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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Polyphasic Sleep Seed Study: Reprise - Less Wrong Discussion
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Note that since the entire human species (7 billion people) spends around 1/3 of its days asleep or trying to sleep, and sleep is desperately important to human productivity, given the total value of this information, we should expect that it will be explored primarily in an ad-hoc, unfunded way by people in the quantitative self community, rationalist community, Leverage, etcetera. #civilizational-inadequacy
So, I discussed my polyphasic sleep plans extensively with my parents before, during, and after them. My father, trained as a fighter pilot, knows quite a bit about sleep from the military's training on it, and was intensely skeptical of uberman, and correctly predicted that it would not work for me. (My family was atypically well-rested when I was growing up, which is probably due to some combination of that training and our personalities.)
It seems to me that the military in particular has done a lot of well-funded research into sleep, and is willing to try fairly exotic things, and is willing to sleep-deprive people during training. It's possible that they haven't tried polyphasic sleep or that they're generalizing incorrectly from studies they've already done in dismissing polyphasic sleep, so that the military isn't doing this already is not conclusive that polyphasic isn't widely useful enough to adopt. But it does push some of the probability to the hypothesis that polyphasic does not work long-term for many people without serious drawbacks. In that case, only ad-hoc, unfunded research on it matches what you would expect for a project to, say, invent an engine that runs on water.
Matt Fallshaw's 2012 presentation to minicamp on polyphasic said that it trades flexibility for time - you sleep less, but you must follow a rigid schedule. It's possible that the military need too much flexibility to make it practical.
There are lots of situations where "it's been 4 hours, I need to take a nap" would be a critical handicap, but there are others where it wouldn't. Having only two shifts on a submarine (2 on 2 off) rather than three (6 on 12 off) seems like it would be useful.
I would have thought a submarine could sometimes hit a crisis that required all hands. But a stronger example might be drone pilots.
Possible, but that's when you pop your caffeine gum (or your speed) and skip a nap. I know that submarines are space-limited, and so dropping the crew requirements might be helpful- I'm not sure what the limitations are for drone pilots. (The flexibility that means they don't have crises might also mean there's no real gain from having pilots that can be awake for more of the day.)
I have indeed heard many rumors of the military running fascinating sleep experiments. But I've not had much luck getting access to their results, let alone the details of methodology and such. I admit, however, that I've spent less time and effort looking for them than I should have. If you happen to have illuminating links, please share them!
I'd also like to note that anyone on a successful polyphasic schedule has a pretty huge comparative advantage, so if I were the leader of a polyphasic army, I might not want my opponents knowing anything more than "I hear there is evil there that does not sleep," if even that.
this advantage is directly proportional to how many people you have on this sleep schedule. The fewer people who do it the lower the payoff, but the more people who do it the less chance you have of keeping it secret. If the army invents an advanced airplane, it can be kept secret and used rarely, but if the army invents a new kind of carbine, it's much more valuable if ALL the soldiers have it. Polyphasic seems a lot more like the carbine than like the fighter jet.
The US military did a lot of research with modafinil and amphetamines to keep pilots awake for long-haul flights.
Is that research public? If not, maybe someone could make an effective Freedom of Information request for the information?
I'd have thought that the military would at least shy away from Uberman polyphasic because getting enough sleep on that schedule is very fragile-- if there's an emergency, there's much less reserves than for people who sleep in larger chunks.