Strong disagree. This is an ineffective way to create boredom. Showers are overly stimulating, with horrible changes in temperature, the sensation of water assaulting you nonstop, and requiring laborious motions to do the bare minimum of scrubbing required to make society not mad at you. A much better way to be bored is to go on a walk outside or lift weights at the gym or listen to me talk about my data cleaning issues
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1requiring laborious motions to do the bare minimum of scrubbing required to make society not mad at you
Society has no idea how much scrubbing you do while in the shower. This part is entirely optional.
"Stimulating" here is not quite the opposite of "boring". Many minds are used to said temperature changes, water assaults, and laborious motions, such that they still stimulate, but are easily ignored, leaving much space for thoughts. Showers are boring by consistency, despite stimulation.
A counterpoint: when I skip showers, my cat appears strongly in favor of smell of my armpits- occasionally going so far as to burrow into my shirt sleeves and bite my armpit hair (which, to both my and my cat's distress, is extremely ticklish). Since studies suggest that cats have a much more sensitive olfactory sense than humans (see https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/14/24/3590), it stands to reason that their judgement regarding whether smelling nice is good or bad should hold more weight than our own. And while my own cat's preference for me smelling bad is only anecdotal evidence, it does seem to suggest at least that more studies are required to fully resolve the question.
Depends on whose sense of smell you're optimizing for.
My cats like to sniff each other's butts.
Many dogs love smelling stinky garbage.
I'm not sure I would trust my cats' senses of smell to tell me if I would smell good to other humans.
As someone who very much enjoys long showers, a few words of caution.
- Too-long or too-frequent exposure to hot water (time and temperature thresholds vary per person) can cause skin problems and make body odor worse. Since I started RVing I shower much less (maybe twice a week on average, usually only a few minutes of water flow for each) and smell significantly better, with less dry skin or acne or irritation. Skipping one shower makes you smell worse. Skipping many showers and shortening the remainder can do the opposite.
- A shower, depending on temperature and flow rate, consumes around 10-20kW thermal. It's probably the single most energy-intensive activity most of us regularly engage in other than highway driving. I'm hoping to eventually get a recirculating shower so I don't have to think about this as much, but those are still new, rare, and kinda expensive.
I think rationalists should consider taking more showers.
As Eliezer Yudkowsky once said, boredom makes us human. The childhoods of exceptional people often include excessive boredom as a trait that helped cultivate their genius:
Unfortunately, most people don't like boredom, and we now have little metal boxes and big metal boxes filled with bright displays that help distract us all the time, but there is still an effective way to induce boredom in a modern population: showering.
When you shower (or bathe, that also works), you usually are cut off from most digital distractions and don't have much to do, giving you tons of free time to think about what you want, which is hard to find today. People from various places and cultures report having flashes of insight while in the bathroom. This phenomenon is so common that we even have a name for it: shower thoughts.
So next time, please consider thinking about Friendly AI while you relax in a bathtub. The future of humanity might depend on it.
showers also help keep you clean, but I guess if that was persuasive enough, you wouldn't need to read this post in the first place
although written on April Fool's Day, this is more of a weakly-held belief than a joke