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hyporational comments on question: the 40 hour work week vs Silicon Valley? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (107)
The 40 hour work week is a sweeping kind of a claim you wouldn't accept in any other context. It's like saying that to maximize the benefits of physical exercise, you shouldn't work out more than 10 hours a week, then proceeding to ignore the type of benefit you're looking for, anatomy, intensity, intervals, session length, fun, safety, individual talent etc.
I've seen frequent claims on LW that shorter hours are better for productivity, but very little data to back them up. Why don't people quote some studies so that we can scrutinize them to see if they actually say what people claim they say?
As a side note, what do you people do on your free time? Unless you're letting your brain idly daydream much of what you do on your free time could be considered hard work by others.
"You people"? Allow me to suggest that lowering the level of hostility and contempt a notch might make productive discussion more likely.
I'm not sure if you're serious or humorously playing the oppressed minority card. I fail to register contempt or hostility in the comment. Just trying to be a bit more lively. Chillax.
I consider myself one of the people I'm "you peopleing" anyways. Edited the last sentence to seem less accusatory.
Serious (and not particularly considering myself part of any oppressed minority).
My experience is that addressing any group as "you people" is a near-infallible sign of hostility and contempt, with (not always but often) a side order of prejudice against whatever (political, religious, philosophical, social-class, ...) group "you people" might be part of.
Maybe my experience is atypical, or maybe yours is. You might want to do a bit of googling and see how the phrase is used and how it's perceived; if your impression on doing so accords with mine, you'll probably want to avoid using it when you don't want to signal hostility and contempt.
My mental autocompleter matches "you people" to things like "you people are all the same", "what the ---- is wrong with you people", etc.
(I note that urbandictionary.com's second definition for "you people" is "Blacks". For what it's worth, that isn't something I read into it -- though I see there's a similar suggestion on wiktionary, so maybe it isn't just urbandictionary.com being flaky.)
If your reaction to the phrase is even slightly frequent then I might want to address people in a more neutral way. Is "you guys" better or am I being sexist now? Is just "people" better? Suggestions? Maybe I should go all medical and drop pronouns altogether just to be sure :)
Since I'm not a native speaker my connotation-o-meter isn't always amazingly tuned. The issue is amplified when I think and type quickly. Since you're a native speaker I suppose your experience is more typical than mine, so I'll avoid "you peopleing" in the future unless I want to be extra cheeky.
You might want to better take into account the amount of non-native speakers here next time you're instinctively reading between the lines. Anyways I'm glad I learned something new about connotations again.
"You guys" has absolutely none of the hostile/contemptuous feeling that "you people" has (at least for me). It's distinctly informal and (as you surmise) some people may interpret it as sexist.
I think I'd generally just say "you" and, if necessary, make it explicit what particular group I had in mind.
It hadn't occurred to me that you might not be a native English speaker; sorry about that. I guess it's one of the perils of speaking the language very well :-).
As another non-native speaker, I frequently find myself looking for a "plural you" in English, which was what I read hyporational's phrase as trying to convey. Useful feedback not to use 'you people'.
I do, on occasion, start sentences with "you people" which is a sign that (a) I'm not very serious about the issue; and (b) consider myself to be noticeably different from those I'm addressing. I do NOT use it to signal hostility and contempt, though I'm aware that some people do.
Context matters.
Yup, context matters. However, you should consider the possibility that an appreciable fraction of your audience will fail to read your mind, and will (consciously or not) take your "you people" as indicating hostility, which you probably don't want.
(Though ... it sounds as if you're talking about a use of the phrase with a rather different structure from the one we're discussing here: using it vocatively at the start of the sentence. "Hey, you people, listen up! Blah blah blah." or something like that. I don't think I've ever heard that done; it would strike me as rather odd, but not as hostile and dismissive in the same way as the sort of usage I thought we were discussing.)
No, I use it in the, ahem, traditional structure along the lines of "Now what you people fail to understand is that...".
I understand that some people might read it as hostility. That's fine. I usually scatter enough hints in the text for the clueful people to figure out I'm not actually foaming at the mouth, plus I prefer to have a bit of ambiguity mixed in -- it adds flavour :-)
(I am commenting only to remark that it was not I who downvoted you.)
Thanks for the concern :-) though I don't care much about downvotes.
Off the top of my head, in very roughly decreasing order, sleeping, browsing the web, hanging out with friends at the pub, playing the bass, listening to music, having sex, studying languages, eating, cooking, going shopping, reading books, watching movies, sightseeing.
Many of the things in my previous paragraph have very few people doing them for a living. And there are reasons for that.
I don't consider sleeping, cooking, eating or having sex free time, I consider them maintenance :)
Anyways my point is that most of the things you listed are definitely work for the brain, yet people don't think they affect your ability to be productive at work, since they're not something you're paid to do, which I don't think makes much sense.
If I mostly lived on Soylent or Mealsquares you'd have a point. Given that I often-ish go out to restaurants...
Well, not all the things on that list are the same: arguing that someone is wrong on the internet may drain my stamina almost as much as my paid job, but chatting over a beer occasionally glancing at the TV will drain my stamina almost as little as idly daydreaming -- possibly even less, depending on what I'm daydreaming about.
It totally does. First, there are these effects, and second, as I said, there are reasons why they're not something you're paid to do.
I'm not paid to listen to music I like but I might need to be paid to listen to music you like. Same deal with browsing your websites, reading your books and watching your movies.
If you're enjoying your work and having your cached selves do most of it, what's the big deal with long hours? How will they impact your productivity, if having ridiculously meticulous conversations on your favorite website doesn't?
Well, but the fact that it's the music I choose to listen to etc. means it doesn't drain my willpower as much. See also this.
Actually I meant the part of that post where if you pay someone to do something they'll enjoy doing it less.
Less time left to do the other things I mentioned? Certain things are terminal values; fiat currency isn't one of those. (Granted, I don't only do my current job for the cash, but I wouldn't spend as much time on it if I didn't need money.)