So, I haven’t read Digital Minimalism, but I have been becoming increasingly worried about attention-grabbing systems over the last ~2 years, culminating in me choosing not to have internet at my apartment when I moved last May (getting internet at a local library, with a ~15 minute walk there by foot), after having iterated through many versions of locks & blocks & deleted elements, all pretty much fruitless in the end.
So, yeah, I think already pretty good about my internet usage.
This has resulted in interesting dynamics: I often procrastinate by reading through my downloaded copy of wikipedia, or by weightlifting (!), when I don’t want to do work. I am also much more vulnerable to overindulging when I’m at a place with internet, e.g. when I’m visiting my parents.
I have some predictions about your experiment:
You will continue in your current decluttered mode (70%)
You will temporarily fall back into bad habits (50%)
You will make it stricter after some while (60%)
Your initial productivity benefits will experience a regression toward the mean (80%)
The (perceived) benefits will continue outweighting the (perceived) costs (90%)
You will find yourself procrastinating in odd and novel ways, such as reading a lot of fiction, or exercising, or snacking a lot, or reading Wikipedia a lot (40%)
I also have experienced increased anxiety, which has persisted (and become slightly stronger) 7.5 months after moving.
I don’t necessarily recommend such extreme measures to everyone, but I have the lurking suspicion that people tend to underreact to time & attention lost.
I’m unhappy that picoeconomics hasn’t been further investigated on LessWrong, because, aside from the term being very cute, trying to balance the costs of accessing different resources that may be harmful in too large or small quantities seems pretty central to the endeavour of managing (if not defeating) akrasia.
A hypothesis could be that while human System 2 does exponential discounting, System 1 performs hyperbolic discounting, and we’d like to increase the cost of accessing e.g. internet services so that for that cost, our hyperbolically discounted value is smaller than the exponentially discounted value (ideas like this being central to picoecon).
Under this model, for myself, the time to remove ublock from my browser addons (or simply install another browser, etc.), which would take around half a minute, the hyperbolically discounted present value was not less than the exponentially discounted value, but the 15 minutes of going to the nearest library (or buying a router and installing it, or paying an additional 10€ for more mobile data (so here, expensive mobile data plans are better) would be, so I don’t do it.
This has some interesting implications: The worse the problem of wasting time on the internet is for you, the harsher your measures will need to be, and the less you will want to carry them out (except in lucid moments).
I have an additional pet peeve about this post: It has the words “cost-benefit analysis” in the title, but doesn’t have a cost-benefit analysis in the body (at least not of the juicy expected-value variety)!
Please don’t use those words if you’re not going to deliver ;-)
I have an additional pet peeve about this post: It has the words “cost-benefit analysis” in the title, but doesn’t have a cost-benefit analysis in the body (at least not of the juicy expected-value variety)!
Oh yeah, I feel like a more natural title would be “PLEASE DO SOME ACTUAL EMPIRICISM”.
I also have experienced increased anxiety, which has persisted (and become slightly stronger) 7.5 months after moving.
I have noticed increased anxiety in myself. I think it quite possible I already had most of it before the declutter, and instead wrapped myself in comforting mind-numbing internet usage which obscured it from me. Another person who has done the declutter, reported similar suspicions about themselves.
This has some interesting implications: The worse the problem of wasting time on the internet is for you, the harsher your measures will need to be, and the less you will want to carry them out (except in lucid moments).
This doesn’t ring to my experience. Everything became easier when I said “No reddit”, as opposed to ~”Reddit if I can find a good enough reason.”
I have an additional pet peeve about this post: It has the words “cost-benefit analysis” in the title, but doesn’t have a cost-benefit analysis in the body (at least not of the juicy expected-value variety)!
Please don’t use those words if you’re not going to deliver ;-)
I included eg the Facebook usage meme (which is the real output of a CB analysis), and described the results of other analyses I did. I think the analyses were so lopsided, and the solutions so clean, that assigning numbers would be a distraction. Also, the point of assigning numbers to personal-utility-estimates is, I think, to throw them out after you do the estimate, and do what your updated gut feeling says.
I have noticed increased anxiety in myself. I think it quite possible I already had most of it before the declutter, and instead wrapped myself in comforting mind-numbing internet usage which obscured it from me. Another person who has done the declutter, reported similar suspicions about themselves.
A psyche might start
cutting itself, if it is
not dulled each fortnight
So, I haven’t read Digital Minimalism, but I have been becoming increasingly worried about attention-grabbing systems over the last ~2 years, culminating in me choosing not to have internet at my apartment when I moved last May (getting internet at a local library, with a ~15 minute walk there by foot), after having iterated through many versions of locks & blocks & deleted elements, all pretty much fruitless in the end.
So, yeah, I think already pretty good about my internet usage.
This has resulted in interesting dynamics: I often procrastinate by reading through my downloaded copy of wikipedia, or by weightlifting (!), when I don’t want to do work. I am also much more vulnerable to overindulging when I’m at a place with internet, e.g. when I’m visiting my parents.
I have some predictions about your experiment:
You will continue in your current decluttered mode (70%)
You will temporarily fall back into bad habits (50%)
You will make it stricter after some while (60%)
Your initial productivity benefits will experience a regression toward the mean (80%)
The (perceived) benefits will continue outweighting the (perceived) costs (90%)
You will find yourself procrastinating in odd and novel ways, such as reading a lot of fiction, or exercising, or snacking a lot, or reading Wikipedia a lot (40%)
I also have experienced increased anxiety, which has persisted (and become slightly stronger) 7.5 months after moving.
I don’t necessarily recommend such extreme measures to everyone, but I have the lurking suspicion that people tend to underreact to time & attention lost.
I’m unhappy that picoeconomics hasn’t been further investigated on LessWrong, because, aside from the term being very cute, trying to balance the costs of accessing different resources that may be harmful in too large or small quantities seems pretty central to the endeavour of managing (if not defeating) akrasia.
A hypothesis could be that while human System 2 does exponential discounting, System 1 performs hyperbolic discounting, and we’d like to increase the cost of accessing e.g. internet services so that for that cost, our hyperbolically discounted value is smaller than the exponentially discounted value (ideas like this being central to picoecon).
Under this model, for myself, the time to remove ublock from my browser addons (or simply install another browser, etc.), which would take around half a minute, the hyperbolically discounted present value was not less than the exponentially discounted value, but the 15 minutes of going to the nearest library (or buying a router and installing it, or paying an additional 10€ for more mobile data (so here, expensive mobile data plans are better) would be, so I don’t do it.
This has some interesting implications: The worse the problem of wasting time on the internet is for you, the harsher your measures will need to be, and the less you will want to carry them out (except in lucid moments).
I have an additional pet peeve about this post: It has the words “cost-benefit analysis” in the title, but doesn’t have a cost-benefit analysis in the body (at least not of the juicy expected-value variety)!
Please don’t use those words if you’re not going to deliver ;-)
Oh yeah, I feel like a more natural title would be “PLEASE DO SOME ACTUAL EMPIRICISM”.
I have noticed increased anxiety in myself. I think it quite possible I already had most of it before the declutter, and instead wrapped myself in comforting mind-numbing internet usage which obscured it from me. Another person who has done the declutter, reported similar suspicions about themselves.
This doesn’t ring to my experience. Everything became easier when I said “No reddit”, as opposed to ~”Reddit if I can find a good enough reason.”
I included eg the Facebook usage meme (which is the real output of a CB analysis), and described the results of other analyses I did. I think the analyses were so lopsided, and the solutions so clean, that assigning numbers would be a distraction. Also, the point of assigning numbers to personal-utility-estimates is, I think, to throw them out after you do the estimate, and do what your updated gut feeling says.