Comment by Atrine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Atrine | Hacker News Reader

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I find Cal Newport and the world around him very interesting. He's a CS computer geek that plays arm-chair psychologist in all his popular work. I've often wondered where his abilities breakdown and I think the article nails it:

"While there are many opinions and resources on how to best regulate overstimulation and overcome digital addictions, Newport’s directive is refreshingly simple: get rid of those things that are overstimulating you."

Really what this is saying is that there are many opinions and resources backed by research and psychological study that has complicated answers. And that Newport's solution is so simple is that it almost equates to "feeling depressed? Don't!"

So yeah, while Newport has interesting ideas and can boil things down for us techies to get behind (sometimes), he doesn't fully know what he's talking about. He's not really a trained psychologist and clearly doesn't understand things at a deep level. He's basically talking to people that are like him rather than people at large.

I agree with your points. Cal Newport's content comes up a lot when people are searching for ways to improve productivity by reducing distractions from the web, and people looking for it are more interested in an easy to grasp solution that sounds scientific enough than more complex answers from scientific studies. By definition the target audience that cannot do deep work also cannot comprehend more elaborate studies anyway.

I followed the advice (sometimes attributed to him) to eliminate social media and it works (for obvious reasons), but it is as good as an advice of not going outside on the rain in order to not get wet. We might as well use some dedicated tool to minimize getting wet while still being able to go outside in the rain.

Cal's podcast and books are a guilty pleasure of mine. Yes, he has a tendency to oversimplify. Yes, he can be a bit cheesy. But I think that his cheesy and simple presentation style is kind of his secret sauce. If you want a nuanced take on how difficult it is to stay off your phone and social media, there are other places you can get that (Stolen Focus by Johann Hari for example).

I really admire his efforts to formalize his thinking about these topics into systems that readers and listeners can implement step-by-step. His emphasis on capture systems, time-block planning, and multi-scale planning, plus the whole "deep work/deep life" thing he's got going on now, have really changed my life and habits for the better in the past year or so. It may not work for everyone, but it works for me.

I have no opinion on him.

I can tell you I have gone to probably a dozen therapists and have received precious little to help and quite a bit more that hurt me. Psychology is not even close to a science. You can’t make false a falsifiable assertions and test them reliably.

I would trust his assertions slightly more, perhaps, than those of most psychologists.

Well, he's not a neuroscientist either. Nor a psychiatrist. So GP's main point still holds.

On quick inspection, his experiments seem to be fairly well controlled. I will venture a guess that they are a little better than average, and we know that only half of studies can be replicated.

Assuming that his data is fairly clean, I don’t see why it’s out of the realm of possibility that he could be contributing substantially to neuroscience no matter what is academic background. The results should speak for themselves.

IMHO academia is incredibly broken anyway, and the tenure system has had the opposite effect of it as was intended. Professors are now so desperate to keep tebure they do nothing to challenge the orthodoxy and everything to crush those who do.

> On quick inspection, his experiments seem to be fairly well controlled

What experiments?

Are the only people qualified to speak on the mental experience of being human neuroscientists and psychiatrists? Seems like you’re completely missing GP’s point.

There's a difference between speaking on the mental experience of being human and throwing around words like "dopamine", and "detox" to support unfounded claims about miracle cures.

Haven’t seen any mentions of miracle cures? But I have barely a passing knowledge of his work.

I agree -- in some regards, it's like he's separating conscious thought? Not sure if that makes sense. Like, if it were that easy to just will yourself out of it I'm sure everyone would have quit horrible addictions. The entire point is that the dopamine drives your behavior to a point where it's integrated in everything you do. Sure, with enough effort you can build routines that replace that with more intrinsically beneficial stuff, but I don't think it's just a matter of "simply getting rid of bad things"

Even if he was a trained psychologist I'd be skeptical. The guy who wrote Why We Sleep is, if I recall correctly both a neuroscientist and psychologist and turns out the work was riddled with factual errors to the point of being virtually useless.

There's a lot of sounds sort of correct but has no scientific basis type stuff being published in the public intellectual / life advice genre, probably not surprisingly. Especially all the 'dopamine detox' lingo should set alarm bells off as it is essentially modern day bloodletting.

But where are the psychologists to supplant him? And this advice isn't that bad. It's similar to diet advice.

Diet is complicated so experts just say to restrict calories whether that's through reduced carbs, reduced fat or pretending to eat like a caveman.

While depression can be caused by a multitude of factors we don't have control over, we do however have the option to turn off the TV while doing other things, suppress notifications, focus on one thing at the time...

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