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Comment by dasanman | Hacker News Reader

But if it "feels that way", doesnt that have something to say as well?

In the absence of any actual evidence? Generally we take self-reported feelings as not especially strong evidence.

Maybe all it says is they grew up thinking that "weekend sleeping helped catch-up" and now they only remember the confirming evidence and discard the disconfirming evidence to support their confirmation bias?

I think the actual evidence, for the OP, is that he/she feels better. I don't think it matters if no one else feels better. OP isn't making a scientific claim other than they feel better after a weekend of sleep.

I have a friend who deeply believes that he can drink unlimited amounts of beer and not get drunk. He will drive his car home after drinking 10 beers.

Should his feelings count as evidence in any meaningful sense?

Or do we generally assume that his feelings -- especially since they are contrary to science -- are not a good guide to what really happens?

And remember that spinach has a lot of iron, butter is good for you in 1940, bad for you in 1970, good for you in 2010.

Margarine is good for you in 1970, bad for you in 2010.

Good luck.

Self-reported statements (about how someone feels) are good evidence for how they feel. In your example, if the claim is that your friend believes he is not drunk, then his experience still carries more weight (is a more reliable indicator of his beliefs) than most studies.

This is different from the question of whether he is actually sober, of course. But the post you're replying to is specifically about the claim that X person feels better, not about any physical effects on their body. I'd rather trust a person about how they say they feel (especially at a given moment), than studies trying to determine how most people probably feel or ought to feel in a similar situation.

Wait, what? Why would self-reported feelings not be taken as strong evidence? It seems to me like self-reported feelings are great evidence, and need particularly strong evidence (e.g. evidence of long-term damage that isn’t felt in the short term, like for smoking cigarettes) to contradict.

> Wait, what? Why would self-reported feelings not be taken as strong evidence?

Because you might be stuck in a local maxima that's close to your global minima. I've been reading "Why We Sleep", and while I don't have the citations here at the moment he mentions that one of the tricky things with sleep deprivation is that people are often not very aware of it themselves. Your body gets used to the new, lower, level and thinks that it's normal.

It should also be mentioned that most people don't try to distinguish between correlation and causation, and as such it can be hard to draw any conclusions. Imagine a person who reports that "I'm so happy when I drink alcohol", but it turns out that he has no social contact (e.g. working at night, sleeping through the day; no friends) outside of the bar setting, and it's actually the social element that he most desires.

I guess it depends on what you mean by the word "evidence", but I wouldn't really say that his self-reported feelings show any strong evidence that alcohol makes him happy.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep

Because we're really good at fooling ourselves, and we lie to present an idealised version of ourselves.

Example: [Apparently] having coffee in the morning doesn't wake you up, it's that caffeine dependency (and maybe a little dehydration) makes you feel terrible. Coffee temporarily reverse this negative [local maxima].

Coffee appears to wake you up, but it's doing the opposite.

There are many common examples - 'drinking doesn't affect my driving', 'I don't drink heavily', 'advertising doesn't affect me', 'I get enough exercise', 'my diet is healthy', 'I go to church regularly'.

Reports here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5639921/#!po=7...., for example, have measured overreporting of exercise/church attendance at double.

In the ends its about how you feel, your well being. Right?

Except a lot of studies and protocols do rely on self-assessment of conditions.

Pain scores, Depression scores are the ones I remember right now

So yes, it is something that's used because you don't have a way of directly measuring all things

The important thing to keep in mind there is that it doesn't much matter what the science tells you: It makes you feel better and it costs you almost nothing. That makes it a valuable pursuit even if we couldn't find evidence for it working (though another post in this chain mentions some evidence that it does work for a single week).

When sleeping more shortens my waking life, I really want to know how important it is.

If your waking life feels like shit when you don't sleep an hour more, I don't know what more incentive you need to sleep an hour more (given that you are free to do so).

That's a very important question that should be answered, but your implicit assumption that sleeping shortens waking life should at least be verified. It looks like chronic lack of sleep shortens life expectancy.

No, because it's not predictive. Thousands of things could cause that feeling, there's no telling it's the catch up sleep.

The point is you can't do anything with his anecdote. It gives you no more information about what you should do, and is therefore technically useless.

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