I would have suggested, and still do suggest if another poll will happen, the question,
How many tabs do you have open in your browser right now?
to see if that correlates with e.g. procrastination. Large any-given-moment tab count, I hypothesize, correlates negatively with focus, and maybe slightly negatively with conscientiousness.
it’s not quite trivial to actually measure, but total tabs opened in the last, say, hour is probably a better measurement than how many you have open right now.
After writing that I started thinking “maybe a large number of tabs open with a slow turnover/new tabs opening rate doesn’t even correlate at all with procrastination”, but I suspect that’s just me coming up with excuses for things and isn’t actually true. Could try measuring both if the survey actually works, shrug.
I generally have lots of tabs open (to the point of being made fun of) and my tendency is to open and close them swiftly in the course of multi-pronged subject exploration, with a small handful of “best of exploration” that I retain so that they prime me in subsequent hours or days or weeks with reminders, re-reading opportunities, and the possibility of being folded into longer term projects. Every so often I clean them up by transcribing URLs and notes into text files that accumulate in an idea-archive. I endorse some of this behavior, but suspect that it could become problematic in the long term… not because of “akrasia”, but as part of a more specific problem called “hoarding”.
Hoarding appears to be a mental disorder that can start in one’s teens, but really starts to become visible in one’s 30′s or 40′s, growing with time until you’re an 80-year-old living in a pile of useless trash. My current working model for it is that retention behavior is the default behavior, mostly driven by positive emotions triggered by objects. To throw something away, a hoarder needs to consciously override this default using fluid intelligence (calculating that expected use-value in realistic plans are less than inventory costs?). As aging progresses, fluid mental abilities decline, and you’re less able to decide that something isn’t worth keeping, until there are tiny trails between the bed, the toilette, and the microwave and the rest of the house is full of piles of boxes full of sorted boxes of crap.
Amusingly, I found out about hoarding via my tab-heavy information searches and left the tabs open for days, and cleaned them up into a TODO file to have a conversation with family about hoarding, which is part of why I’m aware of this. Within five years I plan to do some debugging of space management habits and policies to make sure they’re solid and clean, but I expect it to take 30 minutes per day of thinking, acting, measuring, and updating for around six months and it isn’t that high a priority relative to other things currently on my plate.
I find that regular house moves drastically improves hoarding behaviour. Especially international moves :)
It doesn’t stop you hoarding—but gives you good opportunity to prune/discard.
A survey could also ask how many hours you spend online each day.
I never know how to respond to this question. Do I count device-hours? Only time when information is transferring via the Internet to some device I own? Only when I ask it to? Do I need to be looking at a screen? If so, then printouts of ffdn don’t count? What about programs I’ve downloaded and then are running offline? (&c.)
That’s probably not the best question to ask people.
One of the effects of my recent switch from Firefox to Google Chrome is that I came to keep much fewer (less than one third as many) tabs open. When I used the back button or the history menu in Firefox to revisit a page I had recently visited, sometimes (not always, but sometimes) the operation took a long time. I had subconsciously changed my behavior to avoid this delay by opening more new tabs. (Or maybe the change in behavior was conscious, but I forgot about it. Point is that I did not realize why I was opening a lot of new tabs until someone brought it up in conversation.) The reason opening a page in a new tab helps is that switching from the new tab back to an old tab does not incur the delay.
Although someone claims Firefox has a solution for the problem most readers are probably using a version of Firefox that still has the problem. (Versions 3 through 7 have it in my experience.) Moreover, I do not particularly believe that the problem was really fixed and that it will stay fixed.
So what should we ask instead of how many tabs the person has open? Firefox and Google Chrome both keep a record or list, which can be accessed through the History menu, of every web page visited, and this list is divided into 24-hour periods. So we might ask the person to go through the last complete 24-hour period on the list (i.e., yesterday) and count how many procrastination web pages the person visited.
People weight their identities more than they epistemically should.
You can come up with all kinds of excuses for how and why your current tab count is X, but at the end of the day, what really matters is how well the number predicts focus, conscientiousness, akrasia, etc.
This is probably because of my habit to opening almost all links in a new tab (because it’s easier to get back to where I came from) and can’t be bothered to close a tab unless I really have too many tabs open.
I regularly let tabs proliferate until I have a dozen windows open and hundreds of tabs between them and the browser gets so slow that I have to restart it or it just crashes. When this happens, I usually don’t feel like waiting for hundreds of tabs to reload, so I move the saved browser session aside, telling myself I’m just making a “temporary” new session, and then the same thing happens and I never revisit any of my past sessions. I have browser session files dating back to… 2007? That can’t be right, this has been going on for way longer than that… maybe I have the older ones on a backup somewhere.
I like this idea better than asking people how many hours they spend on the web because people are terrible at estimating their time usage, but you probably want to also ask people which browser they use: when I switched from Firefox to Chrome, the average number of tabs I have open dropped manyfold because Firefox has a bug that sometimes causes annoying delays when the back button or the history menu is used. The bug conditions Firefox users to open a new tab whenever he or she suspects he or she might need to refer again to the current page. In my case the conditioning was unconscious: I became aware of the bug only after years of using Firefox and years of being in the habit of opening a lot of new tabs.
I would have suggested, and still do suggest if another poll will happen, the question,
to see if that correlates with e.g. procrastination. Large any-given-moment tab count, I hypothesize, correlates negatively with focus, and maybe slightly negatively with conscientiousness.
I open lots of tabs, then close them. I am pretty sure I have an internet addiction.
it’s not quite trivial to actually measure, but total tabs opened in the last, say, hour is probably a better measurement than how many you have open right now.
After writing that I started thinking “maybe a large number of tabs open with a slow turnover/new tabs opening rate doesn’t even correlate at all with procrastination”, but I suspect that’s just me coming up with excuses for things and isn’t actually true. Could try measuring both if the survey actually works, shrug.
I generally have lots of tabs open (to the point of being made fun of) and my tendency is to open and close them swiftly in the course of multi-pronged subject exploration, with a small handful of “best of exploration” that I retain so that they prime me in subsequent hours or days or weeks with reminders, re-reading opportunities, and the possibility of being folded into longer term projects. Every so often I clean them up by transcribing URLs and notes into text files that accumulate in an idea-archive. I endorse some of this behavior, but suspect that it could become problematic in the long term… not because of “akrasia”, but as part of a more specific problem called “hoarding”.
Hoarding appears to be a mental disorder that can start in one’s teens, but really starts to become visible in one’s 30′s or 40′s, growing with time until you’re an 80-year-old living in a pile of useless trash. My current working model for it is that retention behavior is the default behavior, mostly driven by positive emotions triggered by objects. To throw something away, a hoarder needs to consciously override this default using fluid intelligence (calculating that expected use-value in realistic plans are less than inventory costs?). As aging progresses, fluid mental abilities decline, and you’re less able to decide that something isn’t worth keeping, until there are tiny trails between the bed, the toilette, and the microwave and the rest of the house is full of piles of boxes full of sorted boxes of crap.
Amusingly, I found out about hoarding via my tab-heavy information searches and left the tabs open for days, and cleaned them up into a TODO file to have a conversation with family about hoarding, which is part of why I’m aware of this. Within five years I plan to do some debugging of space management habits and policies to make sure they’re solid and clean, but I expect it to take 30 minutes per day of thinking, acting, measuring, and updating for around six months and it isn’t that high a priority relative to other things currently on my plate.
I find that regular house moves drastically improves hoarding behaviour. Especially international moves :) It doesn’t stop you hoarding—but gives you good opportunity to prune/discard.
A survey could also ask how many hours you spend online each day.
I never know how to respond to this question. Do I count device-hours? Only time when information is transferring via the Internet to some device I own? Only when I ask it to? Do I need to be looking at a screen? If so, then printouts of ffdn don’t count? What about programs I’ve downloaded and then are running offline? (&c.)
Except you’d have to exclude IT workers (especially web developers). :)
That’s probably not the best question to ask people.
One of the effects of my recent switch from Firefox to Google Chrome is that I came to keep much fewer (less than one third as many) tabs open. When I used the back button or the history menu in Firefox to revisit a page I had recently visited, sometimes (not always, but sometimes) the operation took a long time. I had subconsciously changed my behavior to avoid this delay by opening more new tabs. (Or maybe the change in behavior was conscious, but I forgot about it. Point is that I did not realize why I was opening a lot of new tabs until someone brought it up in conversation.) The reason opening a page in a new tab helps is that switching from the new tab back to an old tab does not incur the delay.
Although someone claims Firefox has a solution for the problem most readers are probably using a version of Firefox that still has the problem. (Versions 3 through 7 have it in my experience.) Moreover, I do not particularly believe that the problem was really fixed and that it will stay fixed.
So what should we ask instead of how many tabs the person has open? Firefox and Google Chrome both keep a record or list, which can be accessed through the History menu, of every web page visited, and this list is divided into 24-hour periods. So we might ask the person to go through the last complete 24-hour period on the list (i.e., yesterday) and count how many procrastination web pages the person visited.
People weight their identities more than they epistemically should.
You can come up with all kinds of excuses for how and why your current tab count is X, but at the end of the day, what really matters is how well the number predicts focus, conscientiousness, akrasia, etc.
Your reply to my attempt to inform makes me sad.
I have ten tabs open right now.
This is probably because of my habit to opening almost all links in a new tab (because it’s easier to get back to where I came from) and can’t be bothered to close a tab unless I really have too many tabs open.
I have ten tabs open right now… in my second browser window. And another 42 in the first one…
112 in 5 windows.
I regularly let tabs proliferate until I have a dozen windows open and hundreds of tabs between them and the browser gets so slow that I have to restart it or it just crashes. When this happens, I usually don’t feel like waiting for hundreds of tabs to reload, so I move the saved browser session aside, telling myself I’m just making a “temporary” new session, and then the same thing happens and I never revisit any of my past sessions. I have browser session files dating back to… 2007? That can’t be right, this has been going on for way longer than that… maybe I have the older ones on a backup somewhere.
Anyway, I think I have a problem.
o_O
16 in one window.
Jawdrop. 42? Wow.
As for myself, I have 8.
14 in two different windows.
26 tabs in one window.
73 tabs, 4 windows.
15 tabs
5 tabs. Three of them are related to the Akrasia poll and I will be closing them within 5 minutes. I do not like large numbers of open tabs.
I like this idea better than asking people how many hours they spend on the web because people are terrible at estimating their time usage, but you probably want to also ask people which browser they use: when I switched from Firefox to Chrome, the average number of tabs I have open dropped manyfold because Firefox has a bug that sometimes causes annoying delays when the back button or the history menu is used. The bug conditions Firefox users to open a new tab whenever he or she suspects he or she might need to refer again to the current page. In my case the conditioning was unconscious: I became aware of the bug only after years of using Firefox and years of being in the habit of opening a lot of new tabs.