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Vaniver comments on Co-Working Collaboration to Combat Akrasia - Less Wrong
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Sometimes we need a person to cooperate with. Sometimes we need a person to discuss the idea with. And sometimes we only need a person who simply is there, who gives our actions the social feeling. (Insert evo-psych explanation why social feels more important to our simian brains.)
My goals at this point of time don't suffer from lack of external help, but mostly from lack of willpower. The useless stuff is pleasant. The useful stuff is great in far mode, but not enough "tempting" in near mode.
A social reinforcement could change this balance, but it would have to feel social. (I suspect the greatest temptation of web browsing is that it feels social.) Beeminder, special threads on LW, even e-mails about daily plans and accomplishments don't feel social the right way. I do feel connected while reading and writing the e-mails or comments, or while entering data to Beeminder... but not while actually doing the useful stuff.
So, because I don't live in one of the rationality beehives, I would like to try the "both on Skype / Google hangout working on separate things" coworking. Maybe with a very short chat about the work, only to add a few fuzzies and increase the social feeling.
However, if many people want to try this, perhaps we could avoid the need (and not-so-trivial inconvenience) of pair coordination by making a global virtual workspace where anyone could join and leave anytime they need, without planning in advance. I am not sure about the exact numbers, but with enough people spending enough time there we could reach a critical mass where 90+% of time someone is already there when a new person joins. Then we would have a permanent virtual workspace.
Let's try some numbers. How long do we want to work (outside of our jobs)? My estimate for myself would be 1 hour a day, on average. (I am not sure how realistic this is.) So to have there 2 people all the time, 24 hours a day, 48 people is a minimum with perfectly coordinated times. If everyone spends there 1 random hour, how many people do we need so that each hour with probability 90% (or at least 80%) at least 2 people are there? Someone better in math please help me! For the moment I will assume that the number is between 100 and 200. That is probably too much. Or isn't it? How many people did so far participate in the CFAR minicamps? Would at least half of them join this experiment for the first two weeks? Or is there someone willing to participate significantly more than 1 hour a day (e.g. someone who works from home)?
We could simply try. Agree on the technological details (so we don't accidentally start multiple conferences on the same time), and precommit -- say, during the rest of March -- to be there even if no one else is, when we are in a situation where we would enjoy the company of other rationalists. If enough people do this, sometimes you will meet another person there even without coordination. As a bonus, you can coordinate with other rationalists to meet at the global workspace; so you are guaranteed to have company, and at the same time you provide a positive externality for those who did not coordinate. And at the end of March we will have enough data to see whether this idea works or not.
The global workspace would need some global guidelines; I propose these: Do talk, but don't talk too much; give each other the contact and encouragement, but don't distract each other from work. Only participate when doing something useful, and when you finish, log out; but it does not matter what exactly you do, you don't even have to do in on the computer as long as you are somewhere near (and leave a message what are you doing). It is OK to turn off the sound if the others distract you, or if you are doing something that would distract them.
TL;DR -- Let's make one global virtual workspace for all LessWrong rationalists. Even if you coordinate with someone else, go to the global workspace. If you don't coordinate, but you wish you had some company, also go there, because you may be lucky; and if many people follow this strategy, their luck will increase. At some moment the coordination may become completely unnecessary.
First, let's assume that everyone logs on and off at the hour, then there are 24 windows a day. Let's also assume that everyone chooses to work each hour with probability 1/24, rather than working one hour a day for certain. We then have a binomial distribution with parameters num and 1/24, and can increment the number of people until we get less than 20% of the probability in 0 and 1, and it turns out we cross that barrier at 71 people.
This is an underestimate because we assumed that the start/end times are synchronized.
We can also enforce the "always work exactly one hour a day" rule by seeing this as a combinatorial problem, where we have num people and 23 clock bells which are permuted randomly, and we want to know the percentage of clock bells that have at most one person in between them.
To estimate how much of an underestimate that was, I wrote a very short program to simulate this scenario. From my model, we cross over to 80% at about 85 people. Incorporating a random spread in how long people are logged in, from 0.5 to 1.5 hours, doesn't change anything.
I am not sure how many people you could get to sign up, but the fewer you get, the more hours they'd have to commit. From my model, if you can only get 60 people, they'll need to work on average 1.5 hours; for 45 people, you'd need them to commit to 2 hours.
The numbers don't look too good. Even 60 people, with an average commitment of 1.5 hours, seems like a challenge. Maybe the LW community could meet it?
In practice, it's not going to need 85 people (and it's not going to work for everyone unscheduled), though, because the assumptions are implausible. According to the last survey, ~60% of users are in the US or Canada (and probably another 5% in South America?), and then >22% are in Europe. I would also guess that most people will probably also want to work in the evenings (say an 8h span between 6pm and 2am). This will probably concentrate the desired times a lot, so the popular times can be 80% populated with only something like 45 people (this is me guessing). Conversely, the unpopular times are going to be really dead.
On that note, it would probably make sense to create some sort of schedule. E.g. "We encourage you to come between 4pm and 8am PST." Or to coordinate smaller specific time slots (e.g. "come at 2pm PST for one hour") with a higher chance of having them filled.
If you constrain it to an 8 hour spread, it does indeed help things - you'd only need around 34 people agreeing to commit to 1 hour, so even more optimistic than your guess. And if we do get people to coordinate smaller specific time slots, perhaps convincing 25% to take a 1.5 hour slot and the rest to commit a minimum of 1 hour, this moves things closer to only needing a group of 30. Not too bad.
I've been very pleasantly surprised to see that the room has had people in it 24/7 since I first checked on it afternoon yesterday (current time for me is 5pm)! Usually about 5-6, I think the lowest I've seen is 3, although someone reported that in the quiet hours it got down to 2.
We'll see if we're able to keep it up, promising so far!
I like this idea, thought about checking it out, realized I don't really know how to expect and that it might not be optimal for my personality type...then slapped myself for obvious dithering.
I'll commit to dropping in tomorrow when I get home from work (~5:30EST) for at least an hour, to see if this suits me. After that, we'll see.
Results report: I did get some done. More than I can usually do on demand, though it's hard to say whether the benefit came from the technique or just from the novelty. Either way, I'll continue doing it until it stops working, at least four times a week, in the ~6:00-7:00EST time slot.