"For the past two months, I’ve been living in the world of keystroke tax." | Hacker News Reader

"For the past two months, I’ve been living in the world of keystroke tax."

thetypist.com

18 pointsskman20 comments

"Pain reminds you that your body is an entity of its own, that your body isn’t you. Rather, it’s the machine that the mind utilizes to bring your thoughts and desires into manifestation."

I'd encourage people to avoid thinking about things this way. It matches subjective experience quite well, but it encourages you to think of psychological problems/pains as part of "you" and therefore unchangeable. Internalize this mind/body duality too much and if you encounter a psychological problem in your life you will have a very hard time dealing with it.

It also encourages you to ignore the very real impact your body's state has on your thoughts, feelings and mental abilities (see: all those really interesting studies around "embodied cognition").

It's also provably false but I leave that for the second point because basically any day to day metaphor you use to think about these kinds of things will be similarly "off". Learning the facts and then picking the metaphors and level of abstraction used to think about these subjects that are most helpful has been very useful in my experience.

"[Would I] be less forgiving with my mind and more with my body? ... Why not live like that anyway?"

Even better in my experience to take it even further. See that the distinction isn't particularly valid and be more or less forgiving of the whole.

aside: Looks like I entered dangerous territory voting-wise by wanting to talk about the main point of this post rather than alternative typing solutions. Fuck that, because this subject is way more interesting.

One of the things you'll hear frequently in mental heath treatment is the importance of externalizing the illness, i.e. you aren't the illness its an imbalance you can work to correct, like physical therapy for your brain

Yes, exactly the kind of thing I think would be made more difficult if you think this way. Thanks for the clear example I didn't manage to find.

No one is saying that psychological problems are unchangeable. But it is a useful abstraction to separate mind and body. This will become more relevant in the future when get mind uploading. But even in the present it's a useful concept. You can get a serious crippling disability and still be alive with only limited ability to interact with the world. You can get your body almost completely destroyed and it will still be the same you. This is the point the author was getting at (though to a lesser degree.)

"You can get your body almost completely destroyed and it will still be the same you"

Actually, it won't be the same "you". Your feelings and likely actions can provably be affected by whether you are standing or sitting, or holding a pencil in your teeth or balancing it on your upper lip.

Obviously your self is more sensitive to brain changes (at least in some parts of your brain) than body changes, but that's just a matter of degree rather than some kind of imaginary hard line between mind and body or between "me" and "my meat suit".

Looking at it a different way I'm saying that there are more useful concepts than this distinction, that lead to more successful outcomes.

This article seems to suggest that we should spend our time better. Yet, all the comments here are about tech workarounds/alternatives to typing.

Yes, I know this is HN, but I find it kinda funny anyway. :)

The article doesn't mention voice-recognition software. I wonder if the author has tried using it.

Even the best voice recognition software is really really bad.

I have a friend who had extremely bad CTS and used Dragon Dictate extensively both for programming, and for dictating English text. She said that after a surprisingly short period of training and acclimatization it achieved extremely high input rates, comparable to her touch typing.

I'd be interested to hear what experience do you have to balance that.

That was true twenty years ago. Nowadays Dragon NaturallySpeaking, while missing some obvious improvements the vendors refuse to make (if I were looking for startup company ideas, I'd seriously consider that one - 'improvements the vendors refuse to make' is one of the best signs of a market opening) is far, far better than just continuing to exacerbate RSI.

Is that true anymore? I've read of some significant improvements in machine learning in recent years with deep learning. Not to mention cloud services with massive super-computers and datasets.

Having suffered with RSI for quite a few years, I've found that the best preventative+restorative tool is a wrist-brace. The moment I feel any pain, on it goes - whether I'm going to type more or not, the brace is necessary to take the strain off and allow the wrist to recuperate.

I really regret not discovering that a few months sooner, because I may have done some permanent damage. The problem is that (counterintuitively) just taking a break from typing and resting the hands doesn't take the stress off - the neutral position/state of the hands keeps a great deal of stress on the wrist. I can infer this because the pain continues when I take a break, but goes away the moment I put a brace on. Only when I put a brace on, did my wrist get a chance to "heal" - simply taking a break didn't help.

YMMV, but -man- I hope this advice happens to help someone - it took a long time for me to figure this out. I only figured it out because a physical therapist friend of mine told me it sounded a lot like certain kinds of tendonitis she'd run into with athletes, and suggested the brace.

Dr. Pascarelli recommends against the use of wrist rests while typing:

"The use of wrist rests is controversial. I prefer to call them wrist guides and ask my patients to use them only as guides, because resting the forearms on a wrist support while keying can be harmful for several reasons. First, they take the upper arms out of the process of keying, so you are overloading the forearm and hand muscles and increasing your chances of injury.

Moreover, the wrist support tends to encourage potentially harmful positioning, particularly wrist extension (bending your wrist up, as in pushing a door open). With the wrist fixed on the wrist rest, there is a tendency to use a windshield-wiperlike wrist motion, which is extra work and harmful. Finally, the wrist rest places pressure over the carpal tunnel area, which is not a good idea."

Using them while you're sleeping or resting is OK, but using them while you're typing is not a good idea.

I had wrist troubles a few years back. The only thing that helped was using a vertical keyboard: http://safetype.com/ No wrist motion, no more problems.

I'm under the impression that this doctor's argument is against wrist rests, as in the padded thing you put in front of the keyboard to rest your wrists on. Instead, the comment you are replying to speaks about a wrist brace, as in a bracelet that restricts certain wrist movements and redistributes wrist stress to a larger area in your arm.

Some of the caveats may apply, but I would say that the bulk of your comment does not...

I had CTS surgery on my left hand back in 1998. Pretty ok since but the thing that killed me to start with was a big old mechanical IBM Model M and Windows Alt-Tab. The only keyboards I've used since are Cherry value line, IBM ThinkPad and MacBook Pro. No problems so far. I've also gone uber-careful on posture and working environment. I still have problems holding smart phones and touch devices.

CTS surgery recovery is horrid though. You can't hold anything for a few days. Forget work for a month at least and this wasn't even my dominant hand. The most annoying thing is that it really takes 6 months to heal properly and occasionally your hand just stops working. Didn't hurt a bit though after surgery.

Agree with the author - make every keystroke count.

Every time I see photos of a startup or workplace where everyone is issued a laptop with horrible ergonomics, I think two things: 1) boy it sure was fun to be in my twenties, and 2) you're going to regret everything fifteen years from now.

> Pain reminds you that your body is an entity of its own, that your body isn’t you. Rather, it’s the machine that the mind utilizes to bring your thoughts and desires into manifestation. And just like every other machine, sometimes things go wrong. The problem here is you can’t just call Toyota or go to Apple and get a new one.

Bit off-topic, but I would disagree with this "proof" of mind/body dualism. If anything it shows the opposite: your body and mind are the same by virtue of your mind experiencing pain due to physical shortcomings of the body.

Get one of these for programming: http://specialneedscomputers.ca/index.php?l=product_detail&p...

And for writing English text, try Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

(Almost) Obligatory comment:

If you work involves prolonged typing. then 1) Do not use laptop keyboards. 2) Look at ergonomic keyboards if your work involves typing all day. 3) Consider alternate keyboard layouts (Dvoark,Colemak)

I had RSI even after 2-3 months of quitting full-time work, plus I would wake up with CTS, but eventually it has gone away but after spending significant amounts of time away from typing heavy work.

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