 15 chapters of fanfic in one command line and binging them for an afternoon would be while seeming to use the connection for around 3 seconds… that isn’t what would normally happen.
A lot of anti-akrasia recipies rely on good faith to some extent, so I don’t think it’s a huge problem (implementing those and getting enough people to use them would be a much bigger hurdle!). If some people want to cheat themselves to stop improving themselves, hey, their loss.
Procrastination could be described as the short-term mind vs. the medium-term mind, and cheating would often require a minimum of planning and of thinking beyond the long term—precisely the stuff that the short-term mind doesn’t do.
Some possible things to compete on, that could be automatically measured (with more or less dev work):
commits on GitHub
Time spend on the internet (you want a low score)
Number of Anki cards reviewed
1 and 3 seem too easy to inflate, but 2 is a good idea. Instead of blocking specific websites, write a program that passively measures how much time you spend there, and compete with other people to get a low score. Maybe everyone puts some money in the prize fund...
2 will still lead to some strange behavior. For example, when composing a comment on a forum, rather than typing directly into the textarea you’ll switch to a text editor and copy-paste when you’re done.
Worse, use curl and view the pages offline.
Making web browsing slightly more annoying can be effective in reducing use.
Yes. Even as wrong as downloading 15 chapters of fanfic in one command line and binging them for an afternoon would be while seeming to use the connection for around 3 seconds… that isn’t what would normally happen.
Rescuetime seems to fit this niche already.
A lot of anti-akrasia recipies rely on good faith to some extent, so I don’t think it’s a huge problem (implementing those and getting enough people to use them would be a much bigger hurdle!). If some people want to cheat themselves to stop improving themselves, hey, their loss.
Procrastination could be described as the short-term mind vs. the medium-term mind, and cheating would often require a minimum of planning and of thinking beyond the long term—precisely the stuff that the short-term mind doesn’t do.