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Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes

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Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes

#81

Post by kirubakaran »

Numberwang wrote: post #14
chrisweekly wrote: post #3

Related tangent: Newport's book "Deep Work" is excellent. It makes a strong case that deep work is increasingly rare, valuable, and meaningful. But it goes way beyond the "what" and the "why", providing the "how", in the form of specific, pragmatic, actionable guidance for achieving just that. Anecdotally, it's been very helpful for me.

Didnt someone do a summary of that book in like a single page somewhere? As in, there were good ideas but it could be summed up to a short paper. I can't find the link now.

Sure, and Woody Allen summarized War and Peace in one line: It involves Russia.

Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes

#82

Post by SatvikBeri »

peruvian wrote: post #53
chrisweekly wrote: post #3

Related tangent: Newport's book "Deep Work" is excellent. It makes a strong case that deep work is increasingly rare, valuable, and meaningful. But it goes way beyond the "what" and the "why", providing the "how", in the form of specific, pragmatic, actionable guidance for achieving just that. Anecdotally, it's been very helpful for me.

The book is good, but could've been one long blog post. It also sadly is not very relevant for many workers. Dr Newport is a tenured, famous professor. He sets his own schedule and probably works by himself. I'm an average tech worker in an open office. My office is quieter and more peaceful than most, but I can rarely get much "deep work" in. Meetings, Slack, etc. I have no door I can close and isolate myself with.…

He's been writing about and practicing these ideas since he was a grad student with no publications, well before having tenure. I actually think his early blog posts are substantially better and more detailed than his later books, e.g: http://calnewport.com/blog/2007/07/

Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes

#83

Post by abnry »

StavrosK wrote: post #21
Numberwang wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didnt someone do a summary of that book in like a single page somewhere? As in, there were good ideas but it could be summed up to a short paper. I can't find the link now.

I found that you could do the same for many business books, and had made a site to provide summaries of the books. What sparked me to do it was reading "The No Asshole Rule", which was so devoid of actual content that it could be summed up by its title. It was full of anecdotes and statistics that ended up drawing the wrong conclusion.

So I think this is true, but it is not necessarily a terrible thing. It is one thing to memorize a summary of a book. It is another to engage with and apply the ideas in the summary. The goal of a book is to hopefully give you enough time and space to do that.

Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes

#84

Post by Numberwang »

kirubakaran wrote: post #81
Numberwang wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didnt someone do a summary of that book in like a single page somewhere? As in, there were good ideas but it could be summed up to a short paper. I can't find the link now.

Sure, and Woody Allen summarized War and Peace in one line: It involves Russia.

And you could have made your comment even shorter by not writing it at all.

Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes

#85

Post by sigi45 »

rauhl wrote: post #20
deweller wrote: post #5

Cigarettes are a flawed analogy. There is no such thing as a "healthy" use of cigarettes. But I would argue that smart phones can be used in a healthy way. And I would also argue that the phone itself is not the problem. The problem is the reliance on the endorphin hit that comes from a new IM, like, post, etc. Some app makers have optimized their platform for engagement and have consequently made this highly addicti…

> There is no such thing as a "healthy" use of cigarettes. I don’t think that’s really true. The health effects of a cigarette a week would be indistinguishable from background noise. The fundamental problem with cigarettes is that they are addictive, and convenient (at one time very convenient), and so it’s easy to smoke more and more. That’s actually very similar to smartphones: their use is addictive, and convenie…

But my 'hit' are alarms, communication with family, news, emails etc

I prefer reading emails on my way. I'm distracted anyway and when I arrive at work, no emails anymore.

Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes

#86

Post by StavrosK »

abnry wrote: post #83
StavrosK wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found that you could do the same for many business books, and had made a site to provide summaries of the books. What sparked me to do it was reading "The No Asshole Rule", which was so devoid of actual content that it could be summed up by its title. It was full of anecdotes and statistics that ended up drawing the wrong conclusion.

So I think this is true, but it is not necessarily a terrible thing. It is one thing to memorize a summary of a book. It is another to engage with and apply the ideas in the summary. The goal of a book is to hopefully give you enough time and space to do that.

Unfortunately, most of the books I've read just have the extra material as filler, and don't lead to much engagement. It was just anecdotes like "the nurses in hospital X reported that their bosses were 30% assholes, and in hospital Y they were 96% assholes, so it's no wonder hospital X saved 49% more patients!" and other non-sequiturs like that.

Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes

#87

Post by deepaksurti »

keiferski wrote: post #34
chrisweekly wrote: post #3

Related tangent: Newport's book "Deep Work" is excellent. It makes a strong case that deep work is increasingly rare, valuable, and meaningful. But it goes way beyond the "what" and the "why", providing the "how", in the form of specific, pragmatic, actionable guidance for achieving just that. Anecdotally, it's been very helpful for me.

This book follows the recent trend of: find obvious slightly un-talked-about idea, create a fancy sounding term to describe it (preferably with as few words as possible - one is best, like Blink or Outliers .) These words should be vague and have hundreds of meanings - 'work', 'deep', or 'source', for example. Then, while you could summarize the idea in a single page, write 100+ pages framing the issue as a fundament…

Your definition also applies to Design Patterns!

Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes

#88

Post by andy_adams »

keiferski wrote: post #34
chrisweekly wrote: post #3

Related tangent: Newport's book "Deep Work" is excellent. It makes a strong case that deep work is increasingly rare, valuable, and meaningful. But it goes way beyond the "what" and the "why", providing the "how", in the form of specific, pragmatic, actionable guidance for achieving just that. Anecdotally, it's been very helpful for me.

This book follows the recent trend of: find obvious slightly un-talked-about idea, create a fancy sounding term to describe it (preferably with as few words as possible - one is best, like Blink or Outliers .) These words should be vague and have hundreds of meanings - 'work', 'deep', or 'source', for example. Then, while you could summarize the idea in a single page, write 100+ pages framing the issue as a fundament…

Sometimes a fundamental idea is simple, but it takes repeated hammering into your mind before you adopt it. 95% of a book might seem like fluff, but when you read the 1 example, the 1 anecdote, or the 1 "way of saying it" that resonates with you - that's often when the idea sticks and becomes a more permanent part of your life.

Expanding an idea into book form helps more people discover that "aha" moment than a single blog post does. Plus, people just take books more seriously in general!

Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes

#89

Post by ergothus »

goostavos wrote: post #77
HiroshiSan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though I completely agree with your sentiment, Cal explicitly defines the meaning of Deep Work, and I think it's an important thing society should think about as technology progresses. It helps to have the terminology to describe the state of our lives. From page 3 of the book, Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limi…

I read 75% of it, does that make me qualified to trash on it? I thought it was complete garbage. Not the idea, mind you, the _book_. It's a blog post's worth of information that's comically stretched out in an early college I'm-trying-to-meet-a-word count way. The book is almost entirely pointless fluff.

When I was in some philosophy classes in college I developed my "theory of bullshit".

Basically, when I'm reading your work explaining your theory, if I go through two full pages without encountering a new idea, your work is bullshit.

This doesn't apply to providing EXAMPLES of your theory, and a theory is often many new ideas so that explaining it will take many pages, but if I read 2 pages of explanation and don't find a single new idea - you're wasting my time and trying to build agreement without specificity.

Now, far too many years later, I am both amazed at the raw audacity of my younger self...and how accurate he was in finding which works would be more or less satisfying to read. While I generally prefer escapism in my reading, my virtual and physical shelves have no shortage of books that I've only read the first few chapters of, because of diminishing returns for the effort of reading them.

Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes

#90

Post by leetcrew »

mrfusion wrote: post #54
leetcrew wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unfortunately the law has to balance principle with practicality. it's hard to imagine a way of detecting a wide range of distracting behaviors without some sort of pervasive surveillance. would you be willing to accept a camera in your car than an LEO can tap into at any time?

That’s definitely true but why should it be any harder than detecting someone texting? From a practical standpoint, how about if your car is weaving back and forth they Get checked out.

AFAIK, people are rarely caught simply for texting and driving. to actually catch someone in the act, a cop has to drive by at the right moment and see the driver texting. more often, sms records will be examined in a crash postmortem. if texts were sent right before the time of the crash, it's good evidence that the driver was illegally texting. I guess if the police really care, they can do the same thing after pulling you over for erratic driving.

eating food doesn't leave the same digital trail. if a person crashes or gets pulled over for driving erratically and there's half a sandwich in the passenger seat, there's no way to know whether they were eating while driving or whether they just ate half of it in a parking lot 30 minutes ago.

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