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Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

nautil.us

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Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#111

Post by chaostheory »

whistlerbrk wrote: post #26

And then on the flipside there is Musk, Jobs, Gates and countless others who work(ed) all the time. All I'm saying is I see a lot of emulation-of-success articles posted here...

> Toulouse noted that Poincaré kept very regular hours.

I feel that this is key. I remember an old post about someone's account about another phd candidate they worked with (my memory may be hazy). He noticed that whenever she made good progress, it didn't matter when during the day; she would take off and stop for the day (a lot of times before 2pm) for happy hour. His hours by contrast were less regular and he would work longer streaks, working much longer hours overall. If I remember correctly she finished her thesis a few months before he did.

> The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest “working” hours.

As others have noted, while you stop working consciously when you're 'relaxing'; you never really stop working subconsciously.

Adam Grant and others (like Napoleon Hill) have elaborated on it, but I can only find his account

https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_the_surprising_habits_o...

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#112

Post by cgriswald »

criddell wrote: post #88
differentView wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the old "What do they call the person who graduates last in medical school?"

Aren't most medical schools just pass/fail these days? They don't actually give grades or rank students, do they?

I can't speak for all medical schools, but at my ex's school they have Honors/High Pass/Pass/Low Pass/Fail; so basically (ABCDF).

Other than being required to get at least Pass in order to remain in good academic standing, I'm not certain what effect these grades have.

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#113

Post by lkrubner »

" or just sitting and thinking. "

Put another way, these people worked long hours, so long as you recognize what kind of work they were doing. I mean, they were not shoveling coal. I think humans have some bias such that we don't recognize thinking hard as hard work.

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#114

Post by Qwertious »

DannyB2 wrote: post #17

If their job was, say, picking cotton, then the hours they spent at work would directly correlate to their work output. So what is the difference? Maybe scientists are still thinking about difficult problems when they are away from work. Like when they are sitting in their porch swing with nobody else around to distract.

I think the John Cleese speech is particularly relevant here - it's different modes of thought: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xPvvPTQaMI

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#115

Post by kamaal »

cableshaft wrote: post #105
kamaal wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly: "Opportunities multiply as they are seized." - Sun Tzu One way to have good ideas is to have a lot of them and then filter. Even in highly creative endeavors like say music and painting, volume of work largely matters. You have to spend a lot of time(years) doing a lot of work before you get anywhere close to good.

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.

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#116

Post by Verdex_2 »

maloney wrote: post #94
tyoverby wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"time in the gym" is way easier to measure than tangible improvement. It's not surprising that people try to optimize things that are the easiest to graph in Excel :P

Really? Lifting more weight, running a faster mile or losing weight are just as easy to measure.

You're right I think, but what's actually interesting (I think at least) is that time in the gym is more likely to make you a significant social member of a certain group (gym => office, lab, bar, etc).

Time spent present is easy for the social group to measure. Everyone might be impressed by the guy running the 4 minute mile, but after he leaves we're much more interested in Greg improving from his 7 minute mile to a 6:30 minute mile and that 4 minute mile guy was kind of a jerk anyways. Finding a way to get a 4 minute mile without the trackmaster 2000 and the protein shakes, who does he think he is.

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#117

Post by watwut »

smokeyj wrote: post #50
Cyph0n wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, otherwise cheating would be a valid strategy (ethics aside).

But cheating is a valid strategy.. Colluding when everyone else is competing is exactly what intelligent people do. Not following the rules because they're stupid is what intelligent people do. It's not mutually exclusive to understand the fundamentals and cheat. The idea that we should compete with our peers for a chance at higher education is like a dystopian hunger games novel.

"Not following the rules because they're stupid is what intelligent people do."

Plenty of smart people follow the rules on principle and plenty of rule-breakers are dumb. Notably, many students who cheat has to cheat, because they are unable to learn underlying material.

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#118

Post by contravariant »

pixl97 wrote: post #58
contravariant wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the amount of experience is irrelevant why not use more employees for shorter periods of time?

What is the administrative cost per employee? In most business you will have a point where the cost per employee align with the output per employee and you try to peg production there. Also getting too many employees can lead to second and third order effects that have to be managed, like transportation of employees and parking.

Okay obviously there's some limit. It doesn't make sense to have 1000 employees that only work 5 min each. However I also fail to see the benefit of making anyone work 80 hours, rather than say 40.

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#119

Post by watwut »

DannyB2 wrote: post #17

If their job was, say, picking cotton, then the hours they spent at work would directly correlate to their work output. So what is the difference? Maybe scientists are still thinking about difficult problems when they are away from work. Like when they are sitting in their porch swing with nobody else around to distract.

Your hourly output will go down after a lot of manual work. Same as when you manually work without breakes.

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#120

Post by importantbrian »

There was a poll on HN a couple of years ago that asked how many productive hours each reader had in a given day, and if I remember correctly there was a large plurality that picked 4-6 and a rather large group that picked 2-4. Which seems to square fairly well with my personal experience and that of the scientists in the piece. I often wonder how much actual work people who spend 80 hours in the office are actually getting done.
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