Originally this was a whole other section of the post, but I didn’t have any dramatic conclusion, just a bunch of meandering thoughts:
Choice of Environement
The two available venues are basically “improve your work environment” or “improve your home environment.” (Improving the commute to work is achievable but I think that’d need to focus exclusively on the physicality elements rather than the customizability elements. Participating in more exciting hobbies is certainly an option too, but I’m interested in how our environment is shaped such that exciting hobbies feel less necessary)
After thinking about it a bunch, I’m somewhat pessimistic about any kind of deep integration, but there at least seems room on the margins.
Calibrating Stress
There was a LessWrong post sometime in the past couple months that I can’t find right now, about setting your stress level. There are periods where it’s better to be low stress, and periods where it’s better to be high stress. If you’re trying to relax and watch a movie, being wired for action is counterproductive. If you’re trying to do some spontaneous parkour, attempting it from a low-stress state adds a bunch of activation energy requirements. Being able to control your stress level in either direction can be valuable.
Much of an office environment is designed to produce low physical stress and distraction. The goal is to focus on thinking.
I’d personally like to be able to jump, climb, and play. But doing this easily requires me to be at a moderate stress level which is surprisingly hard to come by. (Lately I’ve been trying to cultivate “parkour mindset”, and notice things on the street I can jump on, but it doesn’t take much for that to feel like too much of a context switch)
Integrated Physical Challenge
I can think of things you might change in an office, but all the options involve making the job arbitrarily harder, and for that physical hardness to be somehow interwoven into the world so that it’s not an abrupt, high-activation energy requirement to engage with it.
I think even the “getting hands dirty” thing is relevant here – offices are clean, even if they’re cluttered. If I did exercise and got sweaty, I’d be flinching as I set down on a nice couch, worried about staining it. On the boat, this just wasn’t a problem at all.
I think it might also be important that the challenge not be skippable, because then with every interaction you end up with a small incentive towards skimping. As soon as you start taking the easy path, your body starts relaxing, and then it gets progressively harder to climb, jump or pull a heavy lever. On the boat, there was no elevator. If you wanted to carry something from the bridge to engineering, you had to climb multiple ladders and close heavy doors.
On the flipside, unskippable challenges harder for a bunch of people with varying physical aptitudes and/or disabilities do their job. (There’s a host of issues surrounding accessibility here)
You could make challenges skippable but optimized for fun/satisfaction. Take the common dichotomy of “take the stairs” vs “take the elevator.” The stairs aren’t more interesting, just blandly effortful. But what if you got to climb an indoor waterfall or labyrinth of monkeybars? (I don’t think this’d fly in a stereotypical corporate office, but I can imagine some Silicon Valley tech companies going for it)
The March of Optimization
Physicality is probably the most relevant-to-human-health aspect of steampunk, but the most conceptually interesting is the “being able to optimize an environment in ways that you maintain gears level understanding of.”
The problem is the manner of optimization that’s available. It’s not that we’re done figuring out how to configure office environments – there’s room for clever ingenuity there. It’s just that it’s generally better business to have people specializing in that. Or, if not, the degrees of optimization don’t require physical embodiment.
I’m just trying to run a business, man – If you’re trying to run a company, making a bunch of things harder is kinda insane. It’s hard enough to succeed if you’re playing on easy mode, or sticking to the hard modes that directly matter to your business.
Most of these options suffer, if nothing else, from being expensive.
[comment abruptly truncates because it’s 1am and this really isn’t the most important thing for me to be doing and I want to just get it out there]
Originally this was a whole other section of the post, but I didn’t have any dramatic conclusion, just a bunch of meandering thoughts:
Choice of Environement
The two available venues are basically “improve your work environment” or “improve your home environment.” (Improving the commute to work is achievable but I think that’d need to focus exclusively on the physicality elements rather than the customizability elements. Participating in more exciting hobbies is certainly an option too, but I’m interested in how our environment is shaped such that exciting hobbies feel less necessary)
After thinking about it a bunch, I’m somewhat pessimistic about any kind of deep integration, but there at least seems room on the margins.
Calibrating Stress
There was a LessWrong post sometime in the past couple months that I can’t find right now, about setting your stress level. There are periods where it’s better to be low stress, and periods where it’s better to be high stress. If you’re trying to relax and watch a movie, being wired for action is counterproductive. If you’re trying to do some spontaneous parkour, attempting it from a low-stress state adds a bunch of activation energy requirements. Being able to control your stress level in either direction can be valuable.
Much of an office environment is designed to produce low physical stress and distraction. The goal is to focus on thinking.
I’d personally like to be able to jump, climb, and play. But doing this easily requires me to be at a moderate stress level which is surprisingly hard to come by. (Lately I’ve been trying to cultivate “parkour mindset”, and notice things on the street I can jump on, but it doesn’t take much for that to feel like too much of a context switch)
Integrated Physical Challenge
I can think of things you might change in an office, but all the options involve making the job arbitrarily harder, and for that physical hardness to be somehow interwoven into the world so that it’s not an abrupt, high-activation energy requirement to engage with it.
I think even the “getting hands dirty” thing is relevant here – offices are clean, even if they’re cluttered. If I did exercise and got sweaty, I’d be flinching as I set down on a nice couch, worried about staining it. On the boat, this just wasn’t a problem at all.
I think it might also be important that the challenge not be skippable, because then with every interaction you end up with a small incentive towards skimping. As soon as you start taking the easy path, your body starts relaxing, and then it gets progressively harder to climb, jump or pull a heavy lever. On the boat, there was no elevator. If you wanted to carry something from the bridge to engineering, you had to climb multiple ladders and close heavy doors.
On the flipside, unskippable challenges harder for a bunch of people with varying physical aptitudes and/or disabilities do their job. (There’s a host of issues surrounding accessibility here)
You could make challenges skippable but optimized for fun/satisfaction. Take the common dichotomy of “take the stairs” vs “take the elevator.” The stairs aren’t more interesting, just blandly effortful. But what if you got to climb an indoor waterfall or labyrinth of monkeybars? (I don’t think this’d fly in a stereotypical corporate office, but I can imagine some Silicon Valley tech companies going for it)
The March of Optimization
Physicality is probably the most relevant-to-human-health aspect of steampunk, but the most conceptually interesting is the “being able to optimize an environment in ways that you maintain gears level understanding of.”
The problem is the manner of optimization that’s available. It’s not that we’re done figuring out how to configure office environments – there’s room for clever ingenuity there. It’s just that it’s generally better business to have people specializing in that. Or, if not, the degrees of optimization don’t require physical embodiment.
I’m just trying to run a business, man – If you’re trying to run a company, making a bunch of things harder is kinda insane. It’s hard enough to succeed if you’re playing on easy mode, or sticking to the hard modes that directly matter to your business.
Most of these options suffer, if nothing else, from being expensive.
[comment abruptly truncates because it’s 1am and this really isn’t the most important thing for me to be doing and I want to just get it out there]