Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The sentence before that is: "Contrary to expert predictions and a large body of sleep research".

Was this study better science that disproved the existing body? Or poorer science? Or is there something problematic about sleep in Chennai? Or special about the people in Chennai?

The full paper states:

> An enormous body of research, mostly conducted in sleep labs in rich countries, documents severe negative impacts of sleep deprivation on a range of outcomes from attention and memory to mood and health (Lim and Dinges, 2010; Banks and Dinges, 2007).

> While experimental evidence on the impact of increasing sleep in field settings is scarce, there is a widely-held belief among researchers and the public that reducing sleep deprivation would lead to improvements in economic outcomes (Walker, 2017).

> To document these priors, we surveyed 119 experts from sleep science and economics who predicted sizable economic benefits, including a 7% increase in work output, of increasing sleep by half an hour per night from the low levels observed in our setting.

Social science is fun.

It could also be a function of their jobs, which weren't specified in the abstract.

While insufficient sleep might cause physical discomfort and contribute to long-term health problems, if their job weren't highly physically or mentally demanding, I suspect that most people could get through the day with negligible detriment to their short-term economic output after having a cup of coffee.

The same can be said for other drugs that raise monoamine neurotransmitter levels, such as amphetamines.

I doubt that a study 'Economic Benefits of Meth use on the Urban Poor' would be looked upon so well by the Ethics Board.

Maybe do a retrospective study, but lack of prospective randomization would taint the results.

No, but you could say “ADHD medication”, much of which is very similar

Please stop repeating this anti-psychiatric talking point.

1. They are different chemicals.

2. They are administered by different means (inhalation is vastly more impactful than swallowing a tablet).

3. The doses for pharmaceuticals are much lower.

By repeating this argument you create prejudice against those of us who live with ADHD and rely on medication to function normally.

Yet methamphetamine is prescribed for narcolepsy and ADHD. The trade name is Desoxyn.

Note that you are also creating prejudice against an already marginalized group of people, a subset of whom may have undiagnosed ADHD.

> Please stop repeating this anti-psychiatric talking point.

That's rich. Here's a prominent psychiatrist's view (who btw, supports and does prescribe amphetamine adhd medication):

"There's a lot of confusion around the difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine. On the one hand you have anti-psychiatry activists who will say that using Adderall for ADHD is exactly like giving kids crystal meth; on the other you'll have people who say that obviously normal amphetamine is okay, but meth-amphetamine is a demonic substance that will hijack your brain and destroy your life. The truth is more complicated.

Methamphetamine crosses the blood-brain barrier more effectively than unsubstituted amphetamine, but I'm not sure how much that matters since people take different doses of both, and a high dose of unsubstituted will end up with more reaching the brain than a low dose of meth. It seems to inhibit the dopamine transporter more effectively, which might matter, but I'm not enough of a pharmacologist to know how much. Meth takes effect more quickly, which seems to increase addictiveness in a sort of behaviorist sense where the sooner a stimulus gets reinforced, the more rewarding it will feel.

I think there's been a little bit more research since then, but the general takeaway - that the science doesn't support the vast gulf between these two drugs in the popular imagination - still seems true."[0]

[0]https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines

Many countries in the WW2 era sold amphetamine based drugs as antidepressants, for "creating the right attitude", making your wife focus on housework, etc. (and other rather disturbing things). Essentially, drugging workers doing low-skill tasks to make them more cooperative or productive or something.

I wonder how much research was done at the time and has been done in retrospect.

Sounds a lot like Brave New World

Which was written around that time (even a bit before) ...

And the German Army in WW2 heavily used meth ( pervitin iirc) to keep focused and going on for longer

And still in 2021 most people are entirely unaware that their affectionately named ”morning joe” contains other mind-altering chemicals in addition to caffeine: Harmala alkaloids that slow down the normal breakdown of neurotransmitters and slowly build up in brain fatty tissues, increasing tolerance and lengthening withdrawal symptoms to many months.

Stimulant overdosage can cause permanent brain damage.

As does driving a car at 120mph in bumper to bumper traffic. Fortunately these things are outside the scope of this conversation.

That brain damage is not caused by the stimulants per se, but the rise in body temperature caused by stimulants. Don’t do meth on a hot day.

The average teacher’s job is reasonably mentally demanding but despite waking and starting work at unnaturally early hours (in the US and China) people do acceptably with coffee. The students do worse because the schedule is even more divergent from their natural sleep schedule and they’re less likely to have coffee or other stimulants.

What time do they start work in the US?

My daughter's school starts at 7am, so she has to be up by 5:45am. It's stupid.

That is really crazy early! Where is this?

My high school started at 08:10 (I think) and elementary school at 08:15 and those were the earliest starters in the neighbourhood. University luckily started around 9.

Ah. That's indeed early.

In France kindergarten and primary school starts at 8:30 and ends at 16:30. Mid and high school at 8 or 9, never earlier.

This is very early for children and teens, really not physiological.

In Australia, at least where I am, from ages 5-17 school is generally 8:45 to 15:15.

In my country it's the same, I think it is done that way because most people jobs start at 8 or 9, there's no school bus system, only private transport for kids going to school, so this schedule gives a chance for parents to drop off their kids at school and make it to work afterwards.

Personally I hated it at the time, because getting up early is not my thing, but now I appreciate the time I got to talk with my parents on my way to school thanks to that schedule arrangement.

Also to offset this early getting up, we jus went to bed earlier, like at 9pm or 10pm max, so not sure it really made a difference on anything.

In the USA, school schedules are at least partially dictated by after-school sports. Classes need to end early enough that teams can practice in daylight.

Yeah we had those too, sun goes down at around 6pm all year round here though, training would take place 3pm - 5pm for extracurricular activities

Another argument for the separation of Sport and State.

> The educational effects of school start times Delaying secondary school start times can be a cost-effective policy to improve students’ grades and test scores

> The combination of changing sleep patterns in adolescence and early school start times leaves secondary school classrooms filled with sleep-deprived students. Evidence is growing that having adolescents start school later in the morning improves grades and emotional well-being, and even reduces car accidents. Opponents cite costly adjustments to bussing schedules and decreased time after school for jobs, sports, or other activities as reasons to retain the status quo. While changing school start times is not a costless policy, it is one of the easiest to implement and least expensive ways of improving academic achievement

https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/181/pdfs/educational-ef....

I grew up in rural Canada, and we had busses. Some kids came in from 60+ miles away. I recall quite a bit about school, and yet no one really complained about getting up at 5 to 6am.

Of course, most kids lived on farms, some even had chores before going to school, and early to bed, early to rise was normal.

We had a few antenna TV stations, no cable, VCRs weren't around for the average family, and of course no Internet.

We also didn't have city street lights / ambient light, street noise, the sound of neighbours.

People have gotten up early to do farm work for aeons, and go to sleep early too. In fact, to be more precise, staying up past 8 or 9pm is an urban / modern aberration.

Point is, staying up late is the problem. Nothing more.

Now of course, society has changed, so maybe change is needed. However, there is also a lot of counter literature on even TV as a sleep depriver. And now we have phone in bed, with a glowing screen, keeping a mind active.

My point? OK, change the time. However, will kids just stay up even later?

Or, as they do now, will they think "I should go to sleep now, or I will be tired tomorrow, but just one more text..."?

Most developed countries are far enough from the equator that the amount of daylight is very different during different parts of the year. Perhaps it would make sense to base the schedule around sunrise and sunset rather than around arbitrary numbers?

How exactly are we supposed to run a modern society without the concept of time?

You can have a time system based around sunrise.

I mean with most clocks also being internet connected computers it wouldnt be too hard to make a system where you measure time in hours after average sunrise in a tike zone.

That is where I live right now it's sunrise +3.

I'll reschedule the daily 'standup' to SR+3.5, the banks open at SR+3 and close at SR+11.

One major consequence I can see is that now we have north south timezones on top of east west.

This would break in the extreme north or south where there are days without a sunrise.

That's what time zones are. You're just proposing more granular time zones. And none of them can fix the problem that in a lot of places the days are just short in the winter.

Timezones don't account for seasonal changes in sunrise times, and DST is a poor hack that tries and fails. Using local solar time would be an improvement in that regard. On short days you just do less.

Timezones are a reasonable compromise between the desire for people to be up during the day, on one hand, and the need for a modern economy to be able to coordinate people over long distances, on the other. Turning up the dial all the way to the left here is going to cause a lot of problems.

As far as human biology is concerned, the entire concept of agriculture is a modern perversion. You can't use it to argue a particular behavior is the natural state.

And yet people get up before dawn to go fishing and hunting.

At no point did I cite biology. Instead, I validated that different wake-up times have existed in the past, and in fact still do.

When does the garbage man, the builder, the mechanic get up? The blue collar man? It isn't 8am, that's for sure. People I know in these professions of start work at 7am. Or earlier. I see them get to sleep by 9pm.

Get to sleep sooner, discipline yourself, as with anything else, it's just that easy.

Or that hard?

Staying up late is much easier then getting up early. Anyone who gets up early and then has to be anywhere can speak to the general paralysis that involves, since the entire activity has to be planned around a very sharp time-based shutdown.

Stealing hours later is a lot easier, because any amount of sleep will still break up the day compared to none.

The other reason of course is that the real trick is just staying up longer then your parents: that's the only truly unsupervised freedom you have as a kid.

No major disagreement, but I will add this...

Eating too much, borrowing more money than you should, eating junk food, staying up too late, being addicted to your phone, texting whilst driving, perhaps these are all the same problem?

And like any animal, we need to be trained to control ourselves, when young, for our own good?

> people do acceptably with coffee.

Do they, though?

Technically, yes. They do well enough that we can and do accept it.

Yeah but not that long ago people accepted not having plumbing. There's no reason to be confident that things couldn't be much better.

> Technically, yes. They do well enough that we can and do accept it.

You shouldn't, and a great many in the US don't.

Given the attendance rate at private schools (low) and their divergence from the normal public school schedule (low) this doesn’t seem accurate. People may complain but they don’t do anything.

Poor people aren't doing brain work but instead do manual labor etc. It definitely should be a core part of any study to highlight this.

In my country poor people are: doctors and nurses who work at state hospitals(most of them), teachers at state schools, university professors(both state and private ones), engineers who work at such government facilities as nuclear plants and the like, scientists in general and also some government officials. All them make roughly 10-20% percent of what moderately skillful software engineer could make, in the same city and country. Just for the reference.

Sounds pretty unrealistic, what country do you live in?

He's arguing they're poorer than the average software engineer, not poorer than a factory worker. I'd put my money on Eastern Europe or South America.

Maybe also south or south-east asia (aside from the asian tiger)?

To put it into context, no, these people make around the same as factory worker. Work conditions would be much nicer, still. Schoolteachers are considered 'poor' by other Ukrainians (who are not too well-off themselves) compared to other occupations without taking into account SW jobs and anything like that.

Ukraine. I think it would similar in other post-socialist states where transition to market economy was not a big success. I would put Moldova, Armenia in the same ballpark, maybe certain poorer Central Asia states like Uzbekistan but I'm not 100% sure.

They probably make more than minimum wage workers at (fast food|restaurants|cleaning|etc) ? So even if they're relatively poor compared to skilled software engineers ( which is usually even more skewed because skilled ones often work for rich foreign companies that can afford a much better salary and still come out cheaper than engineers in their original country), they're still better off than minimum wage, who are the real working poor ( note that in some countries and cities minimum wage can be sufficient and wouldn't put you in the poor category)

Well not really. Actually minimum wage in Ukraine (where I live) is rather low, so businesses generally pay higher. Fast food workers are not on minimum wage.

In terms of salary a school teacher would make less or the same as McDonalds worker.

For example, McDonalds Ukraine pays an entry level worker -14 000 UAH ($500) monthly for 40 hours per week. School teacher makes minimum 5000 UAH ($180), +bonus(10-60%). Teacher who was awarded a "highest category" certification (that would be a very experienced one) and who will get all the possible bonuses and raises will make around 14 000 UAH, roughly.

Workers, cleaning personnel would make in the same ballpark 9000 - 14000 UAH ($300-500) at least in Kyiv. Selling phones in the store, work at supermarket also has a similar remuneration.

Average doctor salary (not nurse) is 9000 UAH, at least officially.

The reason is - most those highly skilled and highly educated workers that I've mentioned are paid by the government which does not have funds and desire honestly to treat these people well. They are remnants of decaying public infrastructure - Ukraine has de jure free universal health care and a very big amount of government-funded seats at state universities. Still it is better to work at school than at the factory probably.

You just have a stereotype of how certain things work, everything is not like US/Western Europe structurally. Higher education is not a ticket to a better life everywhere.

Ah, sorry, didn't know things are that bad in Ukraine. I'm from Bulgaria so i can assure you my stereotypes are mixed and i don't think everything is like in the US or Western Europe.

How's the new president doing? At first it seemed like a joke, but the little concrete things i've read about him post-election seemed OK.

Of course, I think you can really get the idea what is going on in Ukraine due to kind of similar circumstances. Sorry for being a bit too blunt.

New president I think is a bit better than the previous three but the whole situation kind of shows two things: 1) There is not much you can do in the country where oligarchs control everything. 2) There is still not much ideas for the future except some sort of a neoliberal 'reaganomics', further privatization and generally disengagement of the state from any meaningful public good iniatives.

The study took place in India where doctors are well paid and McDonald's workers aren't.

They employed 452 adults for a one-month data-entry job, which the authors say it's "a relatively cognitively-demanding task intended to be sensitive to sleep deprivation."

They employed 452 adults for a one-month data-entry job, which the authors say it's "a relatively cognitively-demanding task intended to be sensitive to sleep deprivation."

As a side note, the study also says that short afternoon naps increased productivity.

Wow. That should have been in the abstract. 452 adults hired for a one-month job intended to be sensitive to sleep deprivation sounds pretty robust.

Chennai's extremely hot. Having been there, intuitively I'd suspect a Spain-like siesta would work very well there and boost productivity.

The nights there are extremely warm too. I wonder if that's a factor in ensuring that 5.5 hours of sleep is no worse than 8?

I don't know how well it compares to a spanish siesta but the abstract ends with "In contrast, short afternoon naps at the workplace improved an overall index of outcomes by 0.12 standard deviations, with significant increases in productivity, psychological well-being, and cognition, but a decrease in work time."

*5.5 vs about 6. The study increased their sleep by 27 minutes, they were still under-slept by 2 hours.

AFAIK not anything below 8 hours qualifies as “under-sleeping”; instead, the need of sleep typically varies between 6 to 9 hours for healthy adults.

Which averages out to 7.5. So the average should have been in that range with outliners at 6 and 9

Because of a combination of health, family, and time zone issues, I sleep approximately 5 hours a night (6 or 7 on weekends, if I'm lucky). I also have a complex work environment where the ability to think quickly, have excellent recall, and make quick decisions is paramount (I manage two dev teams working on two very different code bases, facing very different challenges). The people I work with are often "the smartest person in the room" and notice slips and mistakes.

Anyway, I get by through a combination of sneaking naps, trying not to sabotage myself by eating/living poorly, and catching up when I can.

I suspect the people in this study do the same. They probably doze when on public transportation, or trying to get the kids to sleep, you'll lay down with them and sleep a little. These stolen moments add up. Also, learning to recognize the signs of mental fatigue - if you can't get rest, then, you have to slow down and double check everything, not get irritable, and defer major decisions.

I'm...extremely skeptical a generic "data entry job" is "high cognitive demand".

I can write new applications (atrociously) on basically no sleep, so I'm pretty skeptical "sit at this desk and enter these things" swings one way or the other (or even has much of an ability to quality check - at least the compiler will yell at me when I'm egregiously wrong).

I'd be far more interested if these people could be trusted to run heavy machinery on that schedule, or engage in a creative or hands on task like carpentry or welding. I suspect the results would be quite different.

I just got a good laugh out of the image of a study putting sleep deprived people in charge of heavy machinery for science.

They're called grad students :)

You're not "economically poor". If the economically poor had such creative jobs, our economy would work very differently.

I'm...extremely skeptical a generic "data entry job" is "high cognitive demand".

Same here. While writing the GP comment, I considered using that exact example as something that I wouldn't expect to be heavily impacted by moderate sleep deprivation.

I agree with the claim that they are sensitive to sleep deprivation, though.

I don't think it's necessarily incompatible even if it seems contradictory unless there's research that quantifies the harm as a function of sleep deficit. Could easily be some range of sleep deprivation in which you're just bad at things, you move slow, and you're unmotivated. Intuitively we'd think that it's directly proportional to the amount of sleep deprivation, but I don't know if I've seen research that makes that claim. It would be interesting to see more papers that lead to a model of the benefit of sleep as a function of the amount of time slept.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com