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cousin_it comments on Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality - Less Wrong
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Re akrasia and GTD: I've long had the idea that LW users could pair off and watch each other with screen-capture software. Whenever the other guy starts procrastinating, you stop him, and he does the same to you. Maybe randomly change the pair assignment every day or week to avoid getting too used to each other. Sounds pretty drastic, huh? I'd be up for that. (With the caveat that I'm in Russia, so my day cycle is likely out of sync with yours.)
In Soviet Russia, cousin_it watches YOU.
This reminds me of Pair Programming, which I happened to re-invent while in college... I get much more productive when working with a partner.
I was told by a friend in the educational-program-assessment industry that the more general form of this is "parallel play"--spending time in the physical company of someone else but doing your own thing. It's more enjoyable than working alone, even if you're not directly communicating, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's also more productive. Hence the existence of Coworking and similar programs. (I'm not familiar with that specific site, but it's at least a good description of the concept. I can't remember the name of the local office space where you can rent a desk for a day for this purpose.)
(Edited to fix broken link.)
Wanna try it with me? I remember you had trouble getting programming work done.
I would, if not for the inconvenient fact that you happen to live on the other side of the world. (You're Russian, if I recall correctly.)
Our days still overlap. You may not get a full day of work done, but a couple hours is still valuable. Also, I often stay up at night because I work from home.
Yes, but how are we going to share a keyboard and monitor when we're thousands of miles apart?
VNC.
Oh... you mean pair programming? Yeah, that would be difficult to do remotely. I thought we were talking about my akrasia idea. Sorry.
Could work, except that you might end up procrastinating by watching the other guy's screen. :-)
This would happen all the time, no doubt, but if you're spending your time watching him then he'll see you watching him, because he's watching you, and tell you to stop watching him and get back to work. And since you're watching him, you're bound to see it!
I also wonder how productive watching another user would be in and of itself...
Can you really watch the other person while you're doing your own thing, assuming it requires some degree of concentration and preferably a flow state. Watching the other person doing something entirely different sounds like a new opportunity for procrastination instead.
Pair programming works, because both people are working on the same thing, so watching distracts neither from their task.
Still, this thing's probably worth trying out.
The idea is that I check their screen from time to time (say, every 5-10 minutes), and if they're surfing LW instead of working, I scream at them via chat. You could probably write software to do that, but getting kicked by a living person is more humiliating.
Alternately, you could write the software to check every so often and alert the working person that the non-working person isn't working. That actually almost turns it into a PD situation, even without the being-yelled-at bit: If both people cooperate, nobody ever gets interrupted when they're working.
Yes, good idea. Thanks.
Interesting - I don't know if it would work, but I'd like to hear about somebody who tried it.
Maybe a less invasive one would be a software that just shows a description of the current program the user is running - if he's on the web, the top-level domain, and if not, the name of the document he's reading/working on (Or more likely, the name of the application and the contents of it's title bar, anything deeper than that probably needs a lot more special coding).
This exists. I tried it for a while, but my life doesn't revolve around computer use enough for it to be especially interesting for me. For someone who spends most of their productive time at a computer, it might well help.
Why write special software? Isn't VNC enough? My work is sufficiently specialized that I can trust other LW users with seeing the code I write.
Oh, I wasn't thinking about privacy, more about screen real estate for the watcher (I have a laptop with one small screen), and having readable log files. Being able to look at the logs and say "hmm today I spent 10 minutes coding, 45 minutes on lesswrong, and 2 hours on tvtropes" would be neat. Something like that probably exists.
That would be awesome! Why don't I have that today? I didn't know until you said that that I urgently need that.
Hey! Now I do! It's here.