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

Thank you for bringing some sense to the debate. It's typical that threads on this topic result in a pointless debate about 40 work weeks (I'm in the > 40, but am a founder) in which neither side understands each other, and this thread has not disappointed.

I work like a madman, but unless you asked me about my hours, you'd never know. I work for a result, and if I ever do brag, it's about the result of the work. The hours worked are the natural side effect of achieving said result.

I would never take a job in which I was required to work 60 hours per week (unless I believed the pay made that sacrifice worthwhile), nor would I expect 60 hours per week from employees on a regular basis.

You'll find me breaking from this sentiment near the 40 hour point (I've been vilified for this on this very site), but I'd rather hire more people than burn them out, which is inefficient and leads to resentment.

People are self-renewing resources, and a manager can either choose to cultivate them as assets, or treat them as a battery, throwing them out when they've run out of juice. I'd prefer the former.

> For fun replace 'psychology' with 'quantum physics'. Is it also not science?

There are fundamental differences. In quantum theory one can craft a theory that makes empirically falsifiable predictions about phenomena not yet observed, even in advance by decades, like the Higgs boson.

The theory is the Standard Model, and it predicted the Higgs boson decades ago. Much time passed because we just didn't have a way to observe reality in the right energy domain. Now we do.

There is nothing remotely like this in psychology.

> Contradicts some natural laws

Not really. The quantum and relativistic worlds are non-overlapping, but both have copious observational evidence, which means we need to look for a theory that explains both of them in a unified way. That search is underway. One candidate is string theory, very controversial because no single string theory candidate is the obvious "final theory".

> Is not explained by the natural world except in reference to itself

This is a non sequitur because it's true for any theory -- at some scale it becomes self-referential. Cosmology, a theory about everything, is self-referential at the level of the entire universe.

> Not necessarily testable against the empirical world

No. Quantum theory is constantly empirically tested and is the best-confirmed theory in existence, both in terms of description and prediction. In fact, the computer you're sitting at represents a confirmation of quantum theory.

There is no other scientific theory that has so much agreement between an abstract theoretical construct and careful observation. During the debates that led to modern quantum theory, Einstein and his group (the critics) posed any number of seemingly absurd objections to quantum ("... and that would be a perfectly absurd outcome"), but each of the objections turned out to be true -- entanglement, superposition of states and others.

There are some quantities predicted by quantum theory that have been confirmed in experiment to ten decimal places -- an outcome unmatched by any other scientific theory.

Title: "The Most Precisely Tested Theory in the History of Science"

Link: http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2011/05/05/the-most-preci...

Quote: "Experimental tests of QED measure small shifts, but to an absurd number of decimal places. The most impressive of these is the “anomalous magnetic moment of the electron,” expressed is terms of a number g whose best measured value is: g/2 = 1.001 159 652 180 73 (28) ... Depending on how you want to count it, that’s either 11 or 14 digits of precision ..."

> Falsifiable or not depending on your stance

Definitely falsifiable. There was much discussion before confirmation of the Higgs that its absence would constitute a falsification of much of the Standard Model, which is technically accurate and was a matter of much speculation before the results were in.

Quantum theory is eminently falsifiable in the classic sense, persistently resists falsification, and is the cornerstone of much of modern technology.

> As for Kahneman (and many other psychologists), if you believe that he starts with the conclusion and refuses to change it regardless of the evidence developed during the course of the investigation ...

Wait, I never said that and I don't hold that view. What I said was that Kahnemann's work describes, it doesn't explain. It is in the area of explanation that psychology fails. To explain (and to put it simply), psychologists would have to seek out root causes of behaviors, but that would require the mind to be a physical organ, open to empirical observation. This is why society is moving away from psychology toward neuroscience -- the chance to offer an empirical, falsifiable explanation.

(What follows should clearly demonstrate the difference between description and explanation.)

Neuroscience is in a rather primitive state, but there are some very encouraging signs. Depression, for example, a condition that psychology can't really treat in a way that distinguishes actual results from the placebo effect.

In a recent neuroscience study, a brain area known as Area 25 has become a matter of much interest because deep brain stimulation of Area 25 can cause a patient's depression to lift instantly.

Title: "A Depression Switch?"

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/magazine/02depression.html...

Quote: "Deanna later described it in similar terms. "It was literally like a switch being turned on that had been held down for years," she said. "All of a sudden they hit the spot, and I feel so calm and so peaceful. It was overwhelming to be able to process emotion on somebody's face. I'd been numb to that for so long.""

I emphasize that the patient in this procedure repeatedly experienced a dramatic improvement for reasons she could not see, by means of actions out of her sight. Until this procedure, she had been so depressed that she had given up on life and voluntarily submitted herself to institutionalization.

> Medical science moved past simply treating based on symptoms due to a great deal of work. Who's to say psychology can not do the same?

That's easy to answer -- psychology's topic is the mind, which, because it is not a physical thing, cannot be a source of empirical evidence. And surely, given the present confidence crisis, if psychologists could produce empirically verifiable, testable results accompanied by explanations, they certainly would. But they cannot.

>>Sixty hours a week was a short week in the old days

Yes, and then the labor movement happened and we made very good progress as a society towards something more sane and sustainable.

Having a kid changed my life as well. I'm 21, and my son turned 1 this month.

I'm so glad he came along when he did, because I was on my way down the dangerous road of workaholism; but now my priorities are crystal clear, and I refuse to work more than 40 hours/week on a regular basis.

What is it that you think I claimed?