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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

I can almost detect the disdain in your "voice" as you use the word "bloggers".

Was there something wrong with the article?

The fact that if you travel further down the blog stream for almost any of these practitioners, they always give it up for not working. (Giving it up because "everybody else is on a monophasic sleep cycle" is just a social-face-saving excuse. If it worked, you wouldn't give it up. You've got six extra hours a day to make up whatever the problem is!) The evidence that I've seen suggests that alternative sleep cycles are basically persistent urban legend more than anything else.

And yes, failing to mention the little tiny detail of it not working at this date is a reason to be "disdainful" of an article like this; it encourages one to wreck weeks or months of ones life on something that we pretty much know doesn't work. Negligent at best, evil at worst.

(Excepting "siesta", which there is some evidence for, but isn't the promised miracle, either.)

I agree with you but youre going to upset a lot of people with that. They're going to demand you show them scientific studies and hard proof. Even if you did it wouldn't be good enough for them.

This belief in polyphasic sleep reminds me of a guy I used to know who was a huge conspiracy theorist. He used to tell me that you could build a perpetual motion machine and generate unlimited energy from home and that he was doing it. I tried to reason with him and let him know that stuff was bunk but he never changed his mind despite his machine not working (for which he made some dumb face-saving excuse about not using the right material or something). No matter how much evidence and reasoning you present someone with beliefs like this they refuse to change their mind. The absence of evidence is not evidence for something.

We know polyphasic doesn't work not only because of all the failed attempts and what you talked about in your comment but also because of what we know about how the brain and human body works.

That's why I phrased it the way I did. It isn't "just" scientific studies, it's that if you examine the frequently-cited evidence of successes and follow it downstream, you find it actually ended in failure. (Or in the case of famous figures in history who putatively followed bizarre sleep schedules, generally apparently made from whole cloth, or on occasion, simply one of the people who didn't sleep polyphasically but simply slept less, a phenomenon not well understood but abundantly documented and with no evidence there is any ability to become a low-sleep person by any known activity, and certainly not as easily as simply sleeping less.) As gurkendoktor pointed out, citing Steve Pavlina as a success story is not a good sign. It's hard to even come up with solid or real anecdotal evidence that this works!

Also, as I said with "siesta", there is definitely evidence of alternate sleep schedules, basically to the point that it is so uncontroversial it is almost not worth discussing. What I don't see is any evidence that anyone not simply genetically disposed (for unknown reasons) to two-hour sleep nights can cut their required sleep per day by 3/4s or more by some crazy scheduling regimen.

Yes. You are advocating various alternatives, citing that they're safe and useful based on the anecdotal experience of a handful of bloggers.

The article would be much more credible if you backed it up with some solid science (has there been rigorous scientific studies on polyphasic sleep?). Without that, the credibility based on bloggers is no more than the credibility of snake oil salesmen.

Well, blogging is generally not the most cognitively demanding of tasks. The fact that you are still able do tasks like this does not mean that you are not significantly sleep deprived. It may be worth experimenting with for bloggers just for the sake of doing something interesting. For everyone else, its not. And, there is no scientific evidence supporting the supposed benefits.

Did you read the article on HN a few months ago about the Indian CEO who dropped dead in the middle of a marathon? Why? Because he didn't sleep enough!

Always amazes me how CS students and hackers think they can defy biology ...

It wasn't published in Nature or the New England Journal of Medicine.

Otherwise, good article.

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