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Emile comments on Rationality, competitiveness and akrasia - Less Wrong Discussion

14 Post author: cousin_it 02 October 2013 01:45PM

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Comment author: Emile 02 October 2013 02:20:29PM *  0 points [-]

Some possible things to compete on, that could be automatically measured (with more or less dev work):

  • commits on GitHub
  • Time spend on the internet (you want a low score)
  • Number of Anki cards reviewed
Comment author: cousin_it 02 October 2013 02:43:40PM *  0 points [-]

1 and 3 seem too easy to inflate, but 2 is a good idea. Instead of blocking specific websites, write a program that passively measures how much time you spend there, and compete with other people to get a low score. Maybe everyone puts some money in the prize fund...

Comment author: Antisuji 02 October 2013 03:42:11PM *  4 points [-]

2 will still lead to some strange behavior. For example, when composing a comment on a forum, rather than typing directly into the textarea you'll switch to a text editor and copy-paste when you're done.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 02 October 2013 06:02:50PM 1 point [-]

Worse, use curl and view the pages offline.

Comment author: 4hodmt 02 October 2013 09:20:35PM 6 points [-]

Making web browsing slightly more annoying can be effective in reducing use.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 02 October 2013 09:54:59PM 0 points [-]

Yes. Even as wrong as downloading 15 chapters of fanfic in one command line and binging them for an afternoon would be while seeming to use the connection for around 3 seconds... that isn't what would normally happen.

Comment author: Vaniver 02 October 2013 04:49:56PM *  1 point [-]

Rescuetime seems to fit this niche already.

Comment author: Emile 02 October 2013 08:20:02PM 0 points [-]

A lot of anti-akrasia recipies rely on good faith to some extent, so I don't think it's a huge problem (implementing those and getting enough people to use them would be a much bigger hurdle!). If some people want to cheat themselves to stop improving themselves, hey, their loss.

Procrastination could be described as the short-term mind vs. the medium-term mind, and cheating would often require a minimum of planning and of thinking beyond the long term - precisely the stuff that the short-term mind doesn't do.