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loqi comments on When Willpower Attacks - Less Wrong
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Both cases of sleep and hunger are demonstrably untrue, for we can turn off those systems (with modafinil for sleep, and ECA stack for hunger), and there are few ill effects. These systems are horribly misregulated, and cause more problems than they save from.
We know that not sleeping for days, or sleeping significantly less per day than 8h, doesn't cause any serious problems in healthy adults. Modafinil completely turns off sleepiness, and modafinil users do not die in droves, or even get sick from that.
Sleepiness on the other hand forces you to sleep even when it's not necessary at all, by reducing your alertness, making it painful to keep awake etc. Sleepiness often kills people, for example by making them insufficiently alert while driving, far more often than it saves them from death due to sleep deprivation.
With appetite suppressants it's similar story. How many people die due to diets, and how many people die due to obesity?
These systems are completely broken.
...in the short term. I need more evidence than "they don't get sick or die right away" to believe that cranking a knob as central to our physiology as sleep doesn't deliver some unintended consequences further down the road. For example, possibly contributing to Alzheimer's.
By simple evolutionary argument, it's extremely unlikely that sleep would develop to any considerable degree to protect against very late age mental deterioration like Alzheimer's (Wikipedia says it's "generally diagnosed in people over 65 years of age") - we're trading 8 hours a day at reproductive age (very high cost) versus something that happens far post reproductive age, and until late stages is only a mild problem compared to other not-sleep-dependent deteriorations (benefit very close to zero).
You might want to accept far lower standards of evidence in general. There will never be enough long term medical studies in humans. No long term studies of which early adulthood activities contribute to Alzheimer's will be done until you reach age when it will be too late to act.
Indeed. But that doesn't mean sleep can't protect against it anyway. Not every biological mechanism that protects against pathology X is an exclusive anti-X bullet. Also, the fact that Alzheimer's tends to set in after 65 isn't strong evidence against the claim "human sleep has evolved to delay Alzheimer's until after reproductive obsolescence".
I was talking about belief, not action. You said:
I don't think we're so sure of this. When sufficiently compelled to act (e.g., to gain to more time by sleeping less), we may well decide to scrape together what applicable knowledge we have and take a calculated risk. This is distinct from knowing the risk is low: It takes much less evidence to change which action appears optimal in the low-knowledge scenario than the high-knowledge scenario.
Risk of Alzheimer's is 0.3%/year past 65 years. Only 19% of people in 75–84 group get it, and it's still a few years before it becomes fatal. It's extremely far removed from reproductive age (and there might be various environmental factors present, I'm not even sure if wild humans could get Alzheimer's at all).
If sleep was mainly to protect against Alzheimer's, we would sleep quite a lot less, and have significant risk of Alzheimer's by age of 50 or so, just as happens with most other deteriorative diseases. Evolution never overprotects like that.
We know there's virtually no short to mid term risk.
We know next to nothing about long term risk of pretty much anything, we can only take our best guess and hope for the best.
How many hours on average do you sleep a week? Also, I know that the ECA stack makes losing fat much easier and raises your resting heart rate, but what evidence do you have that ECA stacks "take away hunger"?
I don't think amount of my sleeping diverges much from 8h/day, but it's very irregular. I don't take modafinil unless in special circumstances, but ask people who do so a lot.
With ECA I have personal experience, and you can ask pretty much anyone who tried it, or tried any amphetamines, which act in a very similar way. As far as I know it does not raise resting heart rate.
Pubmed has plenty of studies of ephedrine and weight loss; I don't have any particular links ready right now, but it shouldn't be hard to find them if you're interested.
I have tried many stimulants for my attention problems, including amphetamines, and all (except a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor) raised my resting heart rate unacceptably, from 65-70 to 85-95. I think I might try ECA and report back.
Amount of ephedrine in ECA stack is really pretty low. It won't have significant stimulant effects past the first couple of days, caffeine in the stack is probably more stimulating than ephedrine.
The stack is good exactly because it provides good appetite suppression to stimulation ratio. You can reduce your hunger by taking a lot of amphetamines, but stimulation will be huge before appetite suppression becomes significant.
And you seem to have some heart problems. In such case, maybe it's a better idea not to take even mildly stimulating drugs, and go for a willpower-based diet, preferably one with a pseudo-cultish background like paleo or Atkins to help you stay on track.
(I recommended ECA for appetite suppression and fat loss, I don't have any opinion on their use for attention deficit or any other problem).
That's what I was interested in it for.
Also, have you tried selegiline? Sulbutiamine? Nothing magical, but worth a play. Selegiline in particular I've found to boost motivation. That makes the constant effort of turning back to whatever I was supposed to be paying attention to less of a drain on willpower.
Try intense cardiovascular exercise for 50 minutes every day. It'll lower the heart rate, never mind the boost to cognition! Not entirely joking. Stimulants impact both my blood pressure and my heart rate. With exercise I can reduce my non-wired resting heart rate to 40 and blood pressure to borderline hypotension (when in a near meditative state and according to my monitor). That's two side effects down!
I did that for a while. Unfortunately it's incredibly mentally painful for me--intense boredom. Also, I have weird knee problems.