Worked great. I chose facebook. These were my observations
1. Well, confirming the obvious, the platform actually is optimized to eat as much time and attention as possible. I found it quite easy to not open fb at all, but when I needed to post something work-related several times, it was hard not to check if someone interacts with it, comments, etd.
2. I partly substituted tracking “general discussion” on my facebook with tracking the general discussion on LessWrong. While generally it seems a positive change, I lost some interesting links e.g. from AI Safety Discussion. Idea: if someone would make a periodic digest and post it here I would love it.
3. Writing fb statuses correlated with the fact that I wrote more useful texts.
A potential disadvantage is my fb still seems a better environment for idea incubation or constructive criticism than current LW or EA fora. What I’ve been doing is to write in google docs and ask friends for comments privately.
4. What is hard to replace are invitations to local events, however, I usually deal with the undersupply of evenings, not undersupply of events.
5. Overall, I find that I was more successful in the things I care about.
Big thanks for the lent posting.
Conclusion: I’ll mostly leave facebook for at least a few months, or until I really need something that fb offers due to changed circumstances. I’m not going to delete accounts or anything like that, just not follow the discussion there or post. It will likely cost me some “weak but important” social ties, but seems worth it.
Writing fb statuses correlated with the fact that I wrote more useful texts.
A potential disadvantage is my fb still seems a better environment for idea incubation or constructive criticism than current LW or EA fora. What I’ve been doing is to write in google docs and ask friends for comments privately.
What I currently do for this sort of thing is use IRC or Discord friends to get that private commentary. Because it’s a real time discussion medium it’s usually easy to find some people I trust to give my work a look.
Theoretically the private messaging tools here on LessWrong should be helping to facilitate something similar, but they’re currently very underdeveloped. GreaterWrong is trying to implement messaging tools in their client right now, but at the moment it’s read only.
Worked great. I chose facebook. These were my observations
1. Well, confirming the obvious, the platform actually is optimized to eat as much time and attention as possible. I found it quite easy to not open fb at all, but when I needed to post something work-related several times, it was hard not to check if someone interacts with it, comments, etd.
2. I partly substituted tracking “general discussion” on my facebook with tracking the general discussion on LessWrong. While generally it seems a positive change, I lost some interesting links e.g. from AI Safety Discussion. Idea: if someone would make a periodic digest and post it here I would love it.
3. Writing fb statuses correlated with the fact that I wrote more useful texts.
A potential disadvantage is my fb still seems a better environment for idea incubation or constructive criticism than current LW or EA fora. What I’ve been doing is to write in google docs and ask friends for comments privately.
4. What is hard to replace are invitations to local events, however, I usually deal with the undersupply of evenings, not undersupply of events.
5. Overall, I find that I was more successful in the things I care about.
Big thanks for the lent posting.
Conclusion: I’ll mostly leave facebook for at least a few months, or until I really need something that fb offers due to changed circumstances. I’m not going to delete accounts or anything like that, just not follow the discussion there or post. It will likely cost me some “weak but important” social ties, but seems worth it.
What I currently do for this sort of thing is use IRC or Discord friends to get that private commentary. Because it’s a real time discussion medium it’s usually easy to find some people I trust to give my work a look.
Theoretically the private messaging tools here on LessWrong should be helping to facilitate something similar, but they’re currently very underdeveloped. GreaterWrong is trying to implement messaging tools in their client right now, but at the moment it’s read only.
Glad you found this helpful, Jan!