Consider working more hours and taking more stimulants

I encourage readers to consider whether they are the correct audience for this advice. As I understand it, this advice is directed at those for whom all of the following apply:

- Making a large impact on the world is overwhelmingly more important to you than other things people often want in their lives (such as spending lot of time with friends/family, raising children, etc.)
- You have already experienced a normal workload of ~38h per week for at least a couple of years, and found this pretty easy/comfortable to maintain
- You generally consider yourself to be happy, highly composed and emotionally stable. You have no history of depression or other mood-related dissorders.

If any of these things do not apply, this post is not for you! And it would probably be a huge mistake to seek out an adderall prescription. 
 

I'd be careful with this sort of advice. 

All I have to offer is my personal story which is of course very little evidence (though I've seen similar stories play out among many of my friends and colleagues). I'll first talk about my experience with stimulants and then about my experience with pushing myself to work more.

In my mid twenties I basically followed the same sort of logic and started taking amphetamines (very reasonable dosages, not more than twice a week). Every skeptic I told, among other things, the story of Paul Erdős who took amphetamines practically every day for decades and was perhaps the most productive mathematician ever. (In fact, Erdős was so productive that his friends created the widely used Erdős number which "describes a person's degree of separation from Erdős himself, based on their collaboration with him, or with another who has their own Erdős number.") 

Well, for me personally this worked for a few months after which side effects started to slowly show up (low mood, fatigue, insomnia, etc.). It was so gradual that I needed another few months to attribute them to amphetamines. It was also very much unlike how I expected side effects and withdrawal to manifest. It's (for many people) not this immediate thing that happens after the first time you take amphetamines. It's usually more gradual than that. Several of my friends also experimented with amphetamine for productivity-enhancing effects, for none of them it turned out positively. 

That being said, I've had somewhat better experiences with Ritalin (though I still often wonder whether it was net positive). And I made much better experiences yet with MAO inhibitors like tranylcypromine (which still have lots of side effects). (I might write more on this in the future.)

Regarding pushing yourself to work more: I think in my case this backfired extremely hard and caused me to burnout. In my twenties I always had this suspicion that talk about burnout is widely exacerbated, perhaps especially by lazy or selfish people who want to work less. (I was pretty stupid.) In my experience, especially if you are a researcher, pushing yourself hard doesn't work that well, at least not in the long  term. Your best ideas are probably two orders of magnitude more important than your average idea. If you start caring primarily about how many hours you work, you risk working on ideas that are easy to write about or execute. Coming up with good ideas often doesn't look like work at all. You might just be reading for your own pleasure or out of curiosity. That's at least how it worked for me. (As an example, I've had most of the core ideas for this article after I had reduced my working hours substantially.)

I guess if you have (very) short timeline, are generally quite young, healthy and robust, I'd be much more optimistic about such strategies. And as the case of e.g. Erdős shows, outliers do exist.

Agree with Xavier's comment that people should consider reversing the advice, but generally confused/worried that this post is getting downvoted (13 karma on 18 votes as of this writing). In general, I want the forum to be a place where bold, truth-seeking claims about how to do more good get attention. My model of people downvoting this is that they are worried that this will make people work harder despite this being suboptimal. I think that people can make these evaluations well for themselves, and that it's good to present people with information and arguments that might change their mind. Just as "donate lots of your money to global charities" and "stop buying animal products" are unwelcome to hear and might be bad for you if you take them to extremes in your context but are probably good for the world, "consider working more hours" could be bad in some cases but also might help people learn faster and become excellent at impactful work, and we should be at least be comfortable debating whether we're at the right point on the curve. 

One extremely under-rated impact of working harder is that you learn more. You have sub-linear short-term impact with increasing work hours because of things like burnout, or even just using up the best opportunities, but long-term you have super-linear impact (as long as you apply good epistemics) because you just complete more operational cycles and try more ideas about how to do the work.

Working more hours could help learning in the sense of helping you collect data faster. But if you want to learn from the data you already have, I'd suggest working fewer hours (or taking a vacation) to facilitate a reflective mindset.

I had a friend who took a stimulant every day, working at a startup, only to wake up many months later and realize the startup wasn't going anywhere & he'd wasted a lot of time. Beware tunnel vision. Once you're at 40 hours a week, it's generally more valuable to work smarter than work harder IMO.

"I agree with Lynette Bye that most of the working hours literature is poor—I'm even more skeptical than she is about agenda-driven research on Gilded Age factory workers—and that gaining an impression from anecdotes of top performers is better. "

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

"A 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."

First, I think it seems unattractive to me to have EA become a large group of amphetamine-fueled workaholics with high burnout rates - not 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 "99th percentile is 100+ times better than being 90th percentile" for the target groups of "operations, entrepreneurship, or community-building ". 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 "small chance of being a very high performer" and the "chance of burnout" 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 I'll 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 like the emphasis on working hard and I think working longer hours is good. Something happens when you start working 60+ hours a week where (in my experience) you begin to have blinders to everything else outside of that work.

For me it becomes the only thing I think about for weeks on end, and it becomes something in my life that I’m subconsciously working on even when I’m not doing the task. Like the mathematician who gets the answer to a proof she’s working on when swimming laps at the pool.

But I’m very very pessimistic about hard stimulants. Nicotine, caffeine, adderall, etc have diminishing returns and tolerance increases the dose required to get the originally stimulating effects. We have heard it before but it is worth mentioning. I would not mentor my bright 16 year old cousin to become reliant on any stimulant.

Weight lifting is underrated. Consciously placing yourself in positive environments is underrated. Maintaining strong mutually beneficially relationships is underrated. And eating a wide variety of fruits and vegetables is underrated.

You should mention that this graph is not from academics testing nootropics on a random sample, but self-reported from nootropics users. So it is non-random, uncontrolled, and unblinded.

The survey also had probabilities of side effects. Maybe include those? A cost-benefit analysis really should also include the potential costs, and not just the potential benefits.

This post with its comments is a valuable discussion.

The post on its own with its lack of cautions and provisos is potentially harmful to many readers, and high upvotes may lead readers to trust it too much. Strong downvote for these reasons.

It is really unfortunate that the existing evidence about work hours as mentioned in Lynette's post is so weak and we need to make decisions based on anecdotical evidence because there is nothing better. It seems to me quite an important topic to study and I wonder why it is not happening.

Maybe it's just really hard to study properly but even then it might be worth it.

Did a Bahamian prison cell write this