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army1987 comments on Things I Wish They'd Taught Me When I Was Younger: Why Money Is Awesome - Less Wrong
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Is there anything remotely like that going on in a non-trivial fraction of the population? The closest I can think of is sleep deprivation, but I'd be very surprised if the effect of non-extreme cases of it is more than 10 IQ points, let alone 40.
Purely from introspection, I would bet that sleep deprivation costs me less than 10 points of IQ-test performance but the equivalent of much more than 10 IQ points on actual effectiveness in getting anything done.
My introspection had similar results about sleep deprivation and mental performance before I tried Anki. Now that I've actually measured my performance with the software, I know it can be as low as 50 % of my peak performance measured in latency of recall when even slightly (2-3 hours) sleep deprived. Of course, Anki measures memory, not IQ.
This experience made me update significantly in the direction that my introspection, at least in the case of mental performance, sucks. My social life has suffered as a result of this realization.
My scores at stuff like Lumosity and Quantified Mind tend to always be great in the morning (a couple hours after I wake up), but unless I slept enough the previous night they suck balls in the early afternoon; they get better again in the evening if I take a nap in the afternoon. My self-perceived wakefulness and willpower levels vary similarly, but several hours earlier (i.e. I underestimate my mental performance right before lunch and overestimate it right after my afternoon nap).
Of course I'm speaking with hindsight here, but it doesn't seem at all surprising that you could be as much as 2x slower at some mental tasks when sleep-deprived. I'd expect that to translate to less than a 10-point loss in IQ-like tests -- maybe that's unrealistic?
How has your social life suffered?
I keep a pretty strict sleep schedule and drink very little alcohol. Almost any nightly socializing is gone, and there used to be a lot of that. I see this as a net positive though.
Ah, I understand. Thanks.
You've doubtless thought about this already, but I'll say it anyway just in case: Your happiness and net effectiveness (at whatever you seek to do) may be affected as much by your network of friends and associates as by your own mental performance. Trading in social life for increased sharpness may be far from an unambiguous win.
Stanley Coren put some numbers on the effect of sleep deprivation upon IQ test scores.
There's a more detailed meta-analysis of multiple studies, splitting it by types of mental attribute, here:
A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Short-Term Sleep Deprivation on Cognitive Variables, by Lim and Dinges