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MichaelPeep comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - Less Wrong
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While we don't spend all our time in front of a computer typing, it does seem to represent a non negligible portion of our days. Assuming an hour a day of typing on average for the rest of your life, the time you will spend typing is tens of thousands of hours.
I'm currently learning Dvorak and it looks like it's going to take about 30-40 hours to be able to type properly. So the gains in efficiency don't have to be very significant to pay off.
To check how efficient the time investment is I checked my typing speed. Like you, probably, I'm not a touch typer but I felt like I was typing pretty decently before, and measured at 40 wpm on both of the two websites that I tried, with no mistakes. I'll check my speeds with Dvorak once I'm done with the lessons, and again after a few months of practice, to settle this debate hopefully, but just from having done the first ten or so lessons I can already see that Dvorak is going to be a major improvement, if not in speed, definitely in terms of comfort.
You make an interesting point about likely spending over 10k hours typing over the course of the rest of our respective lives, although I note that even if you are right, I'd have to invest 30-40 hours now in order to learn to touch-type, whereas the gains would be spread out over a longer period. That said, please post your results when you get them, I am definitely interested in hearing about it.
I do note that you conflate two distinct issues: whether touch-typing is worth learning, and whether Dvorak is a meaningful (or any) improvement over QWERTY. I am definitely far more suspicious of the latter claim than the former (see my link in the grandparent for a thorough debunking).
Even the studies cited by the author in your link show a speed advantage of around 5% for Dvorak over Qwerty. Considering my point of the 10k hours, the payoff is more than worthwhile, before even taking RSI into consideration.
On a side note, one of the reasons I decided to learn touch-typing was because I have some free time at the moment and was looking for something else to do than read blog posts all day, so I totally agree with you that investing 30-40 hours now might not be the best for everyone... TDT probably recommends it though.