1. I fall asleep during the day. I've tried getting more hours of sleep at night and it doesn't solve the problem. When I'm bored or confused, my body says "Naptime!" It can be quite embarrassing.

There are two primary things that determine your alertness (or drowsiness) during day-time: sleep debt and circadian phase. The more sleep debt you have, the more tired you feel during the day. If you have significant amounts of sleep debt it might take weeks to decrease the sleep debt to normal levels.

Then you have circadian alerting, which makes everyone with normal sleep schedule more tired in the afternoon. The desire for afternoon naps is based on our biology. That said, the (afternoon) drowsiness is much exaggerated by the amount of sleep debt you have. With unusually large sleep debt, you might find it almost impossible to stay awake at some point in the afternoon.

Circadian alerting starts to kick in again in the evening. In fact, most people are at their peak alertness only couple of hours before their bedtime.

See this graph for explanation of circadian phases: http://www.ride4ever.org/images/normalsleep.gif (the full article: http://www.ride4ever.org/news/fatigue.php).

Sleep debt seems to be strictly cumulative (ie. all the sleep debt you accumulate have to be paid back), but it takes considerable amount of time to pay it back, because you can't pay the debt back in one go. Something like 9-10 hours a night seems like the most efficient amount. Depending on the accumulated amount of debt, the daily sleep need should start to stabilize after some days or weeks. Eventually you should sleep exactly the amount of sleep debt that you acquire during in between waking and sleeping.

Unfortunately, decreasing the sleep debt to exactly zero is not optimal for anyone who has to adjust to other people's schedules. This is because our circadian cycle isn't exactly 24 hours. Most often it's something like 24,5 to 25 hours. This means that if you were to maintain zero sleep debt (other than the debt you accumulate during the next day before you sleep again), your sleep time will start to shift 0,5 to 1 hour per day. If this sort of shift doesn't cause practical problems, I'd suggest to try it out. You go to sleep whenever you feel tired, and wake when you don't feel tired anymore. (See this article for more information: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm)

Summa summarum: if you feel genuinely tired during the day, it means you have too much sleep debt and the only way to increase alertness is to sleep more. (Unless you have a specific sleep disorder, which needs to be fixed first.)

1. I fall asleep during the day. I've tried getting more hours of sleep at night and it doesn't solve the problem. When I'm bored or confused, my body says "Naptime!" It can be quite embarrassing.

There are two primary things that determine your alertness (or drowsiness) during day-time: sleep debt and circadian phase. The more sleep debt you have, the more tired you feel during the day. If you have significant amounts of sleep debt it might take weeks to decrease the sleep debt to normal levels.

Then you have circadian alerting, which makes everyone with normal sleep schedule more tired in the afternoon. The desire for afternoon naps is based on our biology. That said, the (afternoon) drowsiness is much exaggerated by the amount of sleep debt you have. With unusually large sleep debt, you might find it almost impossible to stay awake at some point in the afternoon.

Circadian alerting starts to kick in again in the evening. In fact, most people are at their peak alertness only couple of hours before their bedtime.

See this graph for explanation of circadian phases: http://www.ride4ever.org/images/normalsleep.gif (the full article: http://www.ride4ever.org/news/fatigue.php).

Sleep debt seems to be strictly cumulative (ie. all the sleep debt you accumulate have to be paid back), but it takes considerable amount of time to pay it back, because you can't pay the debt back in one go. Something like 9-10 hours a night seems like the most efficient amount. Depending on the accumulated amount of debt, the daily sleep need should start to stabilize after some days or weeks. Eventually you should sleep exactly the amount of sleep debt that you acquire during in between waking and sleeping.

Unfortunately, decreasing the sleep debt to exactly zero is not optimal for anyone who has to adjust to other people's schedules. This is because our circadian cycle isn't exactly 24 hours. Most often it's something like 24,5 to 25 hours. This means that if you were to maintain zero sleep debt (other than the debt you accumulate during the next day before you sleep again), your sleep time will start to shift 0,5 to 1 hour per day. If this sort of shift doesn't cause practical problems, I'd suggest to try it out. You go to sleep whenever you feel tired, and wake when you don't feel tired anymore. (See this article for more information: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm)

Summa summarum: if you feel genuinely tired during the day, it means you have too much sleep debt and the only way to increase alertness is to sleep more. (Unless you have a specific sleep disorder, which needs to be fixed first.)

Use Self Control to block all my entertainment internet sites during "working hours" (I'll leave early mornings and/or late nights free.)

I find that the best indication of being productive is that I don't need any external blocking mechanisms.

On the other hand, when I'm in slumber, no amount of self-restriction makes any difference. It only makes my overall feeling worse.

There are different types of conflicts some of which can be treated with this type of thinking. If procrastinating doesn't feel worse than working, then your mental conflict is of different type. (I personally can relate to what EY is talking about.)

The bigger problem is that, depending on the type of conflict that causes the procrastination, the brain is very resistant against these types of insights. The insight works for a short while and sooner than you realize (or to be more exact, don't realize), your brain finds a way to side-step this trick.

Not all of them - most of them. War, hunger, energy limits, resource shortages, space travel, loss of loved ones - and so on. It probably won't fix the speed of light limit, though.

What makes you reach this conclusion? How can you think any of these problems can be solved by intelligence when none of them have been solved? I'm particularly perplexed by the claim that war would be solved by higher intelligence. Many wars are due to ideological priorities. I don't see how you can expect necessarily (or even with high probability) that ideologues will be less inclined to go to war if they are smarter.

Can I refer to "conflicting motor programs" as "conflicting subagents" instead?

No. ;-)

More precisely, I would say that agency is an unnecessary hypothesis, and postulating agency seems to lead people to certain predictable failure patterns (like treating parts of the self as an enemy, or one's self as the victim of these agents, trying to negotiate with them, and other anthropomorphic overkill).

I only restricted the present discussion to "motor" programs to limit distracting digressions on the topic of higher-level cognitive architecture. For modeling akrasia, it's simply sufficient to assume that various programs can be activated in parallel, and that one of consciousness's functions is to manage conflict between activated programs.

For a specific example of motor programs, see this other comment.

Hm, I'm disappointed. He's only able to talk very briefly about the Hurley model for what makes things funny and why evolution would produce it. All I got was something about the brain needing to provide a reward for "debugging", or I guess "discerning the source of a problem".

I'd like to read more about it, but when I googled "Matthew Hurley" and terms like jokes/humor, the only results were ... links to that video!

Anyone know where I can read more about the Hurley model?

You're confusing the superficial expressions of high-status and the nature of normal human interaction, which is nothing but status games. Your texts, this and others, very clearly signal high-status in this context. It is clearly not your sole motivation, not perhaps even a major one, but status moves are apparent throughout your texts.

"Having achieved some small degree of status in certain very limited circles, here's what I do to try to avoid the status-makes-you-stupid effect"

Seriously, you saying that you have achieved "some small degree of status" is a huge understatement. If you used that expression, because stronger statement would make you vulnerable, I guess it makes sense, but do realize that it's just another move in status-games. It's basically a defensive move to counter possible attacks against your status. Ie. it lowers your status so that no one can make threats to your status. Had you said that "I am practically a Jesus in some circles", which would have been close to the truth, this could have been challenged very easily. When it's put the way you said it, it's more of an compliment to yourself.

If you really think that you have achieved "some small degree of status", I think you have a huge blind spot in the area of human social interaction.

"I try to feel a small flash of self-satisfaction whenever I publicly admit that I am wrong, over what a good rationalist I am being and what a good impression I am making."

This is a status move to make your status higher.

I'm interested in knowing how you came up with the conclusion that it reduces your sleep need (or bed time) by one hour?

I can understand that taking melatonin would reduce bed time if it made you fall asleep faster, but personally I've had no trouble falling asleep quickly so there would basically be no difference. (In fact, I've experienced an opposite effect with the couple of times I've taken melatonin.)

It takes a lot more than just casual observations to conclude that there are other effects. Basically you'd need to measure your sleep debt some way and compare its development when taking the drug and when not. Unfortunately there is no direct way to measure sleep debt so it will require quite extensive tests to make any decisive conclusions about this hypothesis.

If you already have this data, please share it. If not, I'd be happy if you took a step back and really tried to measure and confirm this claim.

One final note is that current research has demonstrated that sleep has an important part in memory consolidation. If supplemental melatonin really does cut sleep need, it will necessary have effects on memory consolidation too. (For example, motor memory consolidation happens in REM and NREM-2 phases that most probably would be cut if daily sleep need was reduced.)