Hacker News Reader

Comment by sage76 | Hacker News Reader

For anyone who is familiar with his work, are his assertions scientifically backed or is it more pop psychology?

I've read all his books and many of his articles. I would say they are science-informed. He works with expert scientists in the relevant fields and weaves in his own experiences.

But honestly, most of his ideas IMO are...straightforward and un-controversial? He's doing a good job re-emphasizing them and making the case for why:

- Focusing on 1 task for a long time is hard, but as with most things in human life you can practice & get better

- Deep work = hard, focused work to produce outsized, unique, creative value

- Most knowledge work nowadays is too frenetic and it's hard to do deep work unless you fight for it

- Switching tasks / contexts quickly has a switching cost. Sure, there's some neuro / psychology research around this ... but also haven't we like all felt that?

Cal does a good job drawing from his own experience and from other leading deep work thinkers and he's distilled those learnings in a way the rest of us can embrace & adopt progressively.

But he's not trying to pretend that this is scientifically the best way to crush it in your career or something

To me, it is "straight forward" in the same way that Dropbox was straight forward once it was successful (before their success, it wasn't so obvious). Once you read his material, you might think "oh yeah, of course," but there's far more value in his work than that. It sometimes seemed silly when I was reading his book Deep Work, because it's like "yeah man just put your head down and focus," but of course there is so much more to it than that. There is much more that could be said, but I need to get back to work :D I highly recommend his work.

The point about context switching being costly is definitely something that the general public doesn't get.

If you ask most people whether they can multitask, they will proudly say yes.

Bosses don't care about deep work either. I have been in jobs where they interrupted me every half an hour. I remember switching between 4 or more tasks trying to get anything done. It would all just get muddled in my head making it hard to keep track of what I was doing.

To me, whether books like Cal Newport's cite scientific studies is beside the point. The goal of reading a book like "Deep Work" isn't to gain objective knowledge of results in psychology, but to get some nuggets of wisdom that help you manage your own life. Call it "self help", "wisdom literature", or whatever; it's ultimately one person's perspective on what sort of attitudes help us cope with life and how the world squeezes us. Take that for what it's worth.

What good is a nugget of wisdom if it's false, and how do you know if it's true or false without a factual basis?

Don't say intuition; our intuition sucks. Don't say the need doesn't require some scientific standard of proof; if it's false, it's a waste of time or worse, gets a negative return on the time.

The issue is that most validated scientific results aren't directly applicable as life advice. It's better to be aware that applying them always involves some subjective interpretation, and that's not always better than some heuristic gained from experience.

It is pop psychology. Cherry-picked studies, anecdotes, etc.

I like his advice but his books don’t work to exclude other possible explanations or prove casual links/action mechanisms.

I would almost look at them as light philosophical works although the logical rigor for that field is also missing—again, saying this as an appreciator of his advice.

I disagree with you... . . . . . . . . ...on nothing :)

Not pop psychology. I read his book Deep Work; it was well researched (and good). Also, he's a comp sci professor @ Georgetown and has an excellent podcast.

A related question: is his advice helpful for startup founders? From my brief understanding of his work, it seems like it could be relevant to later-stage founders, who are not wearing quite as many hats on a daily basis, but would be less relevant for early-stage founders. But I'd be interested to know if anyone here has applied his advice in an early-stage context and found it helpful.

I'm a big deep work fan and have read most of Cal's books, and I would almost say neither

It's more like a set of ideas and practices, with a bunch of real-life examples, and tools/frameworks you could use in your own life.

A lot of what he's written makes sense to me, so having more formal frameworks and examples around that is helpful. It wasn't a game changing breakthrough

Reply on news.ycombinator.com