Hide table of contents

Lots of EAs I know suffer from some version of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI), which limits their ability to type. In some cases, people have switched entirely to only using voice commands for controlling their devices, which seems pretty effortful to set up and probably limits their productivity quite a bit.

I have recently developed a mild form of RSI, and am not sure how much time and resources to invest and what types of interventions seem most helpful. I've found it hard to find sufficiently detailed resources on the internet and am interested in learning what others have found most helpful.

22

0
0

Reactions

0
0
New Answer
New Comment


9 Answers sorted by

I endorse most of Max's recommendations.

Based on my own experience I would definitely recommend being very cautious about RSI, i.e. especially resting carefully, as well as investing in solutions like more ergonomic devices, voice control, reading different resources (e.g. about good posture and different solutions) and visiting physiotherapists and other specicialists. I was largely unable to type or use a computer for 2-3 years due to RSI and I attribute a lot of this not having rested enough early on (despite the fact that I actually did reduce my activity quite dramatically almost immediately upon experiencing symptoms).

Another thing I would note is that although I think it's good to seek help from different experts, I would treat this very critically. I received completely conflicting, but entirely confidently expressed, diagnoses and recommendations from a number of different GPs, physiotherapists and consultant rheumatologists. Some of the literature I read myself also explicitly suggested that tendinopathies tended to be poorly understood by frontline medics, though I'm not in a position to evaluate whether that is the case (or at least true relative to other conditions). Some of the things which were recommended seem to have some evidence suggesting potential for harm (e.g. strengthening exercises, anti-inflammatories and immobilising wrist braces), so there are some grounds for caution.

One of the few things I would recommend that wasn't mentioned in Max's post, so far as I recall, and isn't mentioned in a lot of resources was keeping your hands warm, but I see you mentioned that in your own comment. There also seems to be some evidence that nutrition can be relevant for tendon healing (assuming that your RSI is related to your tendons): see this review. The main things they point to are vitamin C, taurine, vitamin A, glycine, vitamin EA and leucine.

I'm also happy to talk about this 1-1 if you like.

One of the things Max recommends are mobilizations and stretching. While the links he provides explain why mobilizations may be important, they don't actually do that good a job of directly showing you the stretches in a video.

For that, you may want to watch Day[9] demonstrate the stretches people in the StarCraft community use before playing in a professional eSports match or before starting any serious practice session.

2
kdbscott
+1 to stretching and mobilization, helped for me. Rock climbing helped my partner. (the best theory I've found so far, but hard to tell if true) Often times muscle injury prevention is helped with teaching your brain/body how to activate the muscle in healthy ways (in addition to rest/stretching/etc). Sometimes much of the problem is your brain/muscles are trying to protect other muscles that are being used poorly, and this compounds (the 'helping' muscles get overworked, and other muscles try to save those ones, etc). 

Thanks, very helpful. Especially knowing about your experience (what you said in the first paragraph) seems helpful.

Would love to get some more of that vitamin EA! ;)

2
David_Moss
Oh dear, I guess I'm too used to always following any capital E with an A automatically.

How did your pain eventually go away, David ?

Some things I've tried and found mildly helpful:

  • Using an ergonomic keyboard (I use a split keyboard, which also helps with back pain)
  • Avoiding typing while feeling cold (this means sometimes wearing a coat at my desk)
  • Wearing a wrist brace at night
  • Adjusting the height of my desk, and using a desk with sufficient depth so I can rest my forearms on it while typing
  • Using my phone with the other hand that isn't affected
  • Generally trying to avoid straining movements with the affected hand (during cooking, etc.)

 

Things I've considered:

  • Learning touchtyping with the Dvorak layout (or some other alternative layout) – takes ~20h to learn, benefits seem disputed (academic research and lifehackers claim mixed results). Might look into if things don't get better.
  • Using a foot pedal for clicking and modifier keys. Takes some time to learn and set up, though some seemed to like it a lot.

These mostly seem like good things to try. It might be worth experimenting with a number of different ergonomic devices to see which work best for you (which work best seems to be very individual, anecdotally).

Regarding wrist braces: it's been a while since I looked into this, so I don't have a reference to hand and you may be more up to date than I am, but my recollection is that these were recommended for carpal tunnel syndrome, but not for RSI. Fwiw, I would guess that only wearing it at night probably avoids the theorised harms of wearing one (forcing ... (read more)

2
Jonas V
Thank you! :)

One thing that helped a lot for me was  using a keyboard with thumb keys (especially replacing keys where I typically used my pinkies like backspace, enter, cmd/ctrl, and shift). Faster to learn than dvorak and imo a more effective intervention.

I used an Ergodox EZ, there's also Keyboardio, Kinesis, and others.

This feels like an area where our society is insane:  our strongest, most dextrous fingers share A SINGLE KEY on the keyboard. 

I found using voice dictation on my phone and iPad pretty good, often now I just send emails and messages using my phone instead of my computer.

I find the Google speech recognition on the Google keyboard for Android pretty good, as well as the Apple speech recognition on IOS devices.

One thing I find very useful but I haven't seen recommended anywhere is simply adding a second mouse to your computer. It allows you to easily switch between both hands. This gives your main hand some rest, but doesn't overuse the other one.

Sample size of 1:

After suffering mild RSI in my early 20s, it was completely and permanently resolved by switching to DVORAK for a year, and then back to QWERTY. It wasn't an intentional solution, but forcing myself to re-learn to type from scratch, twice, massively improved my typing habits. 

Googling around on the benefits of DVORAK for RSI offers more anecdotes in either direction, so take this with a whole pile of salt.

Some further recommendations:

  • Keep using your hands, acknowledging it may be (partly) psychosomatic, and not worrying too much about it. A friend told me they saw a surgeon for RSI and the surgeon recommended to keep using the hands as normally and not worry too much, and that helped in their case.
  • Reducing phone usage; not using the phone in bed while lying down; not playing games on my phone.

I've had RSI in the past, but not from typing, but instead from repetitive motions loading paper into a machine for scanning. I didn't need to see a doctor about it, and addressing it was ultimately pretty straight forward and I was able to keep doing the job that caused it while I recovered. Things I did:

  • wore a stabilizing wrist brace to alleviate the strain on my wrist that was causing pain, even when I was not engaged in an activity that would necessarily cause pain
  • payed attention to and changed my motions to reduce wrist strain
  • rearranged my work so I had more breaks and less long periods of continually performing the motion (I had other job responsibilities so it was easy to interleave breaks from one thing with work on another)

It's now more than 10 years since I developed RSI, and maybe 4 years since I have needed the wrist brace (my need for it rapidly decreased once I left the job). I think never needing it correlated with increased strength, specifically from indoor rock climbing and related conditioning.

I had a very bad time with RSI from 2006-7, followed by a crazy-practically-overnight-miracle-cure-happy-ending. See my recent blog post The “mind-body vicious cycle” model of RSI & back pain for details & discussion.  :)

Small change I found useful: Using my small finger or ring finger instead of the index finger when I have to use my laptop touchpad. This way my wrist is less twisted, which before felt uncomfortable after a time. 

Curated and popular this week
Paul Present
 ·  · 28m read
 · 
Note: I am not a malaria expert. This is my best-faith attempt at answering a question that was bothering me, but this field is a large and complex field, and I’ve almost certainly misunderstood something somewhere along the way. Summary While the world made incredible progress in reducing malaria cases from 2000 to 2015, the past 10 years have seen malaria cases stop declining and start rising. I investigated potential reasons behind this increase through reading the existing literature and looking at publicly available data, and I identified three key factors explaining the rise: 1. Population Growth: Africa's population has increased by approximately 75% since 2000. This alone explains most of the increase in absolute case numbers, while cases per capita have remained relatively flat since 2015. 2. Stagnant Funding: After rapid growth starting in 2000, funding for malaria prevention plateaued around 2010. 3. Insecticide Resistance: Mosquitoes have become increasingly resistant to the insecticides used in bednets over the past 20 years. This has made older models of bednets less effective, although they still have some effect. Newer models of bednets developed in response to insecticide resistance are more effective but still not widely deployed.  I very crudely estimate that without any of these factors, there would be 55% fewer malaria cases in the world than what we see today. I think all three of these factors are roughly equally important in explaining the difference.  Alternative explanations like removal of PFAS, climate change, or invasive mosquito species don't appear to be major contributors.  Overall this investigation made me more convinced that bednets are an effective global health intervention.  Introduction In 2015, malaria rates were down, and EAs were celebrating. Giving What We Can posted this incredible gif showing the decrease in malaria cases across Africa since 2000: Giving What We Can said that > The reduction in malaria has be
 ·  · 15m read
 · 
“I” refers to Zach, the Centre for Effective Altruism's CEO. Oscar is CEA’s Chief of Staff. We are grateful to all the CEA staff and community members who have contributed insightful input and feedback (directly and indirectly) during the development of our strategy and over many years. Mistakes are of course our own. Exec summary As one CEA, we are taking a principles-first approach to stewardship of the EA community. During the search for a new CEO, the board and search committee were open to alternative strategic directions, but from the beginning of my tenure, we’ve committed to a strategy under which we will: * Operate as one CEA, rather than winding down, breaking up or renaming the organization. Instead of optimizing for each of our team’s programs, we’ll be optimizing for EA as a whole. * Take a principles-first approach to EA, rather than becoming an AI org or otherwise re-orienting ourselves to specific causes. * Take greater responsibility for stewardship of the EA community, rather than restricting ourselves to passively providing infrastructure and support. This post explores stewardship in greater detail. Stewardship is about actors taking more responsibility for reaching and raising EA’s ceiling, and we believe CEA should play a leading role in steering, supporting and coordinating the community. Importantly, however, stewardship of EA is not ownership of EA: we don’t want to be the only leaders, and we do want a close collaboration with the community. During 2024 we focussed on building strong foundations that CEA will require to succeed at stewarding the community, including making over 20 hires (having started the year with 34 staff) while cutting a quarter of our costs, and developing our strategy for 2025 and 2026, including by listening to and learning from members of the EA community during visits I made to over half a dozen countries and in more than 200 one-on-one meetings. I feel good about the foundations we built and having priori
Neel Nanda
 ·  · 1m read
 · 
TL;DR Having a good research track record is some evidence of good big-picture takes, but it's weak evidence. Strategic thinking is hard, and requires different skills. But people often conflate these skills, leading to excessive deference to researchers in the field, without evidence that that person is good at strategic thinking specifically. I certainly try to have good strategic takes, but it's hard, and you shouldn't assume I succeed! Introduction I often find myself giving talks or Q&As about mechanistic interpretability research. But inevitably, I'll get questions about the big picture: "What's the theory of change for interpretability?", "Is this really going to help with alignment?", "Does any of this matter if we can’t ensure all labs take alignment seriously?". And I think people take my answers to these way too seriously. These are great questions, and I'm happy to try answering them. But I've noticed a bit of a pathology: people seem to assume that because I'm (hopefully!) good at the research, I'm automatically well-qualified to answer these broader strategic questions. I think this is a mistake, a form of undue deference that is both incorrect and unhelpful. I certainly try to have good strategic takes, and I think this makes me better at my job, but this is far from sufficient. Being good at research and being good at high level strategic thinking are just fairly different skillsets! But isn’t someone being good at research strong evidence they’re also good at strategic thinking? I personally think it’s moderate evidence, but far from sufficient. One key factor is that a very hard part of strategic thinking is the lack of feedback. Your reasoning about confusing long-term factors need to extrapolate from past trends and make analogies from things you do understand better, and it can be quite hard to tell if what you're saying is complete bullshit or not. In an empirical science like mechanistic interpretability, however, you can get a lot more fe