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There has been a tremendous amount of discussion and conflict in the past months over the state of Effective Altruism as a movement. For good reason too. SBF, someone I was once proud to highlight as a shining example of what EA had to bring, looks to have have committed one of history's largest instances of fraud. I would be concerned if we weren't in heated debates over what lessons to take from this!
After spending a few too many hours (this week has not been my most productive) reading through much of the debate, I noticed something: I'm still proud to call myself an effective altruist and my excitement is as high as ever.
If all of EA disappeared tomorrow, I would continue on my merry way trying to make things better. I would continue spending my free time trying to build a community in Denmark of people interested in spending their time and resources to do good as effectively as possible.
What brought me to EA was an intrinsic motivation to do as much good as possible, and nothing any other effective altruist can do is going to change this motivation.
I'm happy to consider anyone who shares that objective to be a friend, even if we don't on the specifics of how exactly one should go about trying to do the most good. "Doing the most good" is a pretty nebulous concept after all. I would find it pretty weird if we all agreed completely on what that implies.
Remember:
- We're all on the same team
- We're all just human beings try to do the best we can
- We're all acting on imperfect information
Why you should buy a desk treadmill
I've wanted to do a 'things I recommend you buy' list for a while, but I think my purchase of a desk-treadmill has been so much higher value than any other purchase I've made that I instead will make the case for only this item.
I've never liked standing desks. When I stand my feet get restless to the point of it being so distracting that I have to sit back down if I want to focus. Half a year ago, I got to try a desk treadmill and I immediately bought one for myself.
Since February I've been walking on this desk treadmill while working. I went from getting an average of <3000 steps a day, to an average of 17,000 daily steps (my day record is 46,000). It's been the single easiest improvement to my health I've made, and I highly recommend you get one as well.
I was fortunate to try it out before buying, but my biggest initial worries were:
Since buying it my home office desk has been permanently raised and I haven't used my office chair since. If I'm working or playing video games, I'm walking. When my feet need to rest, I take my laptop to the kitchen.
I also found no negative effects on my productivity. Unlike desk exercise bikes where people tell me they forget to pedal effectively making it an uncomfortable chair, with a desk treadmill my brain just goes 'oh I'm walking now' and then I entirely stop thinking about it until I'm out of flow state and I notice I've walked 5000 steps and could use a quick break.
I pushed my brother into buying one, and he's been very happy with his as well.
tips and tricks:
This makes it sound to me like you think most the value comes from the health/fitness benefits of generally being less sedentary during a working day; and less to no value comes from potential benefits to focus or productivity (except insofar as they're downstream of being healthier). Is that a fair summary?
Yes entirely in my case, no noticeable benefits to productivity.
Interesting suggestion, thanks for sharing. Do you think it would be comfortable barefoot?
I've walked barefoot, but I've found that my feet get tired much quicker than when I wear running shoes. Sandals are a nice medium for me.
The main concern I would have walking barefoot in the long run, would be damaging my knees.
I got a cheap ish one off Amazon a few years back but I noticed it was melting holes in the the plasticky mat I put it on. I didn’t try to fix this. Does yours get very hot on the underside?
haven't noticed anything like that. It gets warm near the engine, but not remotely hot enough to melt anything.
I can see this work extremely well for some tasks like reading and meetings, but significantly less so for stuff like typing. What's your experience with those types of tasks? Is walking on a treadmill disrupting these a lot or make them substantially more difficult? Or do you exclusively write and respond to emails when you're sitting down?
I don't find this to be much of an issue. Generally, the higher the walking speed the more difficult things become.
At 3.5 km/h which is what I've configured to be the default speed, the only thing I've found to be an issue is reading text that is small. I solve this by just zooming in. My ability to accurate write and click things is not affected.
If I turn the speed down to 2.5 km/h, reading small text is also no problem for me.