It’s already decaying, tiles coming loose, glues coming undone, grime building up. And yeah, up close everything looks cheap, like it was built to be a temporary movie set.
Do you ever get periods of time where you're just not interested in your phone? Periods of time when you don't even feel the compulsion to unlock your phone and scroll, so there's no real willpower required to abstain from it?
That's the state of mind I want to be at. I don't want to have to lock away the phone from myself or unplug my router.
I do get those streaks of no doom scrolling from time to time, perhaps for a few weeks at a time, but, for now, I keep reverting back to my old compulsions. But I will keep working on it :)
I really hope you get what you want the way you describe, but for everyone else reading this: don't dismiss hacks like unplugging your router.
Everyone should use external control (aka stimulus control [1]) more shamelessly. Stimulus control is a well-known technique that gets the job done for day-to-day problems like "phone compulsion."
When you ask what willpower is, people think of "magical mental points." Common knowledge suggests that needing external control (like putting away your phone) means you lack willpower, spirit, maturity, or you're-not-going-to-make-it™. Like there are two opposite camps: willpower/rational decision making/system II [2] vs external control. This is unwise and is not supported scientifically.
Let me explain in CS-like terms: If life is a search problem, the action space is insanely enormous. Sitting in my office, I could jump, eat a candy bar, look at my phone, throw my computer, play the cello, sing, or work. The first "pruning" is simply availability - I won't play the cello since I don't have one here.
The same applies to distractions. We live in a digital environment where accessing distractions costs nearly zero. So maintaining cognitive hygiene through stimulus control (switching off your router, putting away your phone) is good.
Sadly, willpower is what common knowledge sets as the good/moral/mature behavior: if you need to put away your phone, you are less valid or whatever culture-specific narrative you're into. Ignore those ideas and keep your mind clean: put your router on fire if that's what you need at first. You will get better.
Nono, I specifically mentioned no willpower required. Like in your example of available actions, I also have zero desire to jump out of the window, so don’t have to expend any willpower to resist it. Similarly, on my good days, I don’t feel attracted to my phone. What do you say about that?
Sounds great! :) I am working on the same thing, trying to go back to my good days haha. Maybe zero desire is not achievable with highly-designed UIs crafted for attention hooks. But yeah, everyone is fighting a similar fight!
I was not claiming you said any specifics. Sorry, I could have been clearer in my answer. My goal was to try to explain a little more to other readers because this sentence:
> I don't want to have to lock away the phone from myself or unplug my router.
could lead people into thinking that a state of no distractions could be achieved with no external control. In my opinion, that is unrealistic and probably extremely rare. You will probably need to lock away or add some friction to accessing your phone.
As long as we have smartphones with zero-cost distractions, our reptile brain will need some external control and we can carefully design it.
So my general advice for anyone trying to reduce their doomscrolling time is: keep your environment clean and designed for it - move your phone away and activate do not disturb mode, use extensions to block websites, etc.
It's also the mother of creativity. Endless relatively high quality entertainment is one of those things that sounds amazing at a distance but has probably just been an overall significant negative on society.
I was in the same place and I found a solution that works for me and it almost made me totally quit Instagram (the thing that was taking my time). Set the notifications to be shown on lock screen only for critical apps (phone, sms, etc) and configure the others to just show badge counters. Now, at this point you have red bubbles everywhere, for this issue (on iOS, but I'm sure it's a solution for Android too) you apply a shade for all the app icons. It's a feature that came with iOS 18. Even if this seems small, the fact that you don't see them all in red, makes a huge difference. Now, I only look when I want to look.
Aren't in this case they saying that their experiment might have been the wrong one, and that next time they have to do a different kind of test that takes a longer time span into consideration? They acknowledge the result that no changes in cognitive abilities take place within 21 days, and then from there make the next conjecture that such changes might happen later, which would require a different kind of test?
It appears that the problem is not in sitting too much, but rather in sitting in chairs specifically. Apparently, hunter-gatherer people also spend about 10 hours a day sitting. But they sit on the ground. Or kneel or squat. And they don't have the issues we get from sitting too much:
Given the tables in the results section, it would seem that the people in the study don't have long periods where they don't move. "average sedentary bout lengths" hover between 15 and 20 minutes.
So the problem with "sitting in chairs specifically" is probably not the chair, but the fact that the chair facilitates longer "sedentary bout lengths". If this is correct, then the commenter suggesting to get up and move every so often is probably on point.
Makes sense. That said, fidgeting and moving around is spontaneous when on the floor, you don’t have to be reminded to do it. Also, no chair is cheaper than an expensive chair.
> fidgeting and moving around is spontaneous when on the floor, you don’t have to be reminded to do it
Indeed, it's actually what prompted me to go look over the document.
I remember, as a kid, when out and about and before getting into the habit of sitting in a chair all day every day, I would sit on the floor or on random objects, like stones or tree trunks in the countryside. I wouldn't be able to sit still for long periods of time and would need to at least change positions.
Whereas now, in my "ergonomic chair", I can sit for more than one hour at a time with minimal, if any, changes in position. Ditto for my couch (which wasn't marketed as "ergonomic" in any way).
That being said, I've tried using a computer in other positions, like putting the laptop on a coffee table and squatting or sitting on the floor in front of it, or having it rest on my thies while squatting. It gets tiring very quickly, especially in the shoulders and neck area.
So, in my case, what seems to work best is to get up regularly and walk around the room for a bit.
The introduction to the article denies its main point:
> If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it.
It’s a logical error. It’s like saying: people who point out logical errors in internet comments look foolish, therefore no one who hasn’t done that looks foolish. Clearly there are other ways to look foolish.
So even if writing always clarified thought, it’s wrong to infer it’s impossible to have clear thoughts without writing.
But since the writer here committed this mistake, he demonstrated that writing does not always result in clear thought.
Incidentally, I wrote this comment to clarify my thoughts .
No, it's like: people who point out logical errors in internet comments look more foolish - always, no matter what else they did - therefore no one who hasn’t done that looks perfectly foolish.
Or, say, people who have caught a Snorlax have more Pokemon, therefore no one who hasn't caught a Snorlax has all the Pokemon.
This assumes that there's such a thing as a "fully formed idea" (which means an exception to "always" - you can't clarify your thoughts more and more by writing about them forever). If there isn't, it's still true, but it's not saying a whole lot.
Stressing the "always" makes the argument valid only because it's a wordier version of "ideas can always be made more precise and complete, therefore no idea is perfectly precise and complete," which has nothing to do with writing. If we try to salvage the argument by making the assumption that the author obviously meant some ideas are perfect, but only written ideas, this becomes "unwrittendown ideas can always be made more precise and complete, therefore no unwrittendown idea is perfect". Which is vacuously valid in that the antecedent and consequent are identical.
The argument is either merely asserting the conclusion or invalid. I guess it's a matter of judgment which one is the charitable interpretation of the author's meaning.
Perhaps the most charitable interpretation is that the quoted bit isn't intended as an argument at all, just a restatement to cast an already-established conclusion in a different light. It's presented as a "shocking" additional implication, but perhaps it's the shock that's supposed to be novel, not the implication.
I think you're right. But I still think the quote from Graham is terrible writing: confusing, brittle, convoluted, almost as if it was designed to hide something from readers and manipulate them into a different understanding than what it actually claims.
The quote is, as you explain, technically correct due to its use of "always". Take this word away and the sentence is correct English, but the meaning now is incorrect (and would match the interpretation of the comment you replied to). Making the correctness hinge so directly in the subtlety of the presence of the quantifier makes the sentence brittle and convoluted.
It feels almost manipulative, as if the writer hopes the reader won't inspect the sentence so closely (and thus will miss this subtlety) and will understand something slightly different ("if you don't write, it's impossible to have clear thoughts"), so that the conclusion sounds much stronger. And readers do get the incorrect interpretation, as evidenced by the comment you replied to, which attacks the misunderstanding of that sentence.
So while I fully agree with you, I still think the sentence quoted is an example of terribly unhelpful and confusing writing. Especially because the full premise "writing down your ideas _always_ makes them more precise and complete" is debatable (you just need to find one counterexample).
(Incidentally, my recollection of Graham's writing is that this type of misleading sentences (that are technically correct but appear to say something else, something that isn't), as if they were deliberately cultivated.)
A much better sentence would be something like:
* "Writing down your ideas is great to make them more precise and more complete. It's hard to have fully formed ideas about a topic without writing about it." This matches the understanding of a quick glance of the sentence.
* "Writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and complete." Closer to the actual meaning, but doesn't do a slight of hand to hide the main point.
Perhaps it is because of the impossibility of coming to full clarity? It is the process of the truth developing that is more important than any absolute truth, which, it is always clear, turns out to be just a stage of development.
Yay for shorthand. I learned Orthic. Taking notes with pen and paper is now more convenient than taping them into a phone: speed about the same, but you only need one hand, and it's more comfortable.
As a complement, I would also suggest this thoughtful article with a broader perspective, explaining the proper place of SRS in learning to code to a professional level:
Reading the rest of this thread, it seems that the anti-anti-natalists (to which I gravitate more closely) are misrepresenting the anti-natalists' view and that they don't actually expect everyone to be anti-natalist?
The absence of people with bad ideas won't help as much as a surplus of people with good ideas. Since even if we had half the people they could still pollute like crazy.
(Talking strictly about the neoclassical stuff.)
reply