Follow up on Herbert Simon. From his book “Models of my life”
Worked 60-80 hours a week. But does not detail what “work” means.
When collaborating with someone he comments that most of his day’s work would be usually done by 10am, about the time his collaborator would be getting started. This perhaps hints that early in the day he did a few hours of really hard intellectual work.
What HS regarded as hard work may differ from other people. For example he learned about 20 languages to the point of being able to read papers, and 4-5 to the level of reading literature. But he regarded this as a fun/hobby thing.
He had a problem of hobbies turning into work, and had to drop several of them (e.g. playing musical instruments).
At college he only did enough work to get graded at A. Early on he spent too much time playing ping-pong and his grades slipped.
He published ~1,000 papers and 37 books and accrued to date over 350,000 citations. So he was amazingly productive.
He spent a lot of time on office politics and other managerial and administrative things.
He found writing easy and so wrote many/most of the papers he was a collaborator on.
Conclusion: HS was very smart, very productive, found things that were challenging for others to be fun/hobbies, and while it seems he did work long hours, it is not clear how much time he spent at the highest level of effort. There are hints he did concentrate his top tier work in the first few hours of the day.
I think this is sometimes true but often not.
An example:
Andrew Denton, an Australian journalist, did a podcast about the question of euthanasia ( well worth the listen https://www.wheelercentre.com/broadcasts/podcasts/better-off-dead). During this process he attended a right to life conference. During the conference speakers spoke openly about the fact that the arguments they used in public against voluntary euthanasia were not at all their own reasons for opposing it.
In summary their actual reason for opposing VE is that in Christian theology you are not allowed to die until Jesus decides to take you / that you have suffered enough. Because this reason is unacceptable to most people, they said that they would try on various arguments and use the ones that seemed to resonate e.g. Hitler used euthanasia as an excuse to murder people, people will kill granny to get the inheritance, people will kill the disabled and other “useless eaters” , governments will encourage euthanasia to save aged care dollars.
In American politics Donald Trump started using the phrase “Drain the Swamp” frequently when he noticed that people responded to it. I leave it to the reader to judge whether it was his intention to drain the swamp, or whether he even thought it was possible.
In general IMHO people often advance bogus arguments because they know their real reasons will not be acceptable. In fact there is some evidence that confabulation is a core competency of the human brain. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain