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Comment by hpoe | Hacker News Reader

For those interested in someone who created a refutation to Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep"

I wouldn't say this is refuting even a minority of claims in the book. It appears to be a thorough fact check of a small percentage of claims, some of which is going after the author over wording and inconsistencies. It's fair criticism, but by no means invalidates a majority of the information regarding sleep that Walker presents

After finding that the part of the book which actually got fact-checked is full of falsehoods and contains outright falsifications, your conclusion is "well, the rest of it must be fine"?

Except there are cases where Walker went so far as to remove portions of a graph to support his argument. This kind of manipulation shouldn't be allowed to stand and it's frustrating (though not surprising) to see a book that relies on this sort of dishonesty get so much uncritical attention and praise. I can't put it any better than Andrew Gelman:

"If the data didn’t matter, then why did you include them in your damn book in the first place? If the removal of the bar from the graph didn’t matter, then why did you remove the damn bar?"

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/03/24/why-we-sle...

Okay, he removed the 5 hour bar. I get what the author in your link is upset about, leaving out data points. But imo that's not good enough to make me throw out all the information in that book.

It sounds like the author is upset a book about getting enough sleep is getting so much attention. If they're upset at the way Walker misrepresents information, then I'd hate to see the author's blood pressure while feverishly researching the bias of every article they come across

I'm genuinely surprised someone could read that whole blog post (I'm assuming here) and come away with that conclusion. Gelman addresses this so directly in the article:

"Recall the Javert paradox. It’s completely reasonable to write about scientific misconduct, and yes sometimes we have to scream a bit to get heard over all the chatter of the scientist-as-hero press." ... "But we need real expertise, not fake expertise. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Gresham, baby, Gresham. If we don’t contest the fake expertise, I’m seriously worried it will be crowding out the real stuff."

There is good research and there is bad research. The latter should not be given a pass just because all research has some amount of bias.

This refutation is authored by the same person who conducted the study to which these comments are attached :)

I did some digging and it is pretty solid to me. It's sad that Walker did not respond to this.

He did (poorly) and not in a single easily read location.

Proof of digging?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com