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.
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Before I was very involved in the Less Wrong community, I heard that Eliezer was looking for people to sit with him while he worked, to increase writing productivity. I knew that he was doing important work in the world, and figured that this was the sort of contribution to improving humanity that I would like to make, which was within the set of things that would be easy and enjoyable for me.
So I got a hold of him and offered to come and sit with him, and did that once/week for about a year. As anticipated, it worked marvelously. I found it easy to sit and not talk, just getting my own work done. Eventually I became a beta reader for his "Bayes for Everyone Else" which is really great and helped me in my ability to estimate probabilities a ton. (Eliezer is still perfecting this work and has not yet released it, but you can find the older version here.)
In addition to learning the basics of Bayes from doing this, I also learned how powerful it is to have someone just to sit quietly with you to co-work on a regular schedule.
I’ve experimented with similar things since then, such as making skype dates with a friend to watch informational videos together. This worked for awhile until my friend got busy. I have two other recurring chat dates with friends to do dual n-back together, and those have worked quite well and are still going.
A client of mine, Mqrius, is working on his Master’s thesis and has found that the only way he has been able to overcome his akrasia so far is by co-working with a friend. Unfortunately, his friend does not have as much time to co-work as he’d like, so we decided to spend Mqrius’s counseling session today writing this Less Wrong post to see if we can help him and other people in the community who want to co-work over skype connect, since this will probably be much higher value to him as well as others with similar difficulties than the next best thing we could do with the time.
I encourage anyone who is interested in co-working, watching informational videos together, or any other social productivity experiments that can be done over skype or chat, to coordinate in the comments. For this to work best, I recommend being as specific as possible about the ideal co-working partner for you, in addition to noting if you are open to general co-working.
If you are specific, you are much more likely to succeed in finding a good co-working partner for you. While its possible you might screen someone out, its more likely that you will get the attention of your ideal co-working partner who otherwise would have glossed over your comment.
Here is my specific pitch for Mqrius:
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An virtual co-working space has been created and is currently live, discussion and link to the room here.