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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

I'm worried this is nothing more than intellectuals showing pretty severe selection bias.

Take the archetypes listed. There are non famous failures in each. Selecting the successes is a bit of a sleight. Worse, the logic of, "if it isn't working for you, you should try a different method. It is you that is incompatible, not the methods."

I mean, I want to think that Poirot's "little grey cells" are a thing. And I know I have solved problems by thinking about them. The same problems colleagues were busy trying to solve.

I also know my colleagues have probably done more busily solving things than I have thinking about solutions. More, I know they also think. It is not an either or.

So what is to be learned? Keep trying? Change strategies. But stay away from goto statements. There is not true way, but your way is probably wrong. Or at least, you are wrong for that way? :(

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I think what they are trying to convey is that mindless practice simply reinforces current skills.

We've all been in that state of high performance where suddenly its 2am and you think "ok 5 more minutes" then its suddenly 4am.

I would liken a lot of what he is saying there to a kind of trance state, similar to self hypnosis, where there is only the work in front of you.

I get into this state most often when I sit down to produce any kind of art, I spit and spat around starting but then after a while settle into it and can spend hours working on something, its a whole different feeling to just regular doodling, its all encompassing.

I get that they want to convey that. But prove it. There have been some studies into this, I am sure. Show some of the replications. (Specifically, do not show the initial studies.)

Appeal to the times I've been focused for a time gets me to ignore all of the times I did the same and produced nothing. Not only produced nothing, but consumed nothing, as well. Both have happened. I do not keep a solid journal to say that one happens more than the other. One certainly made me happy, so I can remember it better. But that is the definition of selection bias.

>Appeal to the times I've been focused for a time gets me to ignore all of the times I did the same and produced nothing.

Were you really focused then? Not having distractions but still staring blankly at a screen, is not the same as focusing.

Worst case, even if you try 100 things and none of those works, you know that these 100 things are not the solutions to the problem -- something that you didn't before. And you didn't just reject 100 random things, but 100 things that you legitimately could consider as solutions.

I've never not had at least partial results when I have been focused. I've had nothing too many times when I was distracted.

This is just the true Scotsman fallacy, though. I have been plenty focused before and not accomplished anything of note.

More, I've had plenty of brief diversions into a topic that produced more learning than some deliberate attempts I have made.

>This is just the true Scotsman fallacy, though

I think the "true Scotsman fallacy" is often used as a way to dismiss actual classification mistakes.

What one calls focused might not actually be focused -- humans are easy to deceive themselves.

Besides, I don't see what other possibility would there be. That being focused is not important? That people can just as well achieve the same (or even more) things when unfocused vs when focused? That we need special statistical studies to be able to tell that working focused on that work is better? None of these look plausible to me.

If what you're saying is that sometimes non-deliberate attempts can work too, that might be so, but by definition those are non-deliberate, happy accidents.

You can't program these. What you can program is actual work -- and that better be focused, than, "I'll fool around for weeks with other things until inspiration strikes".

So what are you arguing? My point is that "not deliberate, happy accidents," as you call them, likely number in similar magnitude as the result of deliberate focused work.

So, why then don't we encourage more practices that encourage happy accidents?

I accept that the one argument is more appealing to emotional logic. I am highly suspicious of arguments that speak to that form of plausibility.

>So what are you arguing? My point is that "not deliberate, happy accidents," as you call them, likely number in similar magnitude as the result of deliberate focused work.

Then I'm arguing that you're an outlier in that.

And I'll add that for most people, even those happy accidents come when they're engaged in focused work -- not when they're having distractions all the time. Do you really get happy accidents while some colleague annoys you with questions every few minutes, or while checking your Twitter and Facebook and not doing anything specific?

Most of my happy accidents are while I'm biking. When playing with things. When jumping quickly through all the details with a co-worker.

(Twitter and Facebook? Yeah, not so much.)

Do, could I be an outlier? Certainly possible. But I don't think it is a safe thought. More likely, I am a near average person. Which is why I would love studies actually demonstrating this.

Yeah, I get your point, and a lot of this is individual to the person... I personally know that when I am in the zone I perform better and remember the lessons learned for longer.

I would certainly be interested in more/followup studies regarding this matter.

You "know" this. But how? Have you truly tabulated results showing it is the case? Not just collected confirming data, but tried to disprove it?

Would you like me to?

I don't have that big of a horse in this race, all told. So, do I want you personally to do so? Don't care. I would be interested in evidence in the debate, though.

>I'm worried this is nothing more than intellectuals showing pretty severe selection bias.

What intellectuals? These plans can equally apply to a high-school educated person learning to cook or whatever.

>Take the archetypes listed. There are non famous failures in each. Selecting the successes is a bit of a sleight.

What archetypes? The post never mentions any archetypes or lists any chery-picked successes. Perhaps you mean the "strategies" listed? Those are mere ways to approach the issue.

Besides what's important is not whether this practice will have failures -- as it doesn't guarantee a success nowhere in the post. The real question is whether it's more successful than alternative approaches.

>So what is to be learned?

That minimizing distractions, and focusing for some time even if you are if you are confused at first, is better than not doing it.

And that if you want to try the system in practice and see if it works for you, pick a subject, and devote seven 4-hour sessions to it.

Even if you don't learn that much at the end, it would still be better than spending the same time with analysis paralysis about how to study...

The archetypes were the "monastic", "bimodal", etc. Called them strategies, but each is backed by a success.

But, if you have evidence that these are more successful than alternatives, I'm game. Where is the evidence? For that matter, what are the alternatives?

(Currently typing with my 4mo old. So... apologies for any typos.)

>But, if you have evidence that these are more successful than alternatives, I'm game. Where is the evidence? For that matter, what are the alternatives?

The strategies (or archetypes) are just 4 different ways to achieve a focus period for doing some work.

Regardless of which you pick, the core thing you look for in each (and possibly others, but those seem quite an exhaustive list of such strategies, or at least the major ones) is focused work.

I don't think we need any evidence besides the mountains of empirical evidence that focused work is better - not any more than people needed evidence that we should breath before we learned about oxygen and the workings of the lungs...

Is there mountains of evidence? Seems like mountains of anecdotes. Most famous work was work for hire. And yet we don't hear how getting paid for what you produce helps you produce. Often we hear the opposite.

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