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The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

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Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#351

Post by gadabout »

nottorp wrote: post #302
gadabout wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Culling down notifications was a life-changing action for me. Like you, I turned off almost all notifications. My only notifications were texts/calls from people that depended upon me (my wife, my parents, my best friends). Interacting with apps and my phone in general after that became something either I chose or chose not to do. My phone was no longer an algorithm or other person controlling me, but instead a usefu…

> This is obviously a luxury that I am able to work and live like this, but I would encourage everyone to turn off any notifications they can and see how they feel after a week or month like that, then revisit and turn off more if possible. Why is it a luxury?

I mean, my boss - who is the central hub for a lot of communication - can not live his life this way unless he finds a new job. Obviously that is a choice he has made but either way, I count myself lucky.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#352

Post by jethro_tell »

HenryBemis wrote: post #287
jethro_tell wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does next cloud sync to a dumb phone? The question is where do you store the music since it's a dumb phone

10-15 years ago for music I had a cheap MP3 player that also sported a radio tuner. It could take 10mins to transfer a few MB of music, but I was using that for music. It was very slim, imagine a knock-off of an iPod (the ones with the tiny no-touch screen). Perhaps get one of these? They shouldn't cost more than £€$50 for a couple of GB

for a couple GB? You should probably get 60-100 GB for that I'd bet.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#353

Post by smartphone91643 »

i thanked my last smartphone in Magic of Tidying Up induced tearful mania then crushed it with a small boulder. weirdest dreams ever as my brain went ohno there went my backup how does physical space work. since ditched pc, ereader, internet, and finally flip phone, going paper purist for 4 months. typing this now on an olympically defunct 3g numpad phone so listen up. it's a cruel lie that living without the stuff is hard. taking the plunge will take months and leave you weeping in the shower. or maybe i have a mind that naturally reacts strongly to it idunno nobody like that here right. the part that can take weeks of stressfull time work is deleting accounts. digital detox whoo sure great but imagine the freedom of having nothing to return to. all the Kondo insight maps over: does this device, login, file, data in the cloud somewhere bring me joy? my digital closet had millions of identifiable objects, taking up no less space for being virtual. there is aversion in the ambiguous task each represents. gonna drop social media? gotta at least consider you might need that squash recipe burried in chat. glance over every app and service you use and ask how do i live without it -and- where do i find the time and wheelbarrow to get myself out. more saliently, which of the people on the other side do i say bye to or ask for more intimate contact info? the dauntingness of unknowns can only be faced with the will to exit. the only ultimate fate of the unrefactorable is deletion. if you're even a little concerned about the tools you use robbing some magic alternative future for yourself, dont detox, switch.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#354

Post by rainsil »

kabanossen wrote: post #322
trevyn wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we'll be trying for a kid Please consider this carefully. The coming decades will not be pleasant to live in.

On the contrary, they will be awesome, possibly the best thing you ever do!

Seriously, the lack of awareness that pretty much every year is the best year in human history* is rather depressing. Pair that with the coming end of extreme poverty, extraterrestrial habitation, and a non-infinitesimal chance of experiencing radical life-extension (whether through neurotechnological methods such as WBE, or cell-targeting microbiology), it's clear that Gen A/B (is generation naming modular?) will be excellent generations to be born into.

* Except maybe this year, which is an anomaly.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#355

Post by flanbiscuit »

disown wrote: post #254

Isn't this true for any source of distraction? What about a baseball or a book or a dvd or anything? The presence of a distraction reduces cognitive capacity? Other than superficially padding their "researchers'" resume, what is gained by this "study"? We've know this for years. It's why teachers insist kids put away their smartphones, etc.

> Isn't this true for any source of distraction?

Thought the same thing. Sure I can put my smartphone out of sight while working but I am on a computer with the same exact level of access that my smartphone provides. Sometimes I can get in a zone and sometimes I flip between work and distracting myself with sites like HN. I can answer SMS and DMs for all my services and social sites in the browser. Pre-pandemic you can throw an open office plan into the mix as a big distractor as well. I listen to non-vocal chill electronic music while I work and I bet there's some study out there showing that listening to any type of music while trying to work reduces cognitive capacity (I'm speculating here). I feel like managing distraction just a big part of life these days.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#356

Post by rightbyte »

ascar wrote: post #300
wyclif wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like that instead of WSL2, you'd be a candidate for a power Linux distro (not Ubuntu) alone where you have rolling updates.

While I don't mind a specialized setup for work, you often don't really have a choice there or it comes with a lot of corporate pain. Just using whatever your team is using is the way of least friction. At home I'm using my computer also for gaming and Windows is again simply the way of least friction. I've run a hardware switch for my hard drives for a few years to switch between Linux and Windows (effectively cutti…

Running desktop Linux on VM is horrible in my experience. Eg. Eclipse lags out.

I had problem with Windows randomly wrecking the Ubuntu boot sector on separate HDs, but using physical switches seems like a good idea! I'll try that.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#357

Post by [deleted] »

IshKebab wrote: post #350
gus_massa wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the physics lab the T.A. will yell at you if choose a scale that starts at zero instead of a scale that shows only the relevant section. When the T.A. is tired, he/she will ask another T.A. to continue the yelling. (Or sometimes just make you redo the report until you choose the correct scale.) The research journal have a similar policy. For some reason people in the Internet don't like it, so a solution for a blo…

Rubbish. Sometimes it is appropriate to start from zero and sometimes it isn't.

[deleted]

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#358

Post by jethro_tell »

threentaway wrote: post #220
jethro_tell wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does next cloud sync to a dumb phone? The question is where do you store the music since it's a dumb phone

Cron job to copy both to a microSD card?

Reminds me of my old casio watch that synced calendar reminders via a sweet dock. Physical actions to do syncing and remembering every time I left my desk wasn't that long ago.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#359

Post by dbtc »

slothtrop wrote: post #146

New hot take: I'm addicted to my laptop. The phone barely registers in terms of interest because I work on my laptop anyway, which is less cumbersome to navigate. Notwithstanding the need to separate work from leisure life, much of leisure is just attached to this device. Even the less consumptive activities, like writing or playing music, benefit from it. And anything to do with innovation or research is absolutely…

Over the past years I have started increasingly using paper for thinking - reading and writing. I have come to appreciate (fetishize?) the quality of wellmade paper products, the tactility and focus of them, even constraints like the higher demand on my memory or slowness of a paper dictionary in the long run have benefits. The computer is more practical and efficient but maybe often in the way fast food is. What am I doing on hackernews?

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#360

Post by srtjstjsj »

slothtrop wrote: post #146

New hot take: I'm addicted to my laptop. The phone barely registers in terms of interest because I work on my laptop anyway, which is less cumbersome to navigate. Notwithstanding the need to separate work from leisure life, much of leisure is just attached to this device. Even the less consumptive activities, like writing or playing music, benefit from it. And anything to do with innovation or research is absolutely…

What does one do with the other? To take your laptop to the train, cafe, the movie, the dinner party, the bathroom?
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