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Comment by wojtekkru | Hacker News Reader

Have they established causation? Or could it be that lifestyle including alcohol and weapons also happens to involve less sleep?

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"Compared to students who reported sleeping eight hours at night, high school students who slept less than six hours were twice as likely to self-report using alcohol, tobacco, marijuana or other drugs, and driving after drinking alcohol. They were also nearly twice as likely to report carrying a weapon or being in a fight. Researchers found the strongest associations were related to mood and self- harm. Those who slept less than six hours were more than three times as likely to consider or attempt suicide, and four times as likely to attempt suicide, resulting in treatment. Only 30 percent of the students in the study reported averaging more than eight hours of sleep on school nights."

Seems like a lot of data mining to create correlations (hence the use of the word "association" a lot). This kind of work can be good for problem finding and hypothesis generation. It's unfortunate that we live in a world where:

- news outlets publish research that is meant to stimulate discussion + hypothesis exploration

- readers are unable, undereducated, and / or disempowered to discern the level of rigorous science examination done

EDIT: The funny thing is that I predict that this HN thread will lead hundreds of folks to tell stories of confirmation bias.

Nearly every morning one of our local radio station gives "fun" "facts" and always start with "Scientist say " and end with something ridiculous like "dogs can't look up", or "purple is the best colour", or something equally bizarre, and they treat it like because "scientists" say it it has meaning or value, and then they both discuss it as a fact, and have people phone in and talk about it. We utterly fail at scientific education and communication in North America.

I’m not sure if it’s only NA though... just read the chapter 6 “Authority” of Cialdinis book “Influence”. People take stuff that authorities like scientists say as given. It’s human nature. The example of how this can be abused as outlined in the book are quite bizarre.

Oh, yeah, I just didn't want to generalize farther than my own experience.

I wonder if this is CBC Radio 2 Drive. If not, there must be a daily syndicated list available to radio stations to have for banter between actual content.

>Those who slept less than six hours were more than three times as likely to consider or attempt suicide, and four times as likely to attempt suicide, resulting in treatment.

Considering that insomnia is a common symptom of depression, this really shouldn't be remotely surprising

Edit: I'd bet you'd find a similar correlation with students that sleep more than 12 hours a day too

Sleeping too much is also a common symptom of depression, as the user abuses sleep to escape their life.

For serious depression issues, I'm not sure 'abuse' is appropriate here...

The inability to _want_ to do anything or _care_ often isn't a conscious choice.

Not to mention that depression often makes people feel physically tired all the time. I don't think someone with normal neurochemistry even could sleep 16 hours a day if they wanted to.

"Abuse" is Newspeak, it means "abnormal use". When depression causes you to sleep to avoid life situations, it could even be called addiction.

That's precisely what I meant in my edit

Or...uses sleep to reduce the inflammation of the brain, thus treating (the symptoms of?) depression?

> EDIT: The funny thing is that I predict that this HN thread will lead hundreds of folks to tell stories of confirmation bias.

Good reply, but why rush to label potential replies as confirmation bias? That simply makes your reply more subjectively problematic. For all we know, the causation is really there. We just have no idea, for the exact reasons you've posted. It's ok to throw potential causes around.

The leverage point in a reply like yours is in getting people to interpret those replies with more clarity, which should not be confused with getting people to label a bunch of personal anecdotes as confirmation bias.

> subjectively problematic

I might recommend using a word more specific than "problematic" if your goal is to communicate your criticism. It's about as specific as "bad", and seems to form an in-group out-group dynamic for readers who get to fill in the gaps.

I agree with your point, so I've read your comment as "it makes your reply more biased than necessary", whereas people who disagree with you might read it as "I don't like your reply because it hurts my feelings" or some other uncharitable interpretation.

Hope this came across as a friendly recommendation! Communicating over text has so many pitfalls.

> The funny thing is that I predict that this HN thread will lead hundreds of folks to tell stories of confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias looks like on-topic content, and often spurs copycat posts that look like engagement. It's one of the faster ways of growing the number next to your user name in the upper right, which causes a dopamine release in most users.

Another way of wording the finding is "students who engage in activities that adults don't approve of found to also go to sleep at a time adults don't approve of."

There’s no reference to going to sleep at a particular time.

Fair enough. s/go to sleep at a time/have sleeping habits/

Although I somehow doubt the parents' issue is their kids go to bed promptly at eleven but then insist on getting up at five in the morning.

Those missing 2 hours of sleep are probably from going to bed 2 hours later, though, which is a pretty specific time.

From going to bed 2 hours later, and being unable to get up two hours later, because school starts at a nice early time.

The point isn't the time that they go to sleep. The point is the amount of time that they stay asleep.

And suicide, for instance, is a bit more than just "activities that adults don't approve of". It's self-evidently harmful.

Based on nothing but my own personal experience when I get tired I get cranky and more truthful, so the sole factor could be nothing but more people filling out the survey honestly.

I'm only half joking.

It could also be an indication of the lack of parental involvement in their lives.

Yeah, "kids sleep less and do more risky stuff without parental guidance/boundaries".

There is also the possibility that a third variable contributes to both. Like maybe a stressful family life or living in a city (louder at night, more access to drugs) causes teens to be more likely to use drugs and to sleep less.

I would think that fighting, alochol and other drugs are being consumed by 6 hour sleepers during the two hours that the 8 hour sleepers are... asleep.

Hmmm. As a former grades 8-12 educator, if I were to observe 'risky teen behavior' I'd first want to talk to their parents and to ascertain their (compulsory) school environment.

Adolescents have enough to worry about (which they're good at), and their need for a caring support structure is a paramount concern. Experimentation is natural and healthy for them, within limits.

Well, there's pretty good controlled experimental evidence that lack of sleep causes impulsivity. But obviously causality works the other way too and this study doesn't help us know how much of these effects would go away if, say, high school start times were pushed back and how much would persist which is what we're really interested in.

Yeah seems obvious that kids from rough homes don’t get enough sleep.

"self reported" Maybe the interpretation could be that less sleep makes people more honest :p

The confusion of causation and correlation is often presented as a bug in the human operating system. It’s definitely a mistake here and you are right to point it out. But I sometimes wonder if the bug in the human cognitive process is (not mistaking causation vs correlation) but actually that we attribute greater weight to conclusions presented as science, even when they are bad science. We - rightly - trust the scientific process, more than for example testimony or hearsay. Disreputable scientists hack this heuristic to pass bad science as fact.

It could be cortisol. I've been researching the effects of this hormone and it's kind of crazy. It's the hormone that regulates stress, fat deposits, memory and a lot of other things.

Questions like this always pop up, and correlate highly with people who didn't read the article.

The "I'll sleep when I'm dead" generation.

YouTube & Twitch may end up having really bad effect on society because of the effect on sleep they potentially have

YouTube, Facebook and others are basically social cancer.

Remember when they thought putting asbestos in everything and smoking everywhere were great ideas? This "social all the things" strategy reminds me a lot of 1950s America where plastic, fiberglass, and pesticides were going to cure all problems if only you used liberal amounts of it in everything.

"Facebook is a Toilet" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJCJyYtE9Rw) - from Last Week Tonight.

I think it’s the laptops and, especially, smartphones. If it weren’t for YouTube and Twitch we’d find a different way of wasting time.

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