4: Also relevant: checking HP:MoR for updates is variable interval reinforcement. You never know when an update’s coming, but it doesn’t come faster the more times you reload fanfiction.net. As predicted, even when Eliezer goes weeks without updating, the behavior continues to persist.
This type of situation was one of the main reasons I started using an rss feed reader to do almost all of my internet browsing.
I’ve arranged my workspace so that updates come to me without checking: MoR updates appear in my email, email in general has an icon on my taskbar, my RSS aggregator is on my taskbar, etc. The reward is thus entirely causally decoupled from behavior; I can never explicitly check at all, and still get the updates.
There are about four websites that I haven’t been able to get RSS-based updates for (including my LW inbox), and I consider the need to manually check these a moderate inconvenience.
Many free blogging services allow you to post to them by email, thus it’s possible to bounce all of the alerts coming into your email to your rss reader, which I’ve found to be a useful trick.
Other examples include checking for Facebook notifications, new e-mails, replies to your Less Wrong comments, or highlights/interesting discussions on IRC.
Those four combined have caused serious damage to my productivity, to the point where I’m forced to use things like LeechBlock and limiting myself to a slow Internet connection to stop myself from checking them all the time. And even those measures frequently fail.
This type of situation was one of the main reasons I started using an rss feed reader to do almost all of my internet browsing.
I’ve arranged my workspace so that updates come to me without checking: MoR updates appear in my email, email in general has an icon on my taskbar, my RSS aggregator is on my taskbar, etc. The reward is thus entirely causally decoupled from behavior; I can never explicitly check at all, and still get the updates.
There are about four websites that I haven’t been able to get RSS-based updates for (including my LW inbox), and I consider the need to manually check these a moderate inconvenience.
Many free blogging services allow you to post to them by email, thus it’s possible to bounce all of the alerts coming into your email to your rss reader, which I’ve found to be a useful trick.
http://page2rss.com/ is useful. I don’t know if it’ll work for things like your inbox that you have to login to see.
Other examples include checking for Facebook notifications, new e-mails, replies to your Less Wrong comments, or highlights/interesting discussions on IRC.
Those four combined have caused serious damage to my productivity, to the point where I’m forced to use things like LeechBlock and limiting myself to a slow Internet connection to stop myself from checking them all the time. And even those measures frequently fail.