He's pushing back on the idea with zero research and zero expertise.
You could literally ask your taxi driver for their thoughts and it would be as helpful.
I prefer to see what the outcomes are from real-world experiments which to date are showing that shorter work weeks can be effective in many situations.
Disagree. Sure, he's not an empirical researcher, but he does have decades of experience being highly productive. I think his opinion holds some weight. He's also clear that he's speaking from personal experience and not making a scientific claim.
He does not have a monopoly on being highly productive.
And I know he is not making a scientific claim because he is not done any research or has any background in this field. So his opinion does have weight. The same weight as literally any other random person on this planet.
Carmack has accomplished more in the span of a few years (e.g. 1992-1997) than most people do in a lifetime. Saying that his opinion about productivity is equivalent to a random person's is just a bad faith argument.
> but he does have decades of experience being highly productive
...in software engineering. But then he steers into talk about menial jobs. I worked minimum wage jobs for over a decade before I got an app published. I rather doubt Carmack worked a manual job for very long but perhaps someone can correct me.
You could literally ask your taxi driver for their thoughts and it would be as helpful.
I prefer to see what the outcomes are from real-world experiments which to date are showing that shorter work weeks can be effective in many situations.