A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

And I know even more startups that worked 100+ hours and got nowhere. Simple logic would then tell us that amount of work is inversely correlated with productivity!

The actual truth is that success is more about luck than anything else. Working 100 hours a week is just you killing yourself without increasing the probability of success more than, say, getting a better-connected CEO would.

I'm saying that someone is going to attempt something that pushes them to significant physical limits, they need to have good controls. Feeling like you can do something should be supplement by some understanding.

When I teach stretching and movement, I advice my student to only go to the edge of their "comfort zone" at any one point and I only teach certain stretches. It's known that most people's limberness can be gradually increased so that's relatively safe.

It's pretty well known (see studies on this page) that most people can't "learn" to go without sleep and I wouldn't advice them to try to do so (the point of the article).

And I can believe a few people who in the right place at the right time and brutally push themselves can get rich, rich, rich. That doesn't take away from the point of most people who work with extended years of sleep deprivation screwing themselves up (and this can include a fair fraction of the first group).

Sure, push yourself to greatness. I like to push the quality of my activity, not the quantity anyway.

Kudos for writing about this. So many people in the startup world like to brag about how they do things without a whole lot of evidence to back them up. Usually it is about some cool tech that they use, but as you point out, the long hours meme is also something that is going around like a virus even though there is no evidence that it does any good.

There is a lot of talk about big data in our industry, but it seems to me that some small data experiments would be useful as well because there is so much that we do with no data to back up the practices.

There really is an opportunity here for someone to collect some real data on this and help us learn just how far you can push it and for how long. There are so many startups in SV that someone who lives there could interview people at these startups, every 3 months, collect the data, and then after a few years we would have some evidence that suggests the general expected result.

There will always be some outliers, but remember, some startups who have done everything wrong, still made it big. Single examples here and there are not data. It's hard work to get real usable data, but chances are some of you know people at Berkeley or Stanford who would be into that sort of sociological/psychological research.

> OP is incorrect that psychology is not a science.

Pretend to be a scientist and post your evidence. Here's mine -- the director of the NIMH has recently ruled (http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...) that the DSM (psychology's "bible") may no longer be used as the basis of scientific research proposals, for the simple reason that it has no scientific content. The director went on to say:

"The goal of this new manual, as with all previous editions, is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology. While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."

"Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better." [emphasis added]

There is often an embarrassing degree of self-reference in discussions where psychologists try to claim that psychology is a science. The defenders invariably see no need to produce evidence for their claim, as though evidence is irrelevant in a discussion of science. And for a typical psychologist, saying psychology is a science is expected to end a conversation, whereas for a scientist, that claim can only begin a conversation in which evidence rules.

> Next up we have this whole notion of falsifiability. It's a red herring.

Only if science isn't defined as it is in the law -- which it is. Science-defining laws are on the books to keep Creationism out of public school classrooms, and while crafting those laws with the assistance of expert witnesses, guess which non-negotiable criterion always appears in the final ruling? Falsifiability.

Here is one such ruling (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mclean-v-arkansas.html) -- science must have these properties:

1. It is guided by natural law;

2. It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law;

3. It is testable against the empirical world;

4. Its conclusions are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final word; and

5. It is falsifiable.

I bring up this law to make perfectly clear that falsifiability, empirical evidence, and the other standard requirements for science, are only red herrings to people who think they can define science any way they please. For a scientist, obviously this kind of argument is unnecessary -- they already understand what science requires.

> What is correct is that experimental designs are more or less not possible in behavioural psychology.

Wait, what? Because one cannot design reliable experiments in psychology, therefore psychology is scientific? On what basis -- that real science is too difficult?

> This could be OP's second point of confusion.

The only confusion is yours.