All of guzey's Comments + Replies

guzey20

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.

2wslafleur
Does anybody know if there have been any sleep-deprivation studies that attempt to control for belief effects? I'm think about this sort of thing. The knock-on ramifications in either direction seem like they could be potentially significant. Among other things, belief effects could help to explain the swaths of contradictory studies around this topic.
Natália*160

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 ... (read more)

guzey*80

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:

  1. Academic literature is a highly adversarial playing field and although it's very tempting for smart outsiders to think that they can just go on Google Scholar and figure out what's going on, I don't think thi
... (read more)
4Spencer Ericson
Just wanted to tune in on this from anecdotal experience: My last ever (non-iatrogenic) hypomanic episode started unprompted. But I was terrified of falling back into depression again! My solution was to try to avoid the depression by extending my hypomania as long as possible.  How did I do this? By intentionally not sleeping and by drinking more coffee (essentially doing the opposite of whatever the internet said stabilized hypomanic patients). I had a strong intuition that this would work. (I also had a strong intuition that the depression later would be worse, but I figured I'd cross that bridge when I came to it, even though my depression was life-threatening, because I was cognitively impaired by my episode.) It worked! It was my longest and most intense (most euphoric and erratic, but least productive) hypomanic episode, and I don't think this is fully explained by it being later in the progression of my illness. Did I "not simply break down?" I wouldn't say that's the case, even after iirc less than a week of hypomania and ~3 hours of sleep per night. 1. I would say that the urge to extend my episode was already an obvious thinking error from the hypomania. 2. I had the worst depression I had ever experienced immediately afterwards, and I would be willing to bet that, within-subject, longer hypomanic episodes in bipolar II patients are followed by more severe (more symptomatic/disabling, not necessarily longer) depressive episodes. Generally, I would say that bipolar I patients with months-long mania are also "breaking down." Mania is severely disruptive. Manic patients are constantly making thinking mistakes (inappropriate risks resulting in long-term disability/losses/hospitalizations, delusions, hallucinations). They're also not happy all the time -- a lot of mania and hypomania presents with severe anger and irritability! I would consider this a breakdown. I can't say how much of the breaking down is because of the sleep deprivation vs. the other
Cobblepot*870

I found this reply unpersuasive.

By numerical point:

  1. Speculation on OP's education is irrelevant. You reject lots of studies by PhDs that did study the field. If she misunderstood something, address the specific error.
  2. Deep skepticism of the sleep literature is fine, even if you rely on some sleep research yourself, but it's insufficient to respond to the objection of hypocrisy of relying on the sleep literature with "well, I'm really careful about which studies I use". You need to explain why the studies you use somehow avoid the methodological problems that
... (read more)
Natália*180

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... (read more)

Natália*220

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... (read more)

guzey30

Thanks for the taking the time to look into my essay.

Mendonça's claim 1: Guzey’s /r/BipolarReddit evidence is misleading

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... (read more)

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

... (read more)
Natália*150

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... (read more)

guzey*100

(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

... (read more)
Natália*160

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

guzey20

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 ... (read more)

3Mo Putera
I'm confused about your pushback to AllAmericanBreakfast's (great) feedback on your style, which I find antagonistic to the point that (like AAB) I'm not comfortable sharing it with anyone, despite broadly agreeing with your conclusions and thinking it's important. 
3tslarm
For what it's worth, I baulked at that sentence too. If you want to avoid the extra connotations, you could phrase it more like "...will cause them collectively to forgo 62,500 lifetimes' worth of waking hours". (Hopefully something less clunky than that, though.) edit: to clarify, my issue was with the comparison, not with the implied blame. Although you explicitly claim equivalence only 'in terms of their hours of wakefulness', to me as a reader it seems like you are doing one of two things with that sentence: either suggesting that causing a million 20-year olds to sleep an extra unnecessary hour per day is, in terms of overall badness, somewhere in the ballpark of killing 62,500 of them; or making the comparison for no good reason other than rhetorical shock value, knowing that it is technically defensible due to the qualifier ('in terms of their hours of wakefulness'), but only because that allows you to brush over the differences between extra sleep and premature death.

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... (read more)

guzey00

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... (read more)

6frankybegs
You specify a style for citation! By your own logic, this should be of academic-level rigour, surely? Pleading 'oh it isn't supposed to be convincing' is the exact same motte and bailey that Matt Walker is doing with his pop-sci that he self-cites. This is an amazing bit of work, and one of the main reasons I come to LW is to find interesting, well-supported arguments that make me revise or at least question what I believe about important stuff. This does that, and I want to send it to everyone I know. But it's hard to do so when you undermine your credibility at points (in basically the ways that All-American Breakfast has outlined). People are going to be motivated to preserve their dearly held beliefs about sleep, and you give them unnecessary ammo to dismiss you as an internet crazy.

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... (read more)

2ChristianKl
Psyop is a word that you find in Qanon discourse but seldom in mainstream discourse.
guzey-20

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)

guzey10

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?

2Gunnar_Zarncke
I'm sleeping less than many people, and I usually feel powerful enough at 6.5h per day (including actually falling asleep). Though it is a fragile balance that can be tipped to headache easily, and then it isn't net-positive anymore. But again, I'm most worried about my brain not getting enough time to cleanup stuff and this over time adding up without me noticing and then losing a lot of QUALYs later. So I want to be sure to be sufficiently far away from the point where stuff builds up.
guzey10

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.

guzey30

Yep

  1. He didn't have a source in the book.
  2. Multiple people asked him for a source and he never provided one
  3. The dad is INCREDIBLY divergent from all other data we have. Literally all other data people sleep around 7 hours maybe more maybe less while his data shows almost 9 hours of sleep on average.

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.

guzey150

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.

2DirectedEvolution
Peer review, baby! Sorry for scaring you, I've suspected for a while that my writing can come off as intimidating, but I haven't figured out yet how to solve that problem. Thanks for the feedback ;)
guzey20

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?

guzey00

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...

4meedstrom
I'm like Alicorn, with the addition that I love disruption at random periods, because it lets me fall asleep again: pure pleasure.
guzey*20

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.

1Maxwell Peterson
Ok! Thanks.
guzey30

I have not looked into the evidence of sleep quality and life outcomes unfortunately.

2bfinn
Some years ago I did read research showing that improving sleep quality was the easiest intervention most people could make to improve their happiness. (I don't recall where, but googleable no doubt.)
guzey70

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

7Andy_McKenzie
Makes sense! I guess I wonder if there’s a literature on the cause of sleep deprivation induced car accidents, eg whether the problem is only microsleeps or whether things like impulsivity or reaction time also contribute. ETA: Preliminary search: the first Google result found this study: https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-09095-5 Basically, in these driving simulations, reaction time and breaking time is significantly affected by sleep deprivation. I’m not sure how this could all be due to microsleeps. And it seems quite plausibly related to both risk of car accident and cognitive performance more broadly.

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.

guzey10

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

1George3d6
Ah, ok, maybe I was discussing the wrong thing then. I think sleeping 4-6 hours on some days ought to be perfectly fine, even 0, I'd just argue that keeping the mean around 7-9 is probably ideal for most (but again, low confidence, think it boils down to personalized medicine).
guzey10

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?

1George3d6
  I don't think so. BPM is slower when one practices sports (see athletes heart), in that it will be higher during the activity itself, but mean BPM during the day and especially at night is lower. Personally I've observed this correlation as well and it seems to be causal~ish, i.e I can do 3 days on / 3 days off physical activity and notice decreased resting & sleeping heart rate on the 2nd day of activity up until the 2nd day of inactivity after which it picks back up. With cortisol, the mechanism I'm aware of is the same, i.e. exercising increases cortisol afterwards but decreases the baseline. Though here I'm not 100% sure. This might not hold for the very extreme cases though (strongmen, ultra-marathon runners, etc). Since then you're basically under physical stress for most of the day instead of a few minutes or hours. Sleep deprivation, I'd assume, would work through cortisol and adrenaline, which do give a "better than awfully depressed mood" but can't build up to great moods and aren't sustainable (at least if I am to trust models ala the one championed by Sapolsky about the effects of cortisol). Granted, I think it depends, and afaik most people don't feel the need to sleep more than 8-9 hours. The ones I know that "sleep" a lot tend to just hang around in a half-comatosed state after overeating or while procrastinating. I think it becomes an issue of "actual sleep" vs "waking up every 30 minutes, checking phone, remembering life is hard and trying to sleep again | rinse and repeat 2 to 8 times". I'd actually find it interesting to study "heavy sleepers" in a sleep lab or with a semi-capable portable EEG (even just 2-4 electrodes should be enough, I guess?) and see if what they do is actually "sleep" past the 9 hour mark.  But I'm unaware of any such studies. But I have low confidence in all of these claims and I personally dislike epidemiological evidence, I think that there's a horrible practice of people trying to """control""" shitty experiment
guzey20

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.

1George3d6
The "think" here is more prosaic, as in, it's just not my intuition that this is the case and I think that applies for most other people based on the memeplexes I see circulating out there. As for why my intuition is that I can boil it down to, say I said in the post: Everyone told me so and everyone warned me about the effects of not sleeping but not vice versa. Is this correct if analyzed on a rational basis? I don't know, it's not relevant as far as the post is concerned. From personal experience I know that for myself I associate shorter sleep with: *  increase cortisol (urine, so arguable quality) * Increased time getting into ketosis (and overall lower ketone+glucose balance, i.e. given an a*G + b*BhB = y  where y is the number at which I feel ok and seems in-line with what epidemiology would recommend as optimal glucose levels for lifespan | I will tend to fall constantly bellow y given lack of sleep, which manifests as being tired and sometimes feeling lightheaded and being able to walk, lift and swim less ... hopefully that makes sense? I'm not sure how mainstream of a nutrition framework this is ) * increased heart rate (significant, ~9bpm controlling~ish for effort and, ~7bpm o.o at night), *  * feeling a bit off and feeling time passes faster. But that's correlated, not causal, e.g. if I smoke or vape during a day I'm likely to sleep less that night, so is smoking/vaping fucking my body or is lack of sleep or is the distinction even possible given the inferential capabilities of biology in the next 500+years? I don't know More broadly I know that looking back to months with plenty of sleep I feel much better than when i sleep less. But maybe that's because I sleep less overall when I'm feeling down and also feel less happy (by definition) and am less productive, and maybe low sleep is actually a mechanism against feeling even worst. Overall I assume most people notice these correlations, though probably less in-depth, based on how commonly pe
1ADifferentAnonymous
I think the idea is that Huemer's quote seems to itself be an effort to repair society without fully understanding it. I don't think this is a facile objection, either*—I think it's very possible that "Voters, activists, and political leaders" are actually an essential part of the complex mechanism of society and if they all stopped trying to remedy problems things would get even worse. On the other hand, you can recurse this reasoning and say that maybe bold counterintuitive philosophical prescriptions like Huemer's are also part of the complex mechanism.   *To the quote as a standalone argument, anyway—haven't read the essay.
1Slider
I don't exactly get that either. Hypocrisy could apply if someone is advocating not to advocate.
2habryka
(I don't understand it either)
guzey20

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

... (read more)
guzey160

Note that the book contains a multitude of basic scientific errors, misrepresentation of research, data manipulation, etc: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

guzey310

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... (read more)

3ErickBall
Yes, this just-so-story is suspicious, especially because it's not "just so"--if there were such strong selection for variability, wouldn't you expect full coverage of the night? Some people could go to bed at four and others could wake up at three. As far as I know this does not generally happen (in the absence of electric lighting) and hence the dangers of having everybody asleep at once must be manageable.