All corrections
universalprior.substack.com/p/on-not-reading-papers
1 correction found
1
Claim
Assuming a lowball estimate of four hours to engage deeply with a paper would mean 50 hours of reading per week.
Correction
The arithmetic is off. At 100 papers per month and 4 hours per paper, the workload is about 400 hours per month—roughly 92 hours per week, not 50.
Full reasoning
The post is discussing a researcher who claims to read 100 papers per month. Using the footnote’s own assumption of 4 hours per paper, that is:
- 100 × 4 = 400 hours per month.
Converting that to a weekly figure does not give 50 hours/week:
- If you use a simple 4-week month, it is 400 / 4 = 100 hours/week.
- If you convert using a normal calendar year, a common year has 365 days, i.e. 52.14 weeks, so 400 hours/month × 12 / 52 ≈ 92.3 hours/week.
Either way, the correct figure is far above 50 hours/week. The claim therefore understates the weekly reading time by roughly a factor of two.
1 source
- Calendar 2021 | timeanddate.com
The year 2021 is a common year, with 365 days in total.