“Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
guzey.com
guzey.com
Had he put the same effort to sourcing the book and toning down the claims, there would have not been a controversy.
Had he put effort into ruining the success of his book by toning down his claims, expressing caveats, adding footnotes of where he was using a small study, etc, then someone else willing to take the risks of not being diligent would get the fame and opportunity to defend their book.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has stated that, “Insufficient sleep is a public health epidemic.”
Perhaps just a CDC redesign fluke?
It was written December 19, 2019. The link was most likely not dead then. It was archived in July 2019 and does point to what is claimed (consistent with the screenshot): http://web.archive.org/web/20190712132614/https://www.accqsl...
The PDF seems to be a snapshot of the CDC site from 2014: http://web.archive.org/web/20141031142147/http://www.cdc.gov...
So this much checks out.
The blog article describes a problem that exists, and may have always existed. A behavior that contributes to bad health outcomes - well that's tremendously common. There are probably many thousands of human behaviors that have negative consequences. Would you say there's an "epidemic" of poor posture in the world? No, it just is a constant reality - something we need to work on continuously.
Overall, while it might have been an accurate source - it's not a very meaningful notion or weighty reference.
The problem in the initial critique was that the author of the book misattributed the epidemic claim to WHO. He subsequently admitted that he misremembered and really it was the CDC. He provided a source to back this up on the blog.
The poster above then seemingly called the veracity of that into question, based on a brief investigation.
This prompted me to do my own investigation, because I wanted to know what was true after all. Up to that point I was unconvinced of any malicious intent on the author's part.
And it turned out that the author was not lying. That's all.
***
As for the use of the word "epidemic" I agree -- it might have been an exaggeration/hyperbole or colloquial use (a bit out of place then) on CDC's part. This is probably why they eventually changed it to "problem".
The article was online however for close to 6 years under the original headline and even though it was updated long before the book was published, I would not hold it against the author, because the book was most likely written over a long period of time.
That there are mistakes and errors, shows to me that it might have been a bit rushed towards the end.
None of these significantly alter the validity of the message and the author admitted and corrected them -- a revised edition of the book is apparently in print. To me this means that he cares.
***
On a personal level, I feel the message of the book comes from a good place. It does point to real problems that are systematically overlooked/ignored/marginalized/ridiculed and it is completely plausible to me that taking steps to fixing them might significantly improve society. Some exaggeration might be in order.
I read the book and the information did contribute to substantially improving my life. I verified some data in it by self-experimentation. It is harmless and scientifically-sound enough to offer people looking for solutions to their sleeping problems.
For the unfortunate these are absolutely not trivial and incomparable to bad posture. Bad sleep can make one's life absolutely miserable. A lot of miserable people makes for a miserable society.
Hope you sleep well.
As it happens, I've been going through an extremely stressful time since last September. I've learned to sleep by listening to Star Trek while I sleep. I think the sound of familiar voices, and the distraction to prevent me from dreaming naturally (which currently turns into stress nightmares) has really saved me. Two of my colleagues have turned to medication, and I can see they're having a harder time of all this.
I have been struggling with bad sleep for most of my life -- seems to run in the family (now I suspect it might be a common chronotype). What finally improved my life and has now been working better and longer than anything before (and I implemented this after reading the book) is properly establishing my circadian rhythm/chronotype and adjusting to it. Now I sleep on a regular schedule and my total sleep time has actually decreased.
Unfortunately this is rather difficult and requires radical lifestyle changes if you are a night type trying to exist on a typical work schedule. I was desperate and in a position to introduce the changes, and fortunately it's worked for me. Hard to recommend to everybody though at this point -- that's why a societal change is needed and that's where this book does good.
From indirect experience, echoing the book, I would strongly advise against medication, in particular zolpidem. It is very highly addictive, may have terrible side-effects, especially mixed with other substances, and ultimately doesn't really work. Honestly it is so much worse than so many illegal substances that from my point of view the only explanation for its continued proliferation is profit.
Definitely respect the author for standing against that in the book.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140216040930/http://www.cdc.go...
No, Walker, 63 percent of people don't have unmet sleep needs, as you are still falsely claiming. You're either being dishonest or you are too innumerate to understand what an interval is.
“Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22419958 - Feb 2020 (34 comments)
“Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850 - Nov 2019 (58 comments)
It doesn't feel like this can be 100% true
If you leave your hand on a hot stove too long, you can get permanent skin damage.
It’s a highly nonlinear and even chaotic system - a living human being. The idea of “making it up” is a linear concept not entirely fit for the system. You can get back somewhat and you can’t undo everything.
The author really, really wants people to take sleep seriously, so he stretches the truth as much as possible to make sleep sound gravely important. He's writing to sell books and spread his message, not necessarily to win awards for posting accurate research.
> If the deficit reduces cognitive function, and I can't make it up with more sleep, does it follow that for every short nights sleep I will have a permanent reduction in cognitive function?
Obviously, the short-term cognitive deficits of sleep deprivation are reversed upon sleeping again.
It's likely that some amount of long-term damage occurs when engaging in unhealthy activities like losing sleep, but the amount of damage is only significant when sustained over long periods of time.
Think of like drinking alcohol: Drinking a bottle of wine in a night is not a healthy activity, but doing it a couple times a year will have negligible impacts on your health. However, drinking a bottle of wine every night for many years in a row will start to produce measurable effects on your liver, among other things.
Sleep deprivation is similar. Missing a night of sleep isn't going to shorten your lifespan or doom you to early cognitive decline. However, depriving yourself of sleep for years on end is likely to produce some negative effects over time.
Not very ethical. But understandable.
> He's writing to sell books and spread his message,
...and arguably that turns it into fraud. If not for the misrepresentation of the facts, would I have bought his book?
> ...and arguably that turns it into fraud. If not for the misrepresentation of the facts, would I have bought his book?
Not to be overly-pedantic, but I think knowingly exaggerating the truth to sell books is more of a scam than a fraud. To me, fraud is closer to outright deception than exaggeration. Fraud is also better defined. Laws are written about fraud. Fraud, I think, is a weightier charge of duplicity.
I base this only on my own internal reaction to the words. Here’s someone getting more into the lexicon:
> In short, scam has no legal status as a term of law in most jurisdictions, except insofar as it may be defined as a type of fraud. The term fraud is broad but usually very carefully defined in statutory law.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/348183/whats-the...
FRAUD. An intentional perversion of truth for the purpose of inducing another in reliance upon it to part with some valuable thing belonging to him or to surrender a legal right; a false representation of a matter of fact, whether by words or by conduct, by false or misleading allegations, or by concealment of that which should have been disclosed, which deceives and is intended to deceive another so that he shall act upon it to his legal injury.
It's a pretty broad definition. Certainly a strong case could be mounted that this fits, however, academics are basically never prosecuted for fraud and there would be enormous institutional resistance to doing so, given the prevalence of fraud in the research literature.
You have citations to support this? Or are you just recycling Walker’s claims with slightly less exaggeration?
My main sources of anecdote for this are grad school students with hectic school and advisor setups (who often are partly sleep deprived for much of 3+ years), and parents who have several children in short succession (ensuring their sleep is ruined for roughly 2 years).
In neither case do those groups seem to suffer significant long-term effects that are obviously from the sleep deprivation.
This seems to be the source of just every factoid. You took something that just sounds true to you and made it into an objective statement.
If my experience is not local and limited then someone has to do a study about loss of sleep and the effects this have on parents.
I found a lot of articles about the lack of sleep and the effect on mental health or health in general, but I am not finding a good explanation about how come if this is true people still become parents, then they go back to work and seems to function well. Is something special about parenting and recovery from lack of sleep? Or we all parents will remain forever with the negative effects due to sleep deprivation happening in early years of parenting?
Just sharing another personal experience: think book came out exactly in the year my kid was born. After reading some reviews and finding out that it does not give any advice about how to handle sleep deprivation I refuse to read it then as I was afraid it will make me more anxious about the small amount of sleep I was getting thus making me sleep even less :)
Let say an individual is working 20 hours a day for 5 days, and in order for the brain and endocrine system to return to normal it takes 14 days of recovery. A few days of 12+ hours of sleep might not have any beneficial effect because the involved biological systems are too slow to get any benefit from the extra sleep, and the excessive amount of sleep might even cause additional problems which hinder recovery.
Making an educated guess, endocrine system is likely a big culprit here. Some hormones are specifically secreted during sleep, while the recipients of hormones are often triggered based on relative changes in hormone levels. If you have first a period of very low levels, followed by a period of sudden spikes, getting back to normal might take a while.
Over the last 2 years I’ve had several periods of sleeping 0-2hrs/night for up to a week at a time (sick kid in the hospital).
One time, I was able to try to “catch up” in the following weeks by sleeping as much as I wanted. The other times, I was limited to my typical 7-8hrs.
No matter what, my recovery time was about 2 days of proper sleep for every day of sleep deprivation. Sleeping excessively (10+ hours) didn’t seem to accelerate recovery.
Or - if you lose a few hours every night during the week, you cannot 'catch up' on the weekend, it doesn't work like that.
A person who lives for years at 5 hours a weeknight but 11 on the weekends will be in poorer health than someone who just did 8 hours a night consistently.
To me there is an implied "in the short term". So if I go without 4 hours of sleep today, I cannot just choose to sleep an extra 4 (or more) hours tomorrow. It's not an even trade. At some point more sleep has diminishing returns.
This does not mean more sleep has no value. Maybe it will add up over the next few days and we'll be back to good. People with sleep deprivation tend to have an REM rebound effect and personally when I've had a few poor nights in a row I will sleep noticeably deeper.
If someone is awake multiple days then sleep-like behaviour happens while they are still awake. They start to hallucinate or dream with eyes open, or enter microsleeps that they don't remember. It's not inconveivable to me (personal conjecture warning) that our diminished state is because some of our brain is doing the necessary upkeep normally relegated to sleep, so we're catching up while we are awake. It's just not something we notice until it gets really bad.
So, this would remove any permanent cognitive reduction, however you'll probably forever lose any memories that weren't correctly stored and so on.
I get the sense exercise and injury are good analogies. If you overexercise, cutting back by the amount you overdid it is too oversimplified; if you stop exercising for a month, you cant just expect to need or suffice with a month's worth later.
I guess this leads to a bigger philosophical leaning question, how do I pick out good information when I don't know the field. This has been a struggle for me, I have a recent interest in neuroscience and how it relates to consciousness. This topic seems to have a wide variety of science based, philosophy based and some real out there stuff but it gets pitches as reliable. I really don't know how to pick good books to read. I don't know how to filter out the equivalent of like being antivax in a field i dont know about.
To try to answer my own questions, I guess in some way, you can't ever know the truth? But relying on one book, blog, article, view point to base your understanding will definitely lead to being uniformed unless you are lucky enough to stumble on a god source the first time.
To put it another way, you need to have a bunch of sources you trust, and then see how strong the connections are from any new data back to those original trustworthy sources.
On the other hand you can’t spend all that much time researching every individual topic. Which is where the problem comes from, but trick is to hold options lightly.
Following someone's work for years is a much stronger signal than just checking their credentials imo.
And probably not even that either.
Oh, definitely don't trust yourself. Everybody is wrong about almost everything, that includes yourself
that being said, there's clearly something to trusting yourself beyond rational levels. How far would Kanye have gotten if not for boundless self belief?
This is the anti-vaxxer motto, almost. I think I'll pass.
What? MOST of Europe? When did this happen?
This is not good advice.
I’d say find experts that you trust and be aware that these experts may commit mistakes as any other human.
In short: find the experts that make the least mistakes.
Search HN threads on the topic, read people who agree and people who disagree then make your own opinion
I honestly cant tell if this is parody or not.
I can't see how it's a bad idea to get some quick signals on how a community approaches a topic.
Even well credentialed experts aren't strictly trustworthy, because they can often be wrong or have big gaps in knowledge. Credentials can be faked or bullshitted into. Even honest experts can fall into self corrupting games that force them to spread bad information to maintain their position in their field.
As individuals, we're going to constantly mess up and follow the wrong ideas. The best we can do is hold lightly to them and be willing to be proven wrong and always be weighing the risks of an idea being wrong. Always ask what the incentives of a person sharing an idea are. Profit incentives distort rational thinking. We all worship the thing that feeds us.
It's important in some cases to take leaps of faith so that you don't become paralyzed to inaction from the vast uncertainty of the world. Just be wary that you don't get stuck on a sinking island or take overly absurd leaps that don't have the reward to justify the risk.
Hopefully, the human colossus is marching closer to truth, even if we as individuals can never achieve it.
Read textbooks, oldest ones first.
Don't try to understand a field by looking at the new research.
Ignore anything you see in the popular press, newspapers, TED talks, or the internet generally.
Read opinions by experts in adjacent fields whose expertise you can more readily evaluate.
Good luck :-)
This is exactly the same approach I take when I’m trying to learn a new field, especially one in which I have little to no background. I always begin with the texts that have survived the longest and are still recommended to this day.
This is why the Lindy heuristic mentioned by a sibling comment to yours is relevant.
If X% of the consensus in a field was overturned twenty years ago, then again ten years ago, your expectation should be that in ten years, X% of the current consensus will be thrown out as nonsense as well. So it's not necessarily that the old information was more accurate, but you can't interpret the new information well without it. What's X in your field? Maybe 5%, maybe 80%, then you should look at the field very differently.
Of course, you could be living through another annus mirabilis, where a new consensus is established that then stands for centuries. But this is by definition unlikely, so there must be strong evidence available.
But how will you even know that it is a “god source” as you so eloquently put it?
Just read a lot. All the time. On a wide variety of subjects. Or, resign yourself to being deceived by charlatans sometimes. No real shortcut here.
I sometimes see papers getting ripped to shreds by twitter for days, and while the papers are indeed bad, I've seen dozens of papers which are just as bad, just not as interesting to Twitter.
The look like scientific fraud - inventing data.
If you suffer from insomnia, don't pick up this book. It will have the opposite of the desired effect. It doesn't have a lot of practical guidance. And now, according to this article, much of the terror might be unfounded.
Better books I'd recommend if you have insomnia are "The Sleep Solution" and "The Circadian Code"
My insomnia responded to CBT-I extremely fast. After 18 months, 2 nights of sleep deprivation (4 hours in bed) and the corner was turned. Now, if I feel my sleep is falling away, my solution is to cut sleep. It rebuilds habits too - what do I do at 6am except run?
While I'm at work, I'm daydreaming about sleeping. When a friend manages to get me out of the house, I'm thinking how much I'd rather be asleep. I've got meds for the narcolepsy and meds for the depression, and they make it less bad, but I'm still miserable most of the time. The narcolepsy meds make me able to function and the depression meds keep me from killing myself, but being awake and alive isn't the same as content and fulfilled.
It doesn't help that I work a late shift and have been averaging 60 hours a week for the last 6 months.
Sleep deprivation therapy is news to me and you seem like you might have some knowledge about the subject. So do you have any recommendations as far as therapies and strategies I could look into for this anti-insomnia?
1) It sounds like you really just need a break. Can you take one? Can you ask a friend for help? 60 hrs+ on a whack sleep schedule is tough. Do you have blackout curtains, eye mask, or earplugs to protect your sleep?
2) How is your diet? Under stress if you are eating a crap diet (refined carbs, heavy sugars, caffeine, etc) that will impact your body far more and can even cause cyclical swings of anxiety that impact your ability to rest. See:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/prescriptions-life/2...
3) Come up with an image of relaxation in the highest detail. It needs to be a scene where you feel safe, secure, and feeling the warmth of compassion from someone you trust. Maybe you're on the beach, in the forest, whatever, it needs to be as high detail as you can and engage all the senses. Colors, shapes, smells, textures, temperature, touch. Write it down, draw it out, own it, envision it using every single sense and emotion you can. Practice entering this scene for 20 minutes a day (set a timer) and feel every aspect of it. Take notice of the various details as you are in your scene. Don't expect anything from it, but just work on spending time meditating on and building it for 30 days. Practice this every day regardless of if you feel like it "works" for sleep. After about 3-6 months you'll have a tool you can use to relax pretty quickly, the feelings should follow about 15-30 minutes after spending time in your scene.
4) Insomnia blows ass, I've been there, but the long-term recovery is taking breaks as you need them, writing down a few key actions in your relaxation + nighttime ritual and sticking to it, exactly. Ex: Get tea at 11pm, enter scene at 11:20pm for 20 minutes, read book until I feel tired. Even if it feels like things "aren't working"... Also, get out of bed if you toss and turn. If you're not sleeping anyway, there's no point. Associating wherever you sleep with anxiety needs to end.
There will be ups and downs but you will recover. But absolutely please schedule in breaks to look forward to.
- Why we sleep literally calls out the example of treating depression with sleep deprivation.
- The cancer reference was made with the context of “consistently less than 5 hours of sleep”, he then referenced many studies that assessed 4 hour sleeps. This essay misrepresents the context of that chapter.
- As counter evidence throughout he references research done AFTER the book was written...
There is something about the Why We Sleep controversy that is uniquely frustrating to me, having dealt with sleep problems for years. If I hadn't read HN then I probably would have read that book for far longer than I did. What about the people that might not read HN and still aren't aware of the tangible harms it can cause? It currently has a 4.4 out of 5 on Goodreads and pages of written five-star reviews, proving the utter uselessness of such a metric for topics like health.
It seems the solution is research from a variety of different sources. That worked pretty well for actually sorting out my sleep issues, because I was more careful. But the thing is, time is finite. In the programming realm we can't always do the same militant validation for the thousands of microdependencies a single npm project can pull in. The amount of available information is exploding, and much of it is becoming obsoleted constantly. There has to be a line drawn somewhere. And when we decide to trust the creator as being an "expert" as a compromise, we will inevitably encounter sources like these.
It's not that the first-order advice of "avoid blue light in the evening" is necessarily bad. Rather, telling people (in no uncertain terms) that if they do <x> they are hurting themselves and that they must change what they do, may cause second-order problems. This is one of the reasons why you should not get medical advice from the internet or pop science books.
(FWIW, I have read the book, before learning of the scientific critiques. I must agree that the presentation of the book is usually much stronger than what the data presented admits. It's not that the small-scale studies in question seem particularly flawed or that the interpretations are downright unreasonable, but I think it's borderline unscientific to present as fact a story woven from more or less isolated data points in the form of individual studies.)
Also, I’d like to actually understand the inaccuracy... it seems the real problem is he “emphasised” some things. That’s hardly inaccurate.
Curious also why this isn’t published in a journal, and be peer refereed... or has it? That is the standard required for a “takedown”.
Edit: Or at least allow a right of reply from the author. Having just read the book you have intentionally misrepresented a number of (perhaps even all) points. I can only think you are trying to generate controversy to build your own profile.
As someone who is also currently doing sleep trials for our start-up (https://soundmind.co), I can understand why. Clinical sleep trials are time consuming and expensive. Try getting a volunteer to sleep in a lab for more than a few nights, then try to get thousands of people doing that, like you would in a drug trial, also try to factor in all the things that person would have done that day which would affect their sleep, as well as factoring in what their sleep was like the previous 3 or more nights, and how that would affect on going sleep.
When I read Why We Sleep, I remember thinking that the conclusions Dr Walker was arriving at seemed wrong much of the time, and seemed sensationalist. At the same time, I've seen him interviewed where he walks back things like the link between circadian rhythm and blue-light.
I'm not sure if the expectation is that he writes a rebuttal to his own work, or a living document about how the science has changed?
I think we need to look at the emerging field and understand that sleep is still something we don't understand well, and that much of the research is still a moving target.
when it starts with "popular science person xyz charts a map of the most important scientific breakthrough of the decade" etc just put it back and pick something from the fiction section and you'll have a better time.
Life isn't lived in the aggregate, you don't need "sleep science" to figure out how much you need to sleep. Are you tired? Sleep more, no? you're fine. This emerging health industrial complex has just one purpose: create neurotic people who try to optimise their life and then sell them answers.
many people hold this attitude, it’s appealing to have something “objective” when trying to justify going to sleep.
unfortunately it does have these many scientific inaccuracies. depressing.
As for the field of "sleep science", you're drastically oversimplifying it. Your sleeping habits have tons of second order affects that aren't remotely intuitive. For example, you know alcohol wrecks your sleep quality? Over time that lack of quality sleep is associated to weight gain. Doesn't it make sense to have a solid understanding of something you spend a third of your life doing?
Finally the author of the blog post has no background in this past reading articles on PubMed. I've read some genuine criticisms of the book, most of which Walker addressed, but these are incredibly weak. If you're attempting to synthesize entire fields of research, you should probably have a background in them.
He is selling speaking gigs, advises startups. He is cashing out and part of that is sensationalist book for general audience.
> but these are incredibly weak.
It's riddled with factual errors.
Never in my life have I ever wasted a minute installing exercise apps on my phone, reading exercise books, instead I've just gone to public pool and done my laps and for some reason I'm in better shape than some of my peers who seem to spend hundreds of dollars per month on books, peloton courses and exercise audiobooks.
Also there are some long term longevity effects (or at least people doing studies and claiming such effects).
And even with 'noticing' you feel tired, it doesn't always work, at least not for everyone. Obviously most people would feel suboptimal if they start sleeping 4h/day, for example. But anecdotally, I dont notice any subjective difference as long as I slept something like 6.5h+. Sometimes I feel a little sleepy but then it goes away quickly.. sometimes I feel like crap till afternoon even though I slept a lot. And making long term observations is hard because it's hard to compare how tired you're feeling now with how tired you were a week ago.
He explores a lot of of interesting contrarian ideas and runs a lot of interesting self-experiments in productivity.
Followed by a source snippet looking at not average sleep time but prevalence of very short and very long sleep durations - outliers. Ie doesn't necessarily, or even likely, have anything to say on the subject.
For such a meticulous takedown repeating exactly the kind of mistake you're criticizing seems really sloppy. And the alarm bells over "harm" seem overkill and somewhat shrill.
That said, the book definitely has issues and it's good someone tries to point them out. I just feel this overshoots.
[0] wpietri's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684989
[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/11/24/why-we-sle...
I am in general also not a fan of bestselling science books going overboard with their claims (e.g. the book Grit). Though in this case I have a feeling that Guzey’s stance could be an overkill in the opposite direction. I think the general idea of the book might well still be valid despite the inevitable imperfections/exaggerations in it.
The general idea of the book is literally -- sleep 7-8 hours or you'll get some terrible disease -- is clearly not true.
It is clearly true that we need sleep and that it's super important. But it's still not clear how much of it we actually need.
If you are speaking literally, the book references short sleeping of < 4, < 5, < 6 hours and describes various levels of disease and impairment. All of these diseases and impairments are reduced at > 7 and there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of benefit at > 9. That is how the book presents the facts.
You misrepresent this, and pick inconsequential “errors” that don’t change either the overall point or the validity of science, and claim false conclusions from your own opinion.
It’s pretty clear how much we need (on average) > 7 <= 9. But he even points out these are averages, much like calorie recommendations. So yes some people are fine in 6ish and some need 10ish... that’s how standard deviations work.
Hilarious
javascript:location.hostname+='.sci-hub.se'
now i'm dreaming every night AND waking up with programming solutions because of it.
First, in Chapter 3, he introduces "light NREM sleep" as stage-2 NREM, while "deep NREM sleep" is stage 3-4 NREM.
Then, throughout most of Chapter 6, he says that you get a huge "memory restoration" benefit from light stage-2 NREM, due to sleep spindles:
* "The memory refreshment was related to lighter, stage 2 NREM sleep, and specifically the [...] sleep spindles."
* "The more sleep spindles obtained during sleep, the greater the restoration of learning."
* "The concentration of NREM sleep spindles" happen in stage-2 NREM, and you get the most of this type of sleep after 6 hrs of sleeping.
* In the first 6 hrs, you've gotten all your deep NREM sleep: "we obtain most of our deep NREM sleep early in the night, and much of our REM sleep (and lighter NREM sleep) late in the night."
* "Sleep six hours or less and you are shortchanging the brain of a learning restoration benefit that is normally performed by sleep spindles."
* Furthermore, stage 2 NREM is important for other kinds of restorational benefit: "The increases in speed and accuracy, underpinned by efficient automaticity, were directly related to the amount of stage 2 NREM, especially in the last two hours of an eight-hour night of sleep [...]. Indeed, it was the number of those wonderful sleep spindles in the last two hours of the late morning—the time of night with the richest spindle bursts of brainwave activity—that were linked with the offline memory boost."
So he firmly establishes this point about light NREM sleep throughout Chapter 6.
However, but there's a section ("SLEEP-THE-NIGHT-AFTER LEARNING") where he makes a big deal about the distinction between deep NREM and light NREM sleep, calling it a "battle royal":
> You will recall from chapter 3 that we obtain most of our deep NREM sleep early in the night, and much of our REM sleep (and lighter NREM sleep) late in the night. > After having learned lists of facts, researchers allowed participants the opportunity to sleep only for the first half of the night or only for the second half of the night. In this way, both experimental groups obtained the same total amount of sleep (albeit short), yet the former group’s sleep was rich in deep NREM, and the latter was dominated instead by REM. > The stage was set for a battle royal between the two types of sleep. The question: Which sleep period would confer a greater memory savings benefit—that filled with deep NREM, or that packed with abundant REM sleep? > For fact-based, textbook-like memory, the result was clear. It was early-night sleep, rich in deep NREM, that won out in terms of providing superior memory retention savings relative to late-night, REM-rich sleep.
This doesn't necessarily contradict the idea that the spindles during light NREM sleep are restorative, but it says light NREM is less effective than deep NREM, and then he doesn't cite any more research on deep NREM's memory benefits. In chapter 7 he focuses on how deep NREM sleep has other benefits. The author does mention "deep NREM sleep" as important for cognitive benefits later in the book when it seems he meant to say "light NREM sleep".
Also, to say they allowed participants to sleep "only for the second half of the night" is strange, and I don't know what that means. Looking at the original study https://www.jstor.org/stable/1414040 it looks like there were ONLY TWO subjects, and it's not clear to me that this study was described accurately by Walker.
If this point was already discussed elsewhere, I'm not aware of it, and would appreciate a link.
I saw a guy get a ticket for sleeping in a public park the other day. I don’t know if he was homeless.
I started thinking where could I could legally take a nap if tired. I live in one of the wealthiest liberal enclave (Marin County). Home of Gavin Neusome, and important stuff like taking a nap is against the law for all practical purposes.
Yea—technically I could hike to BLM land? For myself I would be a 60 mile hike. And even then there’s a fee to get into the park, and there is no camping?
Personally, I’ve given up on a good nights rest. I can go to sleep, but wake up 3-4 hours later. This has been going on for 20 plus years. I do take naps during the day though. If I had a do over I might have moved to a country that encourages siestas?
(I know I’m not adding anything to this study. I’m just angry over the way we have made everything essentially against some law. And I’m venting?)
The author of the blog above has an About page where they introduce themselves as "a researcher with a background in Economics, Mathematics, and Cognitive Science". Instead of a list of academic achievements: publications, grants, chairs, awards, etc, as we would expect to see in a researcher's "about" page, the author continues their introduction with a few words on what they're "thinking about" at the moment and what their long-term goals are, then makes a peculiar plea:
If you’re reading this and you do anything biology-related at all, I would
love to talk to you and would especially appreciate you getting in touch.
The next thing I usually look for in cases like this is whether the person accusing someone else of academic fraud has given an opportunity to the party they accuse to defend themselves. The author of this blog has not only not done that but is engaging in misleading tactics. The following text is in TFA:
Also see UC Berkeley’s official response regarding this essay – all problems
with the book I discovered are “minor”.
https://yngve.hoiseth.net/articles/why-we-sleep-institutiona...
However, the linked resource is not "UC Berkeley's official response" at all, but rather a blog by a different blogger, Yngve Hoiseth, who claims they contacted someone -who is never named- at UC Berkeley about Alexey Guzey's post we are reading above. Yngve Hoiseth's blog itself claims to have uploaded "the entire exchange here", linking to the following URL:
https://yngve.hoiseth.net/why-we-sleep-institutional-failure...
Which is dead and has not been archived by archive.org.
All this makes the article above sound very difficult to take seriously. In all honesty, it sounds entirely like an attempt to kick shit up for the author's personal gratification. Or perhaps there is some strange ???-PROFIT scheme hidden somewhere in there, but even that is not particularlly interesting.
Posting under a throwaway because the article's author sounds desperate enough to engage in all sorts of internet attacks to deter critics.
What does it matter who is making the accusations if they are verifiable?
He's often just pointing out logical internal contradictions in the text (point 2) or lies/mistakes about what the author claimed a source said when in fact the source said no such thing (point 4 about WHO and point 5 about NSF).
Also, I don't agree that he's misrepresenting himself. He didn't claim that he had an academic appointment. He claimed that he's a researcher, of which professional academics are a strict subset. After reading his excellent article, I'm in agreement with him that this is a suitable label.
Your other criticisms of his About page are just odd. So what if he puts his hobbies on there, or is reaching out to biology people? That's normal for an About page.
I disagree that a "researcher" is a loose label that anyone can assign to themselves without qualifications. For example, a reiki healer could claim themselves to be a "researcher" but this would be misleading.
Writing an article arguing that an author of a book has perpetrated academic fraud is evidence against any claim of careful research. Claming academic fraud is really the nuclear option. The first thing to do when one finds fault with someone else's work is to contact the other person and ask for clarification. If things get to the point where one feels the only way forward is to "go public" with an exposition of the other person's work faults, then one should include the other person's explanations or reactions, if any were given, or details of the attempts made to contact that other person.
As I say above, this was not done to any reasonable degree and the only attempt at anything like it is misleading and links to an email conversation claimed to be an "official response" by UC Berkeley (rather than the book's author) but that is impossible to verify.
The overall impression is of a one-sided argument, lack of transparency, attempts at deception and misrepresentation and overall disreputable and underhanded tactics. Such actions by the article author do not suggest they are a "researcher" of any repute, except maybe in their imagination.
The misquoting of sources doesn't require domain expertise to understand.
The misleading way that data is presented in graphics doesn't require domain expertise to understand.
The author's credibility is not relevant when the claims are easily falsifiable by yourself.
You should read Gelman's more positive take on the article. He's someone that's quite credentialed, if that's what you're looking for.
"I disagree that a "researcher" is a loose label"
Researcher isn't synonymous with academic.
"The first thing to do when one finds fault with someone else's work is to contact the other person"
Part of my point is that an actual researcher, i.e. a professional, would have followed due procedure, contacting the author of the book privately and asking for clarifications, and generally giving the other person an opportunity to examine and respond to criticism.
Academics criticise each other's work constantly but this is acceptable because the purpose is to improve one another's work, not to tarnish each other's reputation and drag their name through the mud.
As things are, it is clear to me the blog post above is meant to kick up an internet storm with accusations of "deliberate data manipulation" and the misleading statements about an "official response" from Berkeley etc. These are the actions of a scandal-monger, not a researcher.
Also, "researcher" doesn't imply "professional", since amateur researchers exist.
The self-appointed title of "Researcher" is appropriate, in my opinion. There are people in industry who receive that designation ("Real Estate Researcher") that are less deserving.
"Academics criticise each other's work constantly but this is acceptable because the purpose is to improve one another's work, not to tarnish each other's reputation and drag their name through the mud."
This is a book that contains health advice being consumed and actioned upon right now by thousands or millions of laypeople. Guzey is therefore trying to warn regular people who might believe and follow bunk advice and suffer health consequences. He makes this intention clear.
James Randi's service to the public as a skeptic was proportional to the amount of noise he made when he would come across and debunk frauds like Uri Geller. (I'm not saying Walker is a fraud, but the public danger of bunk health wisdom is similar to that posed by conmen like Geller.)
I do still agree with you, however, that it would've been better to discuss the allegations with Walker in private before publishing them. Having read Walker's response now, though, I don't believe it would've made much of a difference. He's still misrepresenting official adequate sleep guidelines, willfully or otherwise, by saying that anyone who gets under 8 hours has "unmet sleep needs", contradicting the NSF.
"kick up an internet storm with accusations of "deliberate data manipulation""
On the whole, though, aside from sparse mistakes like this (along with the mistake that you noticed of not making it clear that the Berkeley communication was unverified), I feel that the article is rather constrained.
Gelman also noticed this measured tone and explicitly complimented the author on it.
What I mean to say by this is that when you hear Wagner's music, the impression is of powerful, loud music. Accordingly, when you read an artcile that spends most of its time in a low-key "measured" register but starts off with a big, splashy accusation of deliberate data manipulation, the impression is one of an article written to provoke.
Regarding "researcher", the author could have identified himself as an "ex graduate research assistant", but he identifies himself as a "resarcher", which sounds more important and experienced. This is the tactic of people who want to embiggen the impression of themselves and claim more expertise from themselves. Even if such embiggenment is not necessarily the purpose of calling oneself a "researcher" when one is not a professional researcher, anyone who really really wanted to avoid giving the impression that they are trying to make themselves sound more knowledgeable than what they are, would have shied away from calling themselves a "reseacher".
Finally, "researcher" on its own means absolutely nothing at all. "Biology researcher", "computer science researcher", "neuroscience researcher", "geology researcher" etc, give precise information. The author of the article calls himself an unqualified "researcher" and he is, indeed, unqualified to do so. That is a typical tactic of charlatans the world over and it should give you and everyone else who thinks the author has any expertise to discuss what he's discussing, pause. That goes for the economist blogger also, I don't think he has payed as much attention to the article and its author as I think you assume.
As I've argued at the start of this thread, it is important to understand who is writing the article we are reading. In Ideal Science World it doesn't make a difference who says something, only what they say. In the real world it's not that simple. Because academic integrity is valued extremely highly, accusing someone of academic fraud immediately places the accuser opposite the accused in moral standing. For an academic, his or her reputation (of being a good scientist) is everything. Therefore, when making such accusations, the character of the person making them is important to scrutinise carefully, because simply making an accusation of academic fraud can destroy an academic's career and an accuser may have no other goal than to destroy the accused person's reputation.
When the accusations come from a professional critic (another academic) with a good standing in academia, the chance that accusations of fraud are only made to destroy the other persons' career are harder to accept. But when it's some guy on the internet with a blog, that changes the maths very much indeed. Anyone can throw mud on the internet. Because it's the internet, you need to understand who it is who's speaking, before you look at what they are saying.
Your post and Yngve Hoiseth's post claim that the email exchange presented in Yngve Hoiseth's post is an "official response" from UC Berkeley. To determine the veracity of this claim it is necessary to know who was contacted, in UC Berkeley.
The name of the person (as in first name and family name/s) is not necessary for this, but it is necessary to name their office. For example "dean of such-and-such" or "director of so-and-so". That this information is not provided makes the claim of an "official response" impossible to verify. For example, nobody can contact the person Yngve Hoiseth claims they have contacted, or the person currently holding the same office, and ask them to verify that they or their office have, indeed, been contacted by Yngve Hoiseth.
That, together with the absence of the entire conversation makes it impossible to know whether Yngve Hoiseth really did have this email exchange, to what extent they presented it fairly and to what extent what was said by the other person was edited.
The person Yngve Hoiseth claims to have contacted allegedly said the following:
My understanding is that my university email communication is a matter of
public record, and I try always to communicate with that standard in mind.
There is no prohibition that I know of against publication of my emails with
you, in other words. I would just ask that you contextualize my communications
in a transparent and accurate way.
Assuming the exchange was real, it seems that the person at the other end didn't ask for their identity to be withheld for any reason. It sounds as if they fully expected for their identity to be made public instead. There seems to be no reason why Yngve Hoiseth's post ommits this detail.
Given all the above your post and Yngve Hoiseth's post are misleading and suggest an effort to misrepresent at the very least UC Berkeley's position.
"suggest an effort to misrepresent at the very least UC Berkeley's position."
The decision to keep the identity of the contact anonymous and the presence of a dead link (when a slightly redacted version of the full conversation is still available) doesn't automatically suggest that they're trying to misrepresent UC Berkeley. What an unjustified stretch.
How are we to know that Yngve Hoiseth did not make up the entire conversation, or that they didn't simply choose the passages of the email exchange that support their view, only?
If this is an "official" exchange, why the lack of transparency?
The lack of transparency "suggests an effort to misrpresent".
The author of the blog post is not leaving a lot of room for charitable interpretations.
But in any case, what charitable interpretation do you propose?
- https://guzey.com/how-life-sciences-actually-work/ - https://guzey.com/science/sleep/14-day-sleep-deprivation-sel...
At most I could see what you have written as "study" of others' research but presenting yourself as a "researcher" and what you do as "research" is misrepresenting yourself and comes across as an attempt to claim for yourself greater expertise than you seem to have.
You should make clear your level of experitse and your knowledge about different matters that you like to discuss in your blog.
If you are the only person calling yourself a "researcher" (or it's only you and your dear friends and blog readers) then you are misrepresenting yourself.