That's because a lot of people we think of as famous scientists were really politicians. Rest assured the people who did the actual research weren't working 40-hour weeks.
Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours
241–250 of 304 posts
Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can work on a lot of different problems and still do the creative garden cultivation that the previous poster said. I do that. I've got about 10 prototypes for board and card games actively going at once at the moment, and I write down fresh ideas that pop into my head to come back to later. Even if months pass, I'll get spontaneous ideas to certain projects that improve them a ton. But I have to feed my brain wi…
"creative garden cultivation" might be a poetic way of putting it. In reality its just hard work and sweat at the end of the day. It requires you to go through many iterations of success/failure loops testing outcomes of your work. Of course you can do more than one of this at the same time. In fact that was precisely my point. The more of such you grab, the more come they come to you.
"sweat" is poetry/metaphor in this context, too, so your description and the previous one are equally valid "in reality."
Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem is final GPA means almost nothing. High School Valedictorians are an interesting population because they tend to do poorly in life. Prodigies similarly underperform vs expected results. Interesting, do we have any explanations for this phenomena?
Not sure how much research backs this up, but I think it's a change in what's important. A 10 year old who copies someone else brilliantly is praised, an adult doing the same thing makes minim wage. "Even prodigies who avoid burnout and resist social pressures are unlikely to make a big splash as an adult. The problem, notes giftedness researcher Ellen Winner, is that to make a major contribution in the arts, and eve…
Well, I guess it all depends on what you mean by do poorly in life.
High school valedictorians and child prodigies (especially the former) are disproportionately likely to hold positions of societal power. Just read the bio of any president of the IMF or the World Bank or the Federal Reserve. Essentially all of them graduate university summa cum laude or magna cum laude.
Innovative scientists and people who move the world forward? Perhaps less likely to come from this group, for a variety of reasons.
Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I suppose because it's so easily quantified. I wonder what's being quantified.. intelligence or obedience. This would be like rating a strong-man competition by how much time was spent in the gym and how much unnecessary pain was self-inflicted. It's like there's a culture of "pain enthusiasts". They do things like talk about running until it hurts, they tend to get injured often, and of course they have nothing to…
There is also people who enjoy finding out how much pain they can endure, where masochism is the point. For me, max-weight deadlifting is a measure of how much I can grit my teeth through the pain and how much I can pull off the ground. I know it's not terribly effective in how much progress I make as I do it so I keep it to a minimum, but it is fun to get a new high score!
I did something similar, unfortunately gritting my teeth... well, the dentist had to repair one of my teeth that cracked slightly.
Both figuratively and literally, be very careful how hard you grit your teeth. They (and you) can break.
Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I know, most people wish on their deathbeds that they'd have worked less, been with their loved ones more, and generally would have done more anything else than work. I get that there are extremely driven individuals who want to achieve great things - and some of them are even able to do so - but articles like this should be understood in the context of a culture where common people work themselves to death…
> "As far as I know, most people wish on their deathbeds that they'd have worked less, been with their loved ones more, and generally would have done more anything else than work." No, this is just a hackneyed cliche that gets repeated every time work-life balance gets discussed. I know quite a few people in late middle age that dearly wish they have worked harder and earned more money, now that they need it and can'…
There is a difference between late middle age and deathbed. If it is a hackneyed cliche (and I wouldn't be surprised if it is), I would like to see evidence for it (first hand anecodotal evidence is sufficient, but from someone who is verifiably not you, but worked long hours, and is dying).
Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I think the core problem for most people is that they are attached to the wrong outcome. Their goal is the high GPA. Likely to be true for many people. I remember my uncle, who was a prof. in the US, bemoaning the fact (and this was way back) that some of his students used to come and ask him "What do I need to do to get an A?" His point being, of course, that those students did not have a genuine interest in the su…
I've seen the same. To me it always came across as "Your chosen field of study bores me. What's the least amount of this thing which you've devoted your life to that I can learn without it affecting my future in any way? Please provide this in checklist form." Why would any prof respond positively to that?
Wow, that's a somewhat strong way of putting it, but yes, I guess it would seem that way to a prof. hearing that (the original question from the student). And as an instructor on software topics myself (part-time), I guess I might think somewhat the same way, if that happened. Thankfully it rarely has happened with my students, the ones who actually join my courses, that is. There is of course the top of the funnel, in which there are many such people like the ones my uncle talked about.
Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours
#247They take a very constrained example and claim that "You should be a slacker too". This is at best an irresponsible piece of writing that's clearly targeting discussions like what's happening here. This is the 1000th time I've seen a post on this topic on HN, and every time it's posted here it's like groundhog day, same comments. Well this is what publications like these want, they want more traffic. There are many f…
I think this exposes the "religious" nature of humans in general, including plenty of people on HN. You see them using logical arguments to reason, instead of practical proofs (presumably in order to get away from personal bias). Surprisingly they end up with even more bias when using logical reasoning.
I wouldn't say logical reasoning is at fault here, as much as analogical reasoning.
Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I think the core problem for most people is that they are attached to the wrong outcome. Their goal is the high GPA. Likely to be true for many people. I remember my uncle, who was a prof. in the US, bemoaning the fact (and this was way back) that some of his students used to come and ask him "What do I need to do to get an A?" His point being, of course, that those students did not have a genuine interest in the su…
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." For good or bad, academic performance is measured with GPA, so you should not be surprised to see people optimizing for this measurement. You can't measure "interest in the subject" and even if you could, you could not judge teacher and/or student performance based on it, so instead we have GPA.
You're right. I wasn't surprised, though (okay, I was, a bit, since I was a kid when I heard this, and also wasn't like that myself - usually was interested in all the subjects I took [1], and did well on most). It was more like I was just commenting on the parent comment to mine, by cgriswald.
[1] One exception was organic chemistry in high school. Never could get my head around it, though I did fine in inorganic. I think it had to do at least partly with the fact that in organic, you have to memorize much more (e.g. molecules and their transitions - hardly remember much now), whereas in inorganic, you have to use logic and deduction and problem-solving skills more.
Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours
#249> Scientists who spent 25 hours in the workplace were no more productive than those who spent five. Anecdotally this is a concept I've run into in many areas of life, the most overt one being school, I suppose because it's so easily quantified. You can do a moderately acceptable amount of work on any given assignment and get a C+, work hard for a B/A or work your hands to the bone for an A+, but at the end of the day…
As a PhD, I want to give a word of caution: Classes in school are really almost nothing like doing research (or taking on any large, difficult project). I still take some here and there personally, but the main idea in this article isn't about finding a optimum point on the grade vs. effort plot (I totally agree with your assessment though!). I'm not sure I buy the "you get diminishing returns for working harder" in…
As a counterpoint to this, my second year in CS had four papers (Programming, Data Structures and C, Operating Systems, and Networks). The course was being revamped one year at a time, and right at the beginning of second year there was a problem with the workload:
they had set the load and level for Programming to final year level. A dozen (out of 140ish students) dropped out by the end of the first week, and by the end of the course (13 weeks long) more than half of the students had dropped out, and just 37 were in a position to pass. I don't mean that they had completed the work necessary to pass, but they could conceivably do so by the final due date for the course.
I don't know how many actually passed, but of the 37, not everyone did. It was so bad that they had to drop the prerequisites and allow in anybody who had completed the other papers just so there could actually be a final year (three year Bachelor of Science).
Funnily enough, they refused to refund any fees, even though the person in charge of the course was eventually fired over the mess - one that he didn't even create! He was handed the course and workload, and told "This is it, this is how you must teach it." We were all told "Suck it up and do it." Even the teaching staff had told the professors that it was a badly designed course, which didn't go down well.
I passed that paper, failed all my others (no refund: I was told I should just have worked harder than double the standard semester workload), and burned out. Not one of us paid intending to be part of their incompetence. Had I known how badly put together the course was, I would have dropped out in the first week as well. If I wanted the Honors workload, I would have entered the Honors program.
Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also, if you want to succeed, don't listen to these idiots. Statistically those who work harder succeed more. Period. I'm mean I generally agree but one thing I really can't stand is people believing that success is entirely hard work. The reality is most of success is "standing on the shoulder of giants". People are generally successful if they are given a massive starting advantage. That starting advantage could…
I didn't say that. This is why it's hard to have civil discussion online because people take words out of context and use whatever interpretation they have. If you are one of the people who are in unfortunate situations, you can choose to live two different lives: either believe that you're done for and live a loser life, or try hard to get out of it. It's your choice, but there's plenty of evidence where people who…
> I didn't say that. This is why it's hard to have civil discussion online because people take words out of context and use whatever interpretation they have.
How about I just agree and say you are right?
Its pretty hard to have a civil discussion when you top level post and accuse HNers of commenting like lemmings.
> This is at best an irresponsible piece of writing that's clearly targeting discussions like what's happening here. This is the 1000th time I've seen a post on this topic on HN, and every time it's posted here it's like groundhog day, same comments. Well this is what publications like these want, they want more traffic.
It sounds like you took a lot of: words out of context and use whatever interpretation they have to come up with your theory.
And now your sort of playing king of the mountain on your original comment (being contentious with me and others) and not wanting a discussion. I even originally mostly agreed with you (see my original comment).
> It's your choice, but there's plenty of evidence where people who came from the bottom rose to the top by working hard (and I mean "top" as in someone who's made world-changing achievements)
Yeah we have had lots of female presidents.
Yeah sure people can go up a few rungs with hard work (hence why I agreed with you) but extremely rare is the true Cinderalla story. It usually takes generations.... but I suppose even success is nebulous.
Actually one could even argue you don't need hard work to be "successful" ... you just need to be happy (this is even based on your previous comments).