Request: if this happens again in subsequent years, could you announce the dates earlier? I would have liked to go, but have booked a family vacation that week, and I know at least one other person in the same situation.

Is there going to be an after-party open to the "public"?

What's "the diet"?

I wondered why Burning Man should disrupt polyphasic sleep except possibly by intoxication. But what I get from your earlier post and www.polyphasicsociety.com is that polyphasic has the following disadvantages:

• requires strict sleeping patterns
• requires discipline to keep the pattern
• limited task and schedule flexibility

Obviously you need a job and a family and friends where this is no problem. I have thought about trying DC1 which is the only option that might work with four children.

I wonder what the consequences of falling out of polyphasic may be. From my own sleep deprivation 'experiments' I'd guess:

• Involuntarily sleeping much longer than planned out of order, thus completely wrecking you schedule.
• Being tired and drowsy for a time thus being unusually unproductive and potentially unreliable.

From your graph I'd guess that falling out of polyphasic (accidentally or not) takes a week to recover. If such accidents happen too often (and once a month may be enough) all the disturbances this causes (missed deadlines, bad quality) may quickly eat up all the nominal efficiency gains from more awake hours.

This all assumes that the saved sleep has no other positive benefits. There might be:

• physical regeneration
• subconscious learning (there are some posts on LW about the habit to reflect the lessons of the day before sleep)

With these considerations in mind I decided to stay with my sleep rhythm (0:00 to 6:30). I don't want to risk long time health effects ('the candle that burns brighter burns half as long').

The main thing I took out of this are the recommendations about night lighting: http://www.polyphasicsociety.com/polyphasic-sleep/adaptation/night-lighting/

What are you using to measure your REM/light/deep sleep?

Small correction: I actually found Everyman 3 to be a very doable schedule at Burning Man. It's desirable to stay up really late since lots of neat stuff happens at night, and it's desirable to not need to sleep past 10am since it gets very hot. So a 3 hour core from 6-9am plus a few opportunistic naps in the shade is an excellent solution. Both Cathleen (who runs operations at Leverage) and I were on duty supporting Paradigm, the effective altruist camp, most of the week, and I think it's fair to say the quality of experience the camp achieved was due in no small part to the long hours we were able to put in.

The hard part has actually been sticking to the diet after the event, due to being quite sick for a while.

Looking forward to publishing data as soon as we have the time. As a preview, since it doesn't take any time, here's a plot of my sleep since starting the experiment. The no data part is Burning Man, which was a similar distribution to the period right before it.

The new XKCD is highly relevant.

Okay, middle school students, it's the first Tuesday in February.

This means that by law and custom, we must spend the morning reading though the Wikipedia article List of Common Misconceptions, so you can spend the rest of your lives being a little less wrong.

The guests at every party you'll ever attend thank us in advance.

Subtext: I wish I lived in this universe.

The graph for this post has vanished.

Thanks Alexandros, this was well articulated.

Beyond PageRank, I feel this pattern has applicability in many areas of everyday life, especially those related to large organizations, such as employers judging potential employees by the name of the university they attended...

So a person who goes to a prestigious school and games the system in order to graduate [without actually getting smarter] is something of a "spam worker." The OBP process is incentivizing earning a degree from a good school, and taking the emphasis off of getting smart.

I'd spent plenty of time thinking about SEO, and plenty of time thinking about people seeking prestige via academic institutions, but has never noticed the parallel.

...I have more written material on this subject, especially on possible methods of counteracting this effect...

I would be interested in hearing about those methods. I'm in the business of producing legitimate news (feel funny calling it "content"), and am unhappy with the amount of time I must spend making sure my website stays out of the false negative space.

Also, I wonder if the methods you have thought of would also apply to these parallel situations in society.

Just out of curiosity, are there a lot of people at the SIAI house who confine their participation on LW to lurking?