Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

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I think this book is mostly bullshit - the same author that wrote the linked HN post dug into that book and there was a ton of manipulative data and just straight up false claims. [0]

I get a pretty strong pseudoscience vibe from it.

From a previous post:

I got a strong motivated reasoning/bullshit vibe from Walker in this interview: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/20/630792401/sleep-scientist-war...

Particularly this section:

> “Sleep is not like the bank. So you can't accumulate debt and then try and pay it off at a later point in time. And the reason is this - we know that if I were to deprive you of sleep for an entire night - take away eight hours - and then in the subsequent nights, I give you all of the sleep that you want - however much you wish to consume - you never get back all that you lost. You will sleep longer, but you will never achieve that full eight-hour repayment as it were. So the brain has no capacity to get back that lost sleep...”

I don’t think this follows - seems likely to me that sleep is not some linear time thing and that there’s a standard overhead that doesn’t need to be repeated to extend and make up the time. This feels like a symptom of not understanding the mechanism and making a bad assumption.

I also found the “I won’t mention the cognitive failures I can detect” irritating. If there’s some actual thing to mention, say it - this kind of thing sets off alarms for me.

It doesn’t surprise me that the rest is similarly bad.

[0]: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

>I get a pretty strong pseudoscience vibe from it.

I don't quite know how to categorize complaining about pseudoscience based on a "vibe".

It's not quite irony... maybe it's just humorous. As a member of the post Alanis Morissette generation I guess I can no longer recognize irony.

By 'vibe' I mean a ton of statements that sound likely to be false or at least would surprise me if they were true that aren't backed up when you look closer. The fact that the information is surprising isn't bad itself, but it spikes curiosity - then when I look deeper there isn't much actually there to support the surprising claims and what is there has a ton of issues.

There's a lot of 'wow, isn't that interesting' talk and deference to authority on an 'important' issue, but little talk of the actual mechanisms of how things work, little consideration of obvious counter examples that could be an explanation (like the one in my comment).

The sense is that the argument is driven by motivated reasoning instead of trying to understand what's true. Basically starting with a position and forcing the data to fit your pre-existing position.

It feels like I'm being conned by someone making up bullshit for status or some other agenda (maybe just sunk costs into an existing theory). Often bullshit and complex interesting topics can sound similar at first and it's helpful to have some sense for telling the difference. Otherwise you wander around impressed by 'energy crystals' and worried about 5g.

What agenda could be served by convincing people to get enough sleep?

Walker has clearly made a huge name for himself and sold a significant number of books by skewing the evidence to make his thesis sound more substantial than it is

It's less about the specific content, and more about continuing to push something without good science behind it.

For example: I think X is true, I cherry pick data to back up X and publish a book on it. This book gets a lot of attention and is good for my career, but it's based on bad science and misleads people. This is a theory I identify myself with along with my success and my own career, if its ideas are invalidated that reflects negatively on me and my abilities (and potentially the ability to support myself). There's an incentive to rationalize or continue pushing the bad science which slows down figuring out what's really true. This has happened a ton of times throughout history.

In this specific situation the benign case is people sleep more and it doesn't matter (or it helps), in the pathological case people are anxious about their lack of sleep and it negatively effects their life or they sleep more than they personally need and it turns out over-sleeping is co-morbid with depression and causes other issues.

In the general case popularizing bad science has knock on effects that make it harder for people to get funding to study ideas the contradict the popular, but incorrect zeitgeist of what's commonly thought to be 'true'. It can also lead people down rabbit holes that can take a long time to crawl out of and make it take longer for people to understand what is actually true.

You can't just hand wave this away by saying "I know X is true, therefore it doesn't matter if the data is a little problematic. X is true and it's good for people to know that". A lot of times X turns out not to be true, not to be entirely true, etc.

I don't know if you can call it an agenda but I think there's something like a 'wellness' or moderation bias in these fields. The idea that you need to balance out hard work, slow down, and so on.

For example, as it turns out there is little evidence that stretching actually does anything, yet a lot of experts used to recommend it for decades. Same with nutrition, 'balanced diets', workouts at low heart rates and so on.

What do you mean that stretching doesn't do anything? Any links to such evidence? It's a pretty simple experiment to stretch every day for a month and measure your flexibility gains, so that's quite a bold claim. Do you mean it has no direct impact on your health?

>https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/08/stretchin...

it actually has negative impact on health and injury in people who do static stretches in particular is significantly increased. (as is in people with high levels of flexibility in general)

Nowadays stretches as a warmup are not recommended any more.

Pseudoscience isn't about "vibes" though, its about mis-using scientific concepts in disingenuous ways.

I get the “vibe” because of the misuse. I regret using the colloquialism since people seem to have such a strong reaction to it. I just meant my skepticism went up from what I was hearing.

I find this argument odd for a couple reasons.

First, if you "can't get back lost sleep", wouldn't that mean that you were tired forever? I'm definitely more tired after 24 hours awake than 18. But I can sleep and get back to normal.

Second, I once stayed up for almost 3 days straight. At the end of that, I slept for 24 hours straight. I woke up the next evening as if it were a normal morning, fully refreshed. (I went to bed about 5pm, and woke up about 5pm the next day.)

If I didn't "bank" my tiredness and pay it back with sleep, how is that even possible?

Sleep is essential for memory and skill consolidation. What they mean by not being able to recover sleep is that if you (for example) try to learn something while sleep deprived, more of those memories will be lost the next day. Sleeping extra on the weekend will not make those memories come back. The benefits of sleep are "lost" forever.

If that's what they meant then isn't that what they should have said?

What you're saying makes sense, but it's very different from what was said in that interview.

Grandparent's description is exactly how I read the interview too.

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