[deleted]
Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack
141–150 of 179 posts
Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack
#142We are living in a culture of overwork because work (esp. desk work) has lost all boundaries. I'm in academia and had been idealizing overwork for quite a while ("the noble goal of devoting your life to science!"), but now have to fend off becoming cynical about the culture (increasingly after a parent with a blue collar-company died shortly before their well-earned retirement, stress played a role here). I have met…
> continuous smart drug usage How prevalent is this in academia? I've heard it's fairly common in tech circles but this is the first I've heard of it in academia (although I suppose it shouldn't be surprising in any field where intellectual acumen and ambition are both high).
"Academia" is so broad it's difficult to generalize, caffeine addictions are ubiquitous like everywhere else but quantities consumed seem high
Chronic amphetamine/etc (ab)use is probably linked more to the intensity of competition in some particular field or institution, tends to be stress-induced in my experience and seems orthogonal to intrinsic motivation or competence
Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still the point above is valid. A good 'job' is a source of well being. A bad job will kill you faster. The former might be very rare though.
I wonder if that's true. A good job is still a job. If you enjoy it and that leads to you spending more time working because it's "fun", it's not hard to imagine that good job could actually lead you to die younger than a job you dislike and only work the minimum amount possible at. That's not to mention the fact that you might also sacrifice more time commuting, lower salary, and less benefits for the sake of a "goo…
Job or not, humans spend all of their waken hours doing something.
It may be that the name we give to those things is enough to make them harmful, but I do find that very unlikely. If it's not calling it a "job" that makes it stressful, then it must be some properties, and it's pretty much possible that some jobs lack those properties.
Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack
#144I would differentiate between “working” and “sitting in the office”. My grandfather was a passionate carpenter. His workweek was always at least 60 hours. Sourcing wood, visiting clients, organizing everything, etc. He was in good shape and died at 92 years age. Being forced to sit in the office 45 hours a week I don’t think that I reach age above 60 years. This sitting whole day in the noisy environment was destroyi…
Ah yes, the good old "my anecdote trumps science" post on Hacker News. If this happens on Hacker News, no wonder the rest of the world is even worse. "Two systematic reviews and meta-analyses of the latest evidence were conducted for this study. Data from 37 studies on ischemic heart disease covering more than 768 000 participants and 22 studies on stroke covering more than 839 000 participants were synthesized. The…
Statistics by definition lose information, and part of understanding if you’ve lost the “right” information is to look at the individual cases that are excluded by the model. So yes, in those cases the anecdotes do trump the “science”, if by “science” you mean a lossy, probably-biased model of the real world.
What you can’t do with anecdotes is generalize them to the entire population, but taking an honest look at them is an excellent way to find methodological gaps.
Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack
#145What about tasks you do that aren't paid "work". Ie sitting at my desk writing code in the office is relatively easy. Looking after small children, chores around the house, arguing with family, helping with homework is much more stressful.
Domestic labor. There’s lots of feminist theory on that one.
Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really related to your point, but the best parts of living in a foreign country are not the famous landmarks but rather going deep into the normal life. Anyone can see Yosemite if they visit, but few can develop the close relationships and fond memories where you’ve become a regular.
Agree. A bit off topic: living in a foreign country allows you to progressively discover those little differences in comparison to your own country: the way people say good morning, the way people wait (or not) for the light to turn green, paper bags or plastic ones for grocery shopping?... I find those popular places (e.g., Yosemite, Eiffel tower, etc.) to be the less interesting parts of foreign countries. But sure…
Not to mention cultural differences that are so ingrained that it’s hard to imagine people could consider things differently.
It’s become clear to me after visiting other (Western!) cultures that many things, e.g. political views that are as obvious as gravity here, are considered both incorrect and weird elsewhere.
It makes it easier to consider problems with impartial eyes once you’ve seen immovable truths challenged like this a couple of times.
Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack
#147Does posting shit on Hacker News during business hours count as work? I guess it does (from health/well-being perspective) because that is also a sedentary activity in front of a computer.
Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
My grandfather was a carpenter. Died at a good old age... with missing fingers, arthritis, back problems. I fucked my knees working in construction, actually every single person I know in that line of work has health problems. Wear and tear is just part of existence, at least an office job gives you the choice to keep physically healthy without overusing your body. Tbf, it's possible to do it in a trade, too, but it'…
>Wear and tear is just part of existence, at least an office job gives you the choice to keep physically healthy without overusing your body. That entirely depends on time requirements and stress levels. When you need to work 50-60 hours in a week and/or have high stress, exercise may be a 'choice' but there are many who it's not a choice for. After a long or stressful week, I absolutely cannot get energy and motivat…
True, but the same applies to physical jobs.
And you'd think that you "exercise" at work, but no, using the same muscles over and over again for 8-12 hours a day seems to have different effects than exercising properly for 1-2 hours a day.
Exercising in the morning and then going to the job made me feel much better, but after a while I was too tired to wake up.
After a day of mental work, biking, stretching and basic exercises (no weights or anything) is "low effort", sort of, because it's the brain that's tired but the muscles are fine. It's hard to start, but I feel refreshed after ~30 minutes.
But yeah, 50-60 hours a week is just bad, no matter what job it is.
Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you’re confusing the map for the territory. The study pooled all workers together, but that doesn’t invalidate the hypothesis that certain types of workers were more affected. Unless the study explicitly broke out the purported subdivision, we can’t say for sure. For example imagine 50% of workers are office workers. And say heart attack risk is twice as high for overworked office workers but 10% less for non…
The parent comment shoots from the hip, though. He has one anecdotal case of a more active career living to 92, then he postulates his inactive career will lead him to an extremely early death (60 is young in modern economies). That's just not the depth of discussion HN is designed for, does this ignite curiosity or push the discussion further?
Yes, it does. This is exactly how you pick holes at research. What factors didn't it look at? That helps us understand the limits of what we can deduce from the data. Can we think of an intuitive story about why those factors might have a causal relationship to the thing being measured? If so, we have especially good reason to be skeptical of any conclusions from the study that don't address that possible explanation.
Somewhere in the last couple of decades, the SCIENCE WORKS, BITCHES people seem to have forgotten how real science is actually done. Intuition, anecdote, common sense, hunches are very important parts of the process.
Re: Working over 55 hours a week associated with higher risk of stroke, heart attack
#150I would differentiate between “working” and “sitting in the office”. My grandfather was a passionate carpenter. His workweek was always at least 60 hours. Sourcing wood, visiting clients, organizing everything, etc. He was in good shape and died at 92 years age. Being forced to sit in the office 45 hours a week I don’t think that I reach age above 60 years. This sitting whole day in the noisy environment was destroyi…
Ah yes, the good old "my anecdote trumps science" post on Hacker News. If this happens on Hacker News, no wonder the rest of the world is even worse. "Two systematic reviews and meta-analyses of the latest evidence were conducted for this study. Data from 37 studies on ischemic heart disease covering more than 768 000 participants and 22 studies on stroke covering more than 839 000 participants were synthesized. The…
Maybe it's you who doesn't understand the epistemology of science. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27185221