Do any of these errors reverse that information? Is sleep actually harmful? Should we in fact be loading up on caffeine and alcohol and sleeping 3 hours a night? If not, then what's the point?
The example there is:
Tom: All cats are animals. Ginger is an animal. Therefore, Ginger is a cat.
Bill: You have just fallaciously affirmed the consequent. You are incorrect. Therefore, Ginger is not a cat.
> Logician: Here is an example of a syllogism. The cat has four paws. Isidore and Fricot both have four paws. Therefore Isidore and Fricot are cats.
> Old Gentleman: My dog has got four paws.
> Logician: Then it is a cat.
> ...
> Logician: Another syllogism. All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.
> Old Gentleman: And he's got four paws. That's true. I've got a cat named Socrates.
> Logician: There you are, you see...
> Old Gentleman: So Socrates was a cat, was he?
> Logician: Logic has just revealed the fact to us.
Substitute "data" for logic in this context I guess
- 5h sleep - 60% injury likelihood
- 6h sleep - 75% injury likelihood
Now maintain the conclusion that the graph supports the idea of the likelihood of injury being higher the fewer the hours slept per night. Of course such manipulation will not make your book a bestseller.
Studies [0] show that the likelihood of your science being bunk increases with your desire to turn them into bestsellers and make more money from them.
[0] Too lazy to manipulate a bar chart to show whatever I want it to show because I don't actually aim to turn this comment into a bestseller.
Like I agree that removing the bar is bad, but Walker's takeaway is pretty much the same as that of the original paper from which the graph is taken - the paper states that predictor for injury is sleeping less than 8 hours, which Walker points out as well.
> First, an enormous literature dedicated to the treatment of depression with sleep deprivation has found that people with depression frequently benefit by not getting a good night’s sleep.
> Second, Walker directly contradicts himself in Chapter 7 by acknowledging that there are cases when a good night’s sleep is not helpful after all...
> Finally, although Walker states that “sleep deprivation is not a realistic or comprehensive therapy option”, a review chapter of sleep deprivation in the book Sleep, Neuronal Plasticity and Brain Function published in 2014 reads: "[C]onsidering its safety, this technique [sleep deprivation] can now be considered among the first-line antidepressant treatment strategies for patients affected by mood disorders."
There is no one-size-fits-all advice for sleep, it would seem. For some folks, yes, too much sleep is harmful, and yes, sleep deprivation therapy benefits them.
Moreover, the point is that scientific literature should be peer-reviewed.
[0] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#no-a-good-night-s-slee...
The example cited here, where people on 5 hours of sleep actually have slightly less chance of injury than 6, is by far the most egregious one, but even it doesn't change the conclusion of the sentence where it appears. At most, it would require a footnote: "also, something weird is going on in the tiny 5 hour group".
If the additional data falsified the conclusion, that would be one thing. But it doesn't, so why keep harping about how it wasn't shown?
Is it okay for me to make money by distorting science? At what point does my behaviour cross from "finding the best presentation for the data" into "misleading the public"?
This isn't just one book either. It's a whole industry. People know that some magazines have comprehensive fact-checking, and they used to expect a level of fact-checking in pop sci print books. They didn't know that pop-sci books have almost no fact-checking.
https://slate.com/technology/2016/08/why-doesnt-anyone-fact-...
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/journalism-book-fact-checking-j...
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/09/wh...
Even the greatest popsci book of all time, a brief history of time, is famously a tome almost no one ever reads fully[1]. Every popsci book I've taken up I can never finish because half of it would be repetitive BS and I'll come out of it not taking anymore takeaway points than what was in the article in Forbes promoting the book. The motivations for publishing popular science books by professors are probably to blame here, on top of the fundamental research ethics problems that plague academia nowadays.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/03/1...
It’s a popsci book, not big Rudin.
Yes, actually. The point of writing an entire book is to present enough evidence for the reader to come to the author’s conclusion on their own.
The important part of reading a book, the part that has a chance of altering your behavior in the future, is spending time considering the subject matter from various different angles. That’s what gives you the ability to recognize similarities between situations described in the book and situations that appear in your life. This ability to see the things that happen to you in a new light is the real value these books provide.
What a great quote. I'll be stealing that thanks.
It's a natural process of healing and rest, like.. huh?
He doesn’t say If you wake up early stay in bed, actually the advice given was once you’re up, get up, don’t snooze.
The comment to which I replied, in part: "Do any of these errors reverse that information? Is sleep actually harmful?… If not, then what's the point [of arguing about whether Why We Sleep contains errors]?"
I interpret this comment as: "Why We Sleep may contain errors, but I don't care; sleep is obviously good for you. I know how much sleep is necessary for me, and am capable of ignoring whatever Why We Sleep says on the matter of how much is required."
My response is that we should care that Why We Sleep contains errors. People are going to read that book and use it to determine how much sleep they need, whether or not the parent commenter has done. The fact that Why We Sleep contains errors obviously doesn't mean we should get less sleep - the greatest idiot on Earth may say that it's raining, but that doesn't mean it's sunny outside - but it should make you at least a little sceptical of its arguments that you should get more sleep, because that sleep comes at a massive cost.
Suppose for the sake of argument it is the case that I require seven hours of sleep a night, and the additional eighth hour confers little additional benefit (or even confers harm - it doesn't matter to my argument). Suppose I habitually sleep seven hours, but then I read Why We Sleep and am terrified into sleeping eight hours a night. Now I am spending a full 1/24th of my life - about 4.1% of it - on extra sleep that is doing very little for me except robbing me of consciousness.
Perhaps it is the case that for you in particular, there is enough benefit from that eighth hour of sleep to outweigh the cost (and I assert that it's definitely worth everyone individually doing this little experiment on themselves, because people differ)! Perhaps it is the case that for most people, there is enough benefit - but we don't know, and we can't know simply from Why We Sleep, because it contains errors.
(The first part of the comment to which I replied was "The general message and key takeaway I got from the book was that sleep affects your health in various ways and getting a sufficient amount of higher quality sleep is better than not doing so." This is undoubtedly true: so obviously true, in fact, that there is no need for anyone to read a book to learn it.)