âI agree with Lynette Bye that most of the working hours literature is poorâIâm even more skeptical than she is about agenda-driven research on Gilded Age factory workersâand that gaining an impression from anecdotes of top performers is better. â
I am worried about relying on anecdotes of top performers as this has an obvious selection effect neglecting the (probably sizeable) group of people that tried stimuant-driven work binges and simply burned out.
This is hand-wavingly addressed later
âA third reason is that burnout risk might be overrated if most of your impact comes from the small chance of you being a very high performer, perhaps because being 99th percentile is 100+ times better than being 90th percentile. This makes studying the habits of top performers even more useful because the survivorship bias is less important.â
First, I think it seems unattractive to me to have EA become a large group of amphetamine-fueled workaholics with high burnout ratesânot even because of optics, but because of the immense suffering of those that will burn out.
Secondly, this neglects how many of the high-impact performers would have been high-impact absent amphetamines or excessive working hours.
Third, it strikes me as implausible that the â99th percentile is 100+ times better than being 90th percentileâ for the target groups of âoperations, entrepreneurship, or community-building â. I did a tad of community-building myself, and would be very surprised if for a community-builder, adding 20 hours of work a week even approximates the value of the first 40 hours spent on community-building, and honestly shocked if it outsized it by a factor of 100.
Lastly and most importantly, it is entirely unclear to me in what relation the âsmall chance of being a very high performerâ and the âchance of burnoutâ is. It seems entirely plausible to me that the chance of me becoming Erdos-like because I take stimulants and work a ton is thousands of times less likely than the chance that Iâll burn out because I take stimulants and work a ton.
I also generally think that health-related advice that goes against widely-held priors should at least attempt to quantify risks and benefits using actual numbers, rather than waving hands.
I am worried about relying on anecdotes of top performers as this has an obvious selection effect neglecting the (probably sizeable) group of people that tried stimuant-driven work binges and simply burned out.
This is hand-wavingly addressed later
First, I think it seems unattractive to me to have EA become a large group of amphetamine-fueled workaholics with high burnout ratesânot even because of optics, but because of the immense suffering of those that will burn out.
Secondly, this neglects how many of the high-impact performers would have been high-impact absent amphetamines or excessive working hours.
Third, it strikes me as implausible that the â99th percentile is 100+ times better than being 90th percentileâ for the target groups of âoperations, entrepreneurship, or community-building â. I did a tad of community-building myself, and would be very surprised if for a community-builder, adding 20 hours of work a week even approximates the value of the first 40 hours spent on community-building, and honestly shocked if it outsized it by a factor of 100.
Lastly and most importantly, it is entirely unclear to me in what relation the âsmall chance of being a very high performerâ and the âchance of burnoutâ is. It seems entirely plausible to me that the chance of me becoming Erdos-like because I take stimulants and work a ton is thousands of times less likely than the chance that Iâll burn out because I take stimulants and work a ton.
I also generally think that health-related advice that goes against widely-held priors should at least attempt to quantify risks and benefits using actual numbers, rather than waving hands.