guzey

Consider reading the last section of the post.

Consider actually reading the post before commenting next time. I didn't do an "180" switch. I wrote:

1. There’s no good medical reason to sleep more than the minimum you can sustain.

Not this one! Fight me.

No, you are. You specifically wrote that I "equate" (3) and (4) to my conclusion. You wrote:

probably also wouldn't equate "a person with an ADRB1 mutation can sleep less" and "a single individual that underwent brain surgery can sleep less" with "Decreasing sleep by 1-2 hours a night in the long-term has no negative health effects".

How does your essay explain that I feel horrible for 2-3 hours after waking up if I don't get enough sleep?

So, you are saying that when you don't get enough sleep, you feel fine most of the day, except for the first 2-3 hours after waking up? This is pretty weird and I don't have a good explanation for you.

Are you seriously arguing that sleeping out in the nature, potentially with dangerous animals around you, on bear skins, with several friends (on the same bear skin?) is as comfortable as sleeping on a modern mattress in your home?

Yes, please, do continue to slam a whole field that you are not yourself in. Love hearing from people who love to just cherry pick a couple of articles to support their claims. eye roll

I wholeheartedly agree. Similarly, people outside of astrology shouldn't be criticizing astrology.

Is drinking modern water a superstimulus like modern junk food from my analogy is?

So what you are saying is that, just like me, in your 20s you were optimize for getting shit done and now, being older, you optimize for feeling good and don't care about doing as much and think that optimizing for doing earlier was a mistake for you. This is reasonable!

I probably also wouldn't equate "a person with an ADRB1 mutation can sleep less" and "a single individual that underwent brain surgery can sleep less" with "Decreasing sleep by 1-2 hours a night in the long-term has no negative health effects".

I made 5 points in that section (https://guzey.com/theses-on-sleep/#decreasing-sleep-by-1-2-h...):

1. A sleep researcher who trains sailors to sleep efficiently in order to maximize their race performance believes that 4.5-5.5 hours of sleep is fine.

2. 70% of 84 hunter-gatherers studied in 2013 slept less than 7 hours per day, with 46% sleeping less than 6 hours.

3. A single-point mutation can decrease the amount of required sleep by 2 hours, with no negative side-effects.

4. A brain surgery can decrease the amount of sleep required by 3 hours, with no negative-side effects.

5. Sleep is not required for memory consolidation.

You cited (3) and (4) but ignored (1), (2), and (5) all of which are based on studying dozens and hundreds of people.

Yep, and here's conclusion of this argument:

Now, what if the only sleep available to you was modern sleep?

1. If you don’t sleep at all, you go crazy, because some amount of sleep is necessary.

2. If you sleep just enough to be awake during the day, you’ll be dreaming of getting a nap at the sight of a bed and will be distracted and sleepy all the time. Importantly, I claim, in this situation, the feeling of sleepiness does not mean that you should sleep more – it’s your brain being overpowered by a superstimulus while being bored.

3. I claim that if you sleep as much as you want, you’ll probably sleep too much and become more susceptible to depression. [by analogy to eating too much]

- And if you sleep way too much at once, you’ll be feeling terrible afterwards, however pleasant the sleep was.

For the readers, here's my actual argument (https://guzey.com/theses-on-sleep/#comfortable-modern-sleep-...):

1. Experiencing hunger is normal and does not necessarily imply that you are not eating enough. Never being hungry means you are probably eating too much.

2. Experiencing sleepiness is normal and does not necessarily imply that you are undersleeping. Never being sleepy means you are probably sleeping too much.

I'm curious - what do you believe I should've done? How do you discredit a p-hacked small-n experiment, aside from noting that it should not be trusted a priori due to the extreme bias of the results expected from such kind of studies?

Hilarious. Except for the fact that a bunch of neuroscientists actually read my draft and gave me comments a lot of which I incorporated in the essay, e.g. https://guzey.com/theses-on-sleep/#appendix-philipp-streiche...

For those interested, here's my critique of sleep science (https://guzey.com/theses-on-sleep/#our-priors-about-sleep-re...):

Do you believe in power-posing? In ego depletion? In hungry judges and brain training? [1]

If the answer is no, then your priors for our knowledge about sleep should be weak because “sleep science” is mostly just rebranded cognitive psychology, with the vast majority of it being small-n, not pre-registered, p-hacked experiments.

I have been able to find exactly one pre-registered experiment of the impact of prolonged sleep deprivation on cognition. It was published by economists from Harvard and MIT in 2020 and its pre-registered analysis found null effects of sleep on all variables of interest [2] (the authors changed analysis post-hoc and fished out some significant effects. Notably, they put the post-hoc results into the abstract but decided not to mention the null-preregistered results there or anywhere else in the paper explicitly).

So why has sleep research not been facing a severe replication crisis, similar to psychology?

First, compared to psychology, where you just have people fill out questionnaires, sleep research is slow, relatively expensive, and requires specialized equipment (e.g. EEG, actigraphs). So skeptical outsiders go for easier targets (like social psychology) while the insiders keep doing the same shoddy experiments because they need to keep their careers going somehow.

Second, imagine if sleep researchers had conclusively shown that sleep is not important for memory, health, etc. – would they get any funding? No. Their jobs are literally predicated on convincing the NIH and other grantmakers that sleep is important. As Patrick McKenzie notes [3], “If you want a problem solved make it someone’s project. If you want it managed make it someone’s job.”

Even in medicine, without pre-registered RCTs truth is extremely difficult to come by, with more than one half [4] of high-impact cancer papers failing to be replicated, and with one half of RCTs without pre-registration of positive outcomes being spun [5] by researchers as providing benefit when there’s none. And this is in medicine, which is infinitely more consequential and rigorous than psychology.

And here's my critique of Why We Sleep, which the author of the comment above decided to omit for some reason:

Here are just a few of biggest issues (there were many more) with the book.

1. Walker wrote: “Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer”, despite there being no evidence that cancer in general and sleep are related. There are obviously no RCTs on this, and, in fact, there’s not even a correlation between general cancer risk and sleep duration. [6]

2. Walker falsified a graph from an academic study in the book. [7]

3. Walker outright fakes data to support his “sleep epidemic” argument. The data on sleep duration Walker presents on the graph below simply does not exist [8]

[1] https://www.gleech.org/psych

[2] https://economics.mit.edu/files/16994

[3] https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1223695673742151680

[4] https://www.science.org/content/article/more-half-high-impac...

[5] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[6] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#also-no----sleeping-le...

[7] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-what-do-you-d...

[8] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#ok-even-if-the-who-nev...

Working 10 to 12 hours straight with only one or two half an hour breaks is no goal one should thrive for. Neither working 80 hours a week.

I work on the thing I love & care deeply about (newscience.org) and I'm most happy when I work 10, 12, 16 hours straight, 60, 80, 100 hours a week.

What wrong with that?

Lmao yes, I heard very similar things... Would love to chat sometime and hear more from you! alexey@newscience.org

Super interesting observations. Would love to chat sometime and hear more! alexey@newscience.org

I'm mostly raising money from people who read my blog (guzey.com) at the moment lol but planning to go to foundations and people interested in funding basic science at scale in the future..

extraordinary

How do you define "research" and "opinion"?

It means that I do "research". e.g.

- https://guzey.com/how-life-sciences-actually-work/ - https://guzey.com/science/sleep/14-day-sleep-deprivation-sel...

The email exchange in question is contained in the post I link itself directly following the broken link: https://yngve.hoiseth.net/articles/why-we-sleep-institutiona... - kinda incredible to not have noticed it. The person from UC Berkeley is never named because, as Yngve notes right there as well: "Because this failure is UC Berkeley's more than any individual's, I have edited the exchange slightly by removing the names of their representatives."

I do not have depression and do not experience significantly notable mood changes when acutely sleep deprived.

The general idea of the book is literally -- sleep 7-8 hours or you'll get some terrible disease -- is clearly not true.

It is clearly true that we need sleep and that it's super important. But it's still not clear how much of it we actually need.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26685755 this comment points out that Walker linked to that blog post from his official site after all.

I just linked to Walker's response at the top of my essay. (I did not link to it when it was published because Walker never acknowledged being the author and it took a while for UC Berkeley to confirm authorship at which point I had already stopped thinking about this. Notably, Walker still never acknowledged being the author of that post)

Honestly no one in particular comes to mind.. The people I value the most are just some of my friends who are really good at this kind of thing..

This is so weird. It breaks in Firefox and Edge for >1820px for me too but works fine in Chrome. Looking into this. They appear to display absolutely positioned elements on the page differently for some reason.

Update: fixed this. Thank you!

the best advice-givers will tell white-lies privately, even to people they love and respect, if the advice-seekers don't send ultra-clear ultra-proactive signals that they will not be hurt by the advice they seek

I think I tried to communicate this when suggesting asking for outrageous advice, but I think you're making this point better. Anyway, I added you comment to https://guzey.com/advice/#best-comments :)

Energy and persistence could basically be the same thing

This in particular I think are very different things. You can start a lot of things and be always doing something yet give up as soon as any difficulties appear. This is high energy, low persistence.

I think the points you make are reasonable and it comes down to our feeling of how much exactly of overlap there is + what percentile exactly are we talking about here (what if to build SpaceX + Tesla one needed to be in 99.9% percentile of one of the variables?) + the number of such traits and how much they can compensate each other.