I don't recall having argued that "proper sleep is necessary for x." [1]
I've argued that sleep restriction impairs cognition, is associated with negative mood and suicidality (not only positive mood) and causes overeating. Not that you need a certain minimum amount of sleep to perform competently at something. So I still don't think that the kind of evidence that you bring up is asymmetric.
I'll come up with an example to explain the difference. Suppose that, after 8 hours of sleep, humans complete a task with an average accuracy of 83%. After 6 ...
Hi Natália,
I want to apologize for lack of proper engagement with the post and lack of replies to you as well as a high level of combativeness in the comments I did leave.
This stuff makes me anxious and I feel like I'm just unable to properly explain what makes me disagree so much with you.
My best attempt is that my takes are some combination of:
I found this reply unpersuasive.
By numerical point:
This isn’t as important as my previous reply (in which I address your object-level arguments), but I wanted to perhaps note that most of your points 1.1 through 1.4 sound, to me, more like an attempt to generate an emotional reaction in the reader than a good-faith effort at pointing out mistakes you think I’ve made or investigating object-level disagreements (although I could be wrong). I don’t recall criticizing you for not having an MD or something, or publicly speculating that you have never thought about [important meta-level epistemological considera...
Thanks for engaging. I hope we can figure out what our cruxes are.
On points 1 and 2: I still think you haven't addressed my counter-argument to points of that nature, which I've raised (1) in the post itself, (2) in my previous reply to you, and (3) in this comment. To reiterate some of it: you use sleep research to support some of your points, mostly in your review of Walker's book but also in Theses on Sleep, and it's not clear to me why research that shows that sleep deprivation is not as bad as people think is admissible evidence to you but resea...
Thanks for the taking the time to look into my essay.
Here's what Mendonça writes in her first point that so conclusively demonstrates that the point I make is "misleading":
[Guzey's] evidence from bipolar disorder patients is not representative of what you see in the general population: both long and short sleep duration are associated with depression
The paper Mendonça cites looks at long-term long sleep and long-term short sleep, with their association with depression. My claim and my evide...
In the interest of simplicity, I'm going to look at individual pieces of your and Natalia's counterarguments. I won't do it all at once, but I'll try to be thorough over time. I'll be separating my analyses into separate comments.
To start with, you say:
...Here's what Mendonça writes in her first point that so conclusively demonstrates that the point I make is "misleading":
[Guzey's] evidence from bipolar disorder patients is not representative of what you see in the general population: both long and short sleep duration are associated with depression
The paper
The paper Mendonça cites looks at long-term long sleep and long-term short sleep, with their association with depression. My claim and my evidence (from bipolar people) are concerned with short-term long sleep and short-term short sleep.
Your specific claim about depression was “depression triggers/amplifies oversleeping while oversleeping triggers/amplifies depression.” Nowhere in the section did you specify your claim was about short-term long sleep.
Your evidence, too, barely concerns short-term long sleep: depressive episodes last about five or six...
(I'll reply in more substance by the end of the week -- have a big deadline coming up this Thursday)
From skimming the post, three parts stand out to me
1. the fact that acute sleep deprivation relieves depression in ~50% of people with depression seems completely unaddressed and Natália's section about bipolar people seems to imply that this would not be happening. I specifically noted in this the section Natália addresses by writing:
...Lack of sleep is such a potent trigger for mania that acute sleep deprivation is literally used to treat depression. Asi
1.
Natália's section about bipolar people seems to imply that [sleep deprivation's short-term antidepressant effects] would not be happening.
I disagree. I said,
A night of total sleep deprivation seems to be able to trigger full-blown mania in a substantial percentage of people with bipolar disorder (even those currently depressed) and even cause mania-like behavior in healthy subjects. Moreover, a shift towards mania or hypomania after a short night of sleep seems common in bipolar patients.
Here, I think it was clear that what I said is consistent wit...
Natália doesn't set out to disprove all of your theses, but rather to put forth some counter-theses. She says:
I decided to write a post pointing out several of the mistakes I think he’s made, and reporting some of what the academic literature on sleep seems to show.
Read carefully, she neither claims that every point you've made is mistaken, nor to give a comprehensive review of the academic literature. So I don't think you can fault her for not addressing the point about the use of sleep deprivation as a depression cure. She's critiquing those theses of yo...
re: persuasive intent -- yes, of course I want to persuade people but I'm believe I'm being very clear about the fact that some sections are just analogies.
My strongest objection to your writing style is the accusation that sleep researchers in general are doing shoddy research and culpable for the equivalent of killing people. This is the point at which I would have stopped reading your article (and lowered my likelihood of reading other things you write in the future), if it weren't for the fact that Elizabeth was the one who curated the piece.
I believe ...
appears clearly to be just a thought experiment to me.
The point isn't what you intended to come across in your writing, but what actually does come across in your writing, and the expectations that creates in the reader about how others will perceive your writing.
By analogy, let's say you go to a party and tell a joke making fun of my friend Sarah's shoes. You think it's funny and mean it as a bit of friendly teasing. I know that you're a little nervous and are just trying to connect, and the joke honestly seems kind of funny to me.
However, I also know Sar...
This I agree with. As I noted in another comment, Guzey's a lot of things right here, except that the tone and format of his post makes his argument feel hard to respect. It comes across as ranty, manic, highly motivated ("passionate"), the sort of style we now associate with Qanon. But this is LessWrong, and I think that here, at least, we should try to focus on substance over style.
Tbh I'm very confused about the issues you have with my tone. I very deliberately called the post "Theses" on sleep! And I believe I very explicitly wrote that these are my co...
in no way am trying to make people think that the analogies that I thought of that I find convincing should be convincing to other people.
This reads as a denial of persuasive intent, which is clearly not the case.
Your post consists of more than analogies that you thought of. It also consists of data, your own self-experiments, arguments, citations, critiques of the literature and of Matthew Walker's book. It doesn't need to make us convinced of the truth of all your beliefs re: sleep to be a piece of writing with persuasive goals. I posit that virtually an...
Yep, if someone was majorly undersleeping for a few days, they are probably going to be more sleepy and make more mistakes of attention/find it more difficult to concentrate and absorb the kind of information that they would need a tutor to absorb!
As an experiment -- you can ask a couple of your students to take a coffee heading to you when they are underslept and see if they continue to make mistakes and learn poorly (in which case it's the lack of sleep per se likely causing problems) or not (in which case it's sleepiness)
Have you done an explicit calculation of your perceived increased risk in Alzheimer's and compared it to QALY (potentially) gained by decreasing amount of sleep?
Yep, I sometimes manage to ask my body to wake up at a certain time and it does it when there's something I care a ton about waking me up a few minutes before the alarm.
Yep
Given these three, and the fact that he did literally alter a graph in one other place in the book, I'm pretty sure he just faked this data. If you manage to find the source, I'll edit the posts and will apologize to Walker.
lmao I started reading this comment and was like "oh no i'm about to be destroyed" and instead everything held up 😎
I guess showing drafts to literal dozens of people before publishing actually works haha.
Thanks! Very interesting. Have you experimented with sleeping vs staying up all night resting to see if it's sleep or just passage of time that helps with consolidation?
Hmm, we seem to have very different subjective experiences around sleep. While I'm sure that I would also feel bad if my sleep was disrupted at random periods, I have no issue with alarms and I feel like I sleep better with an alarm, knowing that I will not just sleep through everything I wanted to do in the morning...
Please be cautious and do not try cutting your sleep from 9 hours to 7 hours right away.
If you want to try experimenting with how much you sleep, try 8:30 and see how it goes first, make gradual changes, make sure you feel good, and take naps.
I have not looked into the evidence of sleep quality and life outcomes unfortunately.
I wrote:
I agree that driving while being sleepy is dangerous and I don’t want anyone to drive, to operate heavy machinery, etc. when they are sleepy.
Driving simply seems to be a monotonous task of the exact kind where falling asleep even for a few seconds is very dangerous, thus driving while being sleepy is dangerous
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This was indeed a big screwup on my part. Again, I'm really sorry I broke your trust.
Wow, that is very bad. Personally I'd still trust Julia as someone to report harms from Leverage to, mostly from generally knowing her and knowing her relationship to Leverage, but I can see why you wouldn't.
re: bpm. yeah i'm not saying never sleep or always undersleep. but if you undersleep one time, you're going to have higher bpm and then on the recovery day it's going to be normal
Yeah a ton of bad things and stress tend to fuck up sleep and make us sleep less! That's why there are all these correlations.. The rest of your arguments (bpm, cortisol..) apply fully to sports as well I believe.
re: not encountering info re dangers of oversleep: do you want to comment on the bit about sleep deprivation therapy? Isn't this rather compelling evidence of sleep directly causing bad mood?
the possible outcomes table for 'hacking' your sleep includes premature aging and dementia. I don't think the inverse is true.
Why do you think that inverse is not true?
We eat as much as much as our body wants to, and the result is that >73% of US adults are overweight or obese.
Given that one of the hallmarks of depression is increased sleep and that short-term sleep deprivation is literally one of the most effective treatments for depression, you ought to at least consider the potential harms of sleep.
Hm?
I think Michael Huemer had an interesting take on a variant of this question -- In Praise of Passivity:
...Voters, activists, and political leaders of the present day are in the position of medieval doctors. They hold simple, prescientific theories about the workings of society and the causes of social problems, from which they derive a variety of remedies–almost all of which prove either ineffectual or harmful. Society is a complex mechanism whose repair, if possible at all, would require a precise and detailed understanding of a kind that no one today posses
Note that the book contains a multitude of basic scientific errors, misrepresentation of research, data manipulation, etc: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
I'm the author of this essay. I don't believe your characterization of it is accurate.
1. You write:
Author advocates biphasic sleep totaling 6.3hr/day.
I don't remember "advocating" biphasic sleep. I link to people I know who were able to adjust to it and I describe my personal experience. In fact, in the essay's conclusion I write:
If you take one thing away from this entire essay, remember this: as long as you feel good, sleeping anywhere between 5 and 8 hours a night seems basically fine for your health
which contradicts your a...
(removed this comment)
I think that if you ask anyone who knows me in-person they will tell you that I'm an unusually emotionally intensive person. My writing is also usually very emotionally intense but it tend to go through getting feedback from like 20 people who tell me to remove all of the excessive language and to tone it down before publication, so it ends up sounding normal. Comment do not go through this kind of process.