kpreid comments on Group Rationality Diary, July 1-15 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (13)
I'd like to coin some terminology: anti-lists.
Having a well-constructed list helps you get things done. Every action on the list has an immediate successor, so you don't have to think about the next actionable step required to complete your overall goal. If the goal is "clean my home" or "pack for my trip abroad", this is very useful. If the goal is "enjoyably waste time", it can cause some problems.
An annoying number of time-wasting activities are very good at giving you the next actionable step in wasting your time. In some cases this is deliberate, such as websites that provide you with lists of related articles once you've finished reading them. In some cases it's presumably accidental but still very effective. Heavily cross-referenced websites such as Wikipedia, TVTropes or Less Wrong can create a tab explosion, and once you've finished reading this tab, the obvious successor to that action is reading the next tab. Once you've watched an episode of a TV series, there is generally an obvious successor to that episode, and if you have immediate and easy access to that successor, watching it becomes a strong candidate for your next action.
I have recently started thinking in terms of "anti-listing" activities that are conducive to this sort of behaviour. To anti-list an activity is to take action to disrupt the line of succession. In the case of the series of Robot Chicken I just downloaded, this is literally a case of removing the list of files from my immediate environment. This seems like a fairly robust way of thinking about my activity management.
I find the term slightly confusing, in that it seems like "anti-list" could just as well be a name for the system which is wasting time as opposed to the act of avoiding it.
(In particular, a list of the first kind is an ordering of subtasks to complete some goal, which form a tree or directed graph with a single final node (often not itself on the list). A time-wasting activity of the sort you describe is a an ordering of nodes in a directed graph with a chosen initial node, and is thus opposite-but-analogous.)
I am convinced of the term being sufficiently confusing to warrant changing. Alternative suggestions would be welcome.