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.
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.