I think the research behind this news is quite weak: only 9 days and not that many participants (18 men and 18 women).
You can't judge the weakness of an experiment just based on the number of participants. Your comment might mislead others with not enough knowledge of stats I think.
That study tracked 38,000 people over 13 years. "People who slept for fewer than the recommended seven hours each weekday, but caught an extra hour or two on weekends, lived just as long as people who always slept seven hours, the authors reported."
I still find it worrying here because we know there's substantial variance in how/when people sleep, and 36 is well below "representative sample" numbers. More generally, a 36 participant, 2 week study ought to be examined pretty carefully when it contradicts a study (Akerstedt et al) on 38,000 subjects over 13 years. I can hardly blame the authors for that, though; small lab confirmations of large self-report studies are a useful and established practice.
But I don't think that's the damning part. The 9 night study span is incredibly worrying for trying to assess a long-term effect. If a value shifts over that span, is it rising steadily, rising to a new equilibrium, or reacting to a change and then returning to homeostasis?
(I do want to give credit to the study for using pre-experiment substance/diet/sleep control, and then applying individual sleep times to avoid "night owls" being a confounder. Seeing studies judge "sleep time" by making all subjects go to bed at the same hour is infuriating.)
Finally, there's strong evidence that something was unusual about study conditions. The WaPo article claims that the weekend sleepers "gained nearly three pounds over two weeks", but that's pretty much journalistic malpractice. The study actually found that all patients in the study gained weight; more weight with higher confidence for the low-sleep groups, but the groups had heavy overlap in amount gained. We can be confident that two weeks of work-schedule sleep do not cause that sort of weight gain for most people, since the reduction to the absurd there is everyone gaining ~70 lb/year indefinitely. It's the sort of number which raises pretty significant questions about how this compares to anything outside the lab setting.
The file-drawer problem with small lab studies is serious, and can't be solved with effect sizes; it's much easier to run a few of these and publish the hits than to do that with large-population studies.
But small lab studies provide a lot of value alongside population studies. They help reveal issues with bad self-report data, which are major concerns for sleep and weight questions. They also offer an efficient way to replicate and extend large studies. If you're spending a decade with 10k+ subjects, gathering a huge range of data is understandable (and I would argue, preferable). But it leaves you with a choice between salami slicing across all your variables, or applying multiple-comparisons corrections that destroy your sensitivity. Using large multi-factor studies as exploratory work, then validating effects with small focused studies is actually a pretty healthy outcome.
A final thought: I have a lot of problems with this study, but file-drawer issues aren't one of them. Looking at a bunch of correlated variables (insulin sensitivity, weight gain, outside-meal eating, etc) and reporting them all is a solid way to mitigate that - we know those things should correlate for basically any real effect, which makes it much harder to stumble into a false positive and publish.
It's just publication pressure (or worse, as other commenters have hinted at).
You can't say that. (Ok, of course everyone has the right to her opinions.) The point of the scientific method is that it is, in many ways, self-correcting. It's getting addressed, albeit slowly. It will be counterproductive for all of us if we simply dismiss all results we're not comfortable with that it's only publication pressure.
I mean -- you can say that personally, and it probably makes sense, but as a society we need to get social sciences and medicine into a better shape instead of just 'letting it go'.
Oh, so what should we go to now in order to try to expand our knowledge about this? What are you suggesting?
It's draped in the language of knowing, but it's purely emotional material; stuff that makes you feel good, and makes you feel smart for feeling right.
(I also think the desire to drape our tribal impulses in scientific form comes from society prizing smarts for so very, very long, but that's another story.)
He has his opinions, positions and motives just like anyone else, but is open about them. If anything he is a rock star lecturer that exemplifies how informative, accurate, sincere, progressive, intimate, and inspiring science can be. He helps people for a living as a psychologist and a lecturer. If he offends you then you either have issues or don't understand him or both, but he would gladly engage with you either way.
Most that disagree with him disagree with the science, which puts them in the same boat as climate change deniers, of which there are plenty voicing their alternate facts online. But their voice doesn't validate their claims. Science is not a democracy.
If dissing someone is allowed then why isn't praising them? And praising them well?
Because I exaggerated?
But did I?
He continues to help millions of people. Can't say that about many people.
Regarding his work/words: He's right about the biological differences between men and women. He's right about social hierarchies and power structures being inevitable. He's right about the government's overreach on speech being dangerous. He's right about proper discourse on any matter being uncomfortable. He's right about the value of honesty and integrity. He's right about ways to piece your life and yourself back together.
And by right I don't mean binary true or false, because that isn't how science works. By right, I mean the most accurate knowledge we currently have on the topic that could be usefully applied to a problem at hand compared to other less accurate knowledge that is already being applied to problems at hand. Seeing this is why he stood up, and many stood up with him.
You can't be a quack and help so many people or be right about so many things. And at the end of the day he's just a lecturer that's really really good at his job -- at engaging his students and sharing the wealth of knowledge that already exists. And yes, using that knowledge to point out why you are wrong does make him offensive to a lot of people. You don't have to be one of them. And yes, he has turned activist. You don't have to turn into one, by why not? But if you have, then why against?
He isn't anti-scientific. He just isn't. That's a blatantly false claim.
Hmmm no we can also think he uses mostly weak papers with dodgy methodologies and over-generalizes the conclusions. Not all scientists within a field agree with any given scientist of that field, that would be ludicrous.
And I never said all scientists agree. Typical straw man. But what I will say is there are plenty of climate change deniers that claim to be scientists.
Nothing is indefensible. Challenge him all you want.
His views are his views. Most of his lectures are about other people's work. When he draws conclusions his logic is sound and his premises are transparent. Talk, think, debate.
Why hate? He continues to help so many people.
Is there a list of people building on the work of Jordan Peterson? I'd like to see it.
See it. You could have just Google it.
He's listed as first author on three of the first 20 entries, and one of those is a pop-sci book, not an academic paper. Of the other two, one is from 17 years ago and the other is from 29 years ago.
This is not the publication record of an influential social scientist.
Knocking him for collaborating is ignorant and disingenuous. Scientists collaborate. His record shows he is a real scientist. It doesn't have to show he is the best or that he deserves a Nobel Prize. At this point, he's probably a better candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize if anything, but this only goes to show what he's been working on lately, which is more activism than scientific research. More Neil deGrasse Tyson than Einstein, but that doesn't make Neil a fake scientist.
JDP's last book he did write for a broader audience. Great move. Even I read it. And he brought with him the scientists and the research that otherwise would not have reached his audience.
His book is maybe 75% work of other scientists, 20% story telling, and 5% what he draws from it. Basically his 12 rules. He demonstrates how to draw meaning and meaningful conclusions rationally, with well grounded premises. If you have low tolerance for the more abstract genre of ancient story analysis, then skip it. Or maybe there is some truth to it? Decide for yourself.
Did you read his book? Fine if you didn't but I wouldn't claim to understand him if I hadn't. Maybe you have issues with him, which is fine, but again, that is a separate matter than the substance of his lectures. Which are all highly specific by the way. So to say they're all based on weak papers or that he's selling snake oil is an immediate tell that, again, you either don't understand him or have other issues/motives.
(Thanks HN for not letting me reply, claiming I'm posting too fast, when clearly I'm not. Not sure how you're suppose to have a conversation.)
Important work, I'm sure, but not what I'd call groundbreaking; I think the effects of drinking on cognition have been somewhat well-known, at least anecdotally, for at least a few thousand years, give or take.
Conclusions are cheap.
Citation needed. Because hyperbole is no different in meta.
Citation need... Oh wait, this is discussion, not an academic paper.
It's literally an academic discussion insofar as it's about the technicalities of an academic paper.
So yes, you really do need to support your arguments if you want them to be taken seriously.
and past issues.
They said the participants slept only five hours a night for weekdays. 8 hours is the generally recommended amount for a good nights sleep, so to truly bring balance to that schedule, they'd have a 15 hour sleep-debt to make up on the weekends, in addition to the full 8 hours they'd need to sleep those two weekend days on their own. I seriously doubt the participants were able to sleep 16 hours on both friday and saturday night to fully pay the sleep debt even at their level of sleep deprivation, so I don't think you can really say the "balance sheet" approach is wrong.
I'm not necessarily saying I support a balance sheet view of sleep, I just think these kinds of articles are not very careful with the kind of wording they use. Also maybe I'm just living under a rock, but I don't feel like its that common to only get 5 hours of sleep every single weekday unless you're like a single parent with a baby (in which case you probably wouldn't magically get 8 hours on the weekend), I'd be more interested to see what happens if this was done in smaller spurts, like two consecutive days with three or four hours of sleep to emulate some work or school deadline approaching, but then 8 or 9 the rest of the week after its complete. As it stands now, the title of the article comes off as click bait because its a pretty fear-mongering conclusion drawn from what I consider to be pretty extreme circumstances.
Well, if you take a reference of 7 hours instead of 8, it is more possible. That's kind of what I was doing when I was in high-school: sleeping 5 hours or under on week days, so a total of about 24-25 hours over 5 days; and then sleeping 12 hours or more on week-end nights. So I was sleeping as much in those 2 days, as I was in the other 5, for a total of about 50 hours / week, which is around 7 hours per day on average.
Note that I do not recommend this rhythm! Periodically during those years, I suffered from awful 3- to 5-days long periods during which I was... I don't know how to explain, like if there was a cotton wall between the world and me, I had no control over anything, everything was happening automatically, I had kind of visions of stuff that would happen not matter what I'd do, etc. I guess all of this was caused by sleep deprivation. Gee, I don't miss those periods... luckily it stopped after high-school.
But all my life, I have had huge difficulties to fall asleep at night, and also suffered from stress, which doesn't combine well with the necessities of school times, work times, and other mandatory times: I generally managed to sleep earlier when there was no need to wake up early... If I ever need to wake up at 5 or 4 AM, I won't even manage to get any sleep (or 45 minutes with 10 sweaty 180 heartbeats per minute wake-up inside).
This very much depends on statistical power. If the effect size is big enough, 36 participants can be plenty.
I suspect the effect sizes of sleep deprivation are probably quite large.
Seems it even worse. Thanks for sparing many people's time with your comment.
Then you let your subjects rest up and repeat it again another few times, to make sure that its repeatable and not a coincidence.