Interesting discussion of concentration and productivity [link]
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2013/02/04/four-hours-of-concentration/
And since this is the Internet, and facts are involved, our gwern turns up there also.
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http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2013/02/04/four-hours-of-concentration/
And since this is the Internet, and facts are involved, our gwern turns up there also.
Comments (40)
It is striking how he chooses to link to comments mentioning people who claim to do the same, but not to comments mentioning people who claim to do differently.
Nobody owns gwern.
Chuck Norris tried purchasing gwern once, but gwern sent him an exhaustive cost-benefit analysis that caused him to change his mind.
Just more anecdata, but this jives with me. I keep time logs. I have "maximal mental effort" (MME) and "everything else." For me it's about scope and depth: MME is about how much I can integrate and bring to bear on what I'm doing, like my capacity to coherently integrate citations into my writing. So perhaps it's how large and long you can subconsciously sustain "useful potential inputs" to conscious working memory. Monkey coding I can do, for sure, many hours a day. But coding at my maximum ability is, again, 2-4 hours per day.
Missing summary: even the most productive people can only put in 3-4 hours of intense work per day on a consistent basis.
This is not true.
Guys, the reasonable default is not "yeah this sounds similar to what EY said once," but "I don't believe you."
Are you just stating that that the upper limit is not 4? Interesting - what is it and please estimate how rare the ability is. Is there anything else unusual about these people?
They seem to self-select into prominent academic positions (of course I deal with academic folks, not folks with "straight jobs" -- likely there are such people everywhere). I am not sure how rare the ability is, because I think most people do not work up to their genetic limits -- usually acrasia gets them first. Academics often have an easier acrasia problem because (a) their work is interesting/rewarding and (b) collaborators/deadlines help get across motivation lulls.
People in startups are another example. Motivated startup people, especially single digit employees, often work long hours and intensely and productively.
Good for you! :)
I actually was not talking about myself (self-evaluation is noisy), but people I know.
Don't tell gwern ...
Although something like "hours worked in a productive manner" should be well quantifiable, for most professions.
Self-experimentation is causal inference with a sample size of 1 and selection bias, e.g. silly and doomed.
Self-experimentation with within-subject design can be internally valid (I make sure mine are well-powered, even, which is more than some psychologists can say), but this does nothing about external validity or selection bias.
Which ironically makes self-experimentation somewhat analogous to quantum suicide experiments: because of selection bias, observers of my self-experiments will rationally learn little even as I learn much more. Someone watching quantum suicides will expect to see lots of survivals, and someone watching self-experiments will expect to see lots of positive results, even if quantum suicide doesn't work and self-experiments measure nothing but null effects.
(Except maybe if the observer had some reason to believe they would have learned about my experiments regardless of the experiment results... possibly because they became interested in my writings for non-experiment reasons, maybe? I wonder.)
When you say "can be internally valid" what do you mean? What about interactions from repeated treatments? I mean, correlation can equal causation, too. But that's a pretty weak standard to meet.
Also, how do you know the selection bias does not create non-causal explanations for observed dependence? For example, in case control studies you select based on the child of the outcome:
T -> Y -> S, with unobserved U1 being a parent of T, and U2 being a parent of Y (U1, U2 possibly dependent creating unobserved confounding).
If we select on S FIRST, and THEN try to randomize T (conditioning and do(.) do not commute), then we create a dependence between T and U2 due to "explaining away." Randomizing on T cuts the arc from U1 to T (good -- we get rid of some unobserved confounding), but does nothing about this new dependence between T and U2 introduced by the selection procedure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_validity
?
I don't understand your hypothetical. Could you give a concrete example?
http://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/~maxvd/didelez_etal_StatSci_final.pdf
With repeated measures design the problem is whether the "washout period" is sufficient.
What of the Muehlhauser Exception?
Muehlhauser does not work more than 4 hours a day. He makes each hour last 7.
Hour?
indeed
Enlighten those who are not in the know please?
Luke Muehlhauser facts.
("Exception" doesn't correspond to a literal event, more the archetype of Freakishly Focused Person)
Oh yeah, so here's how I actually log these 2-4 hours: If a) I'm only doing X (e.g. not also eating or listening to music), and b) I truly expect not to be distracted (I'm in an isolated location and email and phone are off), then I log that time. Otherwise, it goes into the "everything else" bucket. From my log, it looks like I average only 15 hours/wk under these criteria.
Many thinks that they can concentrate for much more hours, every day. Perhaps they don't know what does it really mean, to concentrate.
Thats a completely unfalsifiable claim
I can think of two ways to interpret that, both falsifiable:
people are mistaken about their ability to concentrate for many hours.
This is easily falsified simply by looking for some objective measure of concentration. EEG frequencies, bug rates of checked-in code, performance on any of a thousand psychological tasks/tests, etc.
We could refine this with explanations for why they are mistaken about their endurance: because their cognitive abilities deteriorate over time including self-monitoring cognition? Self-deception, possibly related to status-seeking? Either of these could lead to a lack of knowing what it really means to concentrate.
people do not put forth peak effort but average effort, and they can do average effort for many more hours and have accurate beliefs, but they are mistaken when they try to distinguish between peak and average. Perhaps it has been too long since they exerted peak mental effort and they've forgotten how unchallenging their daily activities are (I think of intelligent people who crack a math text and remark how much their head hurts and how tired they are after a few minutes).
The difference can be gauged by lengthy testing with and without high stakes or other forms of pressure, and then one simply watches performance over time: if someone performs better under high stakes and their performance does not drop off over many hours, then their claim was right.
(Concrete example: subjects take 3 back-to-back SATs covering ~8 hours, for no stakes; then the next day a gun is put to their head... Does SAT 3 have the same or higher score as SAT 1 under both conditions?)
Nah, there are lots of tests for how focused someone is. Approach them from behind and drop a heavy book on the floor. If they get furious at you because it'll take them hours to get back to juggling eggs, or if they don't notice at all, they were concentrating.