Public computers can make addictive tools safe

post by dkl9 · 2024-12-11T19:55:22.818Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

This is a link post for https://dkl9.net/essays/safe_addictives.html

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Intermittently for the past four years, I read LessWrong and its ilk to hazardous excess. By teaching technical topics sans pressure to rigourously understand, heavy with microhumour and satisfying insights, it got my susceptible mind addicted. Intermittently for the past year, I also posted on LessWrong, with variable (mostly good) results.

For a couple years, I alternated between a couple computers, only one of which I fully controlled. I blocked the addictive nerdy blogs on the machine I controlled. I cross-posted and over-read on the others. Cold-turkeying off the secondary computers gets me to quit the gratuitous reading, but locks me off from posting for much of my potential audience. We can do better.

As I write this, I live a walkable, but tedious, distance from public computers. Public computers can conveniently access the web, with little restriction on legal content. My main device, complete with its careful configuration, is at home. Thus I sometimes access LessWrong, but such access mutually excludes the comfort of home, and so is only occasional. By only going to public computers shortly before nearby scheduled events I'd go to anyway, my time on them is urgently bounded.

This sparse, planned-out nature of my LessWrong usage leads me to cross-post writing and do little else on it. This is the best of both worlds. The strategy generalises to any addictive website with some legitimate uses: visit it rarely and deliberately, and you will cram in the good parts, leaving the distracting parts behind.

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