Well,you try to design a test of typing speed and fatigue but it's very challenging because all your subjects are probably already familiar with qwerty keyboards even if they don't touch-type.

And then you conclude abstract fitness is irrelevant anyway because everyone uses qwerty and there are:

- Advantages in everyone using more or less the same thing

- No way you're going to make everyone incur huge costs and switch

> So how do we decide if qwerty or dvorak is fitter?

Ideally, stay out of it and let others decide for themselves.

We don't need to decide that bikes are better than cars. We ought to just support both (paved roads, traffic laws, places to keep your vehicle while you shop, etc.).

We don't need to decide that SSDs are better than disc drives. We just need to support the latest SATA standard.

So, for qwerty vs dvorak, we just need to support appropriate USB standards. And at the software level, we need to let the user customize their keys from time to time (remap hjkl in vim, remap wasd in video games, etc.).

I realize now that my first response only addresses how an individual might ideally decide whether to switch to Dvorak. Deciding which layout is “fitter” across the globe (or whichever language regions currently use QWERTY and can feasibly use Dvorak) is a much more difficult cost/benefit analysis in practice. To calculate cost, you would need to look at the costs of mass manufacturing new keyboards and/or patching and distributing the software that drives keyboard input. To calculate benefits, you would need to do large scale studies on the speed/productivity benefits of Dvorak over QWERTY, both for first-time learners and switchers. Heck, you’d even need to estimate the political costs (for governments, large corporations, standards bodies, etc.) of persuading the change, as well as the unavoidable costs of having both layouts exist in the wild during the transition period.

This is so daunting that it feels nearly impossible, and indeed, I suspect any rigorous cost/benefit analysis would show that the benefits of any new layout (even the technically best layout) is not worth the costs of switching away from any single ubiquitous standard (even the technically worst layout imaginable), at least not in any reasonable time frame.

My guess is that the best approach is to maintain one ubiquitous standard, and change it very gradually, and to gradually reduce the costs, e.g. by implementing easy layout-switching software in major operating systems, or even bolder approaches like supporting virtualization/containerization of personal software settings and development environments in major operating systems.

What if I could just sit down at any modern networked PC, type in a URL and some authentication, and immediately be running my own exact customized computing/development environment, complete with my keyboard layout, text editor, development dependencies, etc.? That would be awesome. As long as the hardware keyboard layout is roughly compatible with my software settings (and I don’t rely on printed labels on the physical keyboard), most of the costs of choosing a keyboard layout (other than the fixed costs of learning it) go away.

Ideally, by recording (as best you can, and estimating after that) the cost per unit time of using a non-standard keyboard layout (including the cost of learning it and the cost of occasionally needing to use computers that don’t use it) and the benefit per unit time of using that layout.

Either the benefit per unit time eventually surpasses the cost per unit time (since some costs are fixed, namely the initial learning), or it doesn’t. Only switch if benefit surpasses cost in a time window you’re comfortable with.

I've often wondered why alphabetical order isn't the default on phones. Given that most of the population that uses phones didn't learn to type.

It really bothers me actually.

The one who catch-on is fitter, and the fitter one catches on. Circular logic is complete.

Game theory literature should have this problem?