Why We Sleep: a tale of institutional failure | Hacker News Reader

Why We Sleep: a tale of institutional failure

yngve.hoiseth.net

22 pointsingve15 comments

I've taken a look over the evidence and some of the examples. I am unimpressed. This reads like a very undergraduate teardown. Missing a bin in a histogram that maintains the general trend in a pop science book? My eyes roll into the back of my head. As per the longer teardown by Alexey Guzey, it sounds like he has 5 main contentions, all of which I would consider relatively inconsequential and points of academic, or interpretable debate. Storm in a tea cup.

Yeah, I haven't read the book but this analysis actually makes me want to do so. If the biggest issues that can be found with it are as described here, then I'd say it's likely to be in the top decile when it comes to rigorous pop science books.

No, the book is riddled with issues. This is far from the only one. Have a read through https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/.

Since links are being posted, here's Walker's clarifications

https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/

... where he first links to the takedown before addressing the issues.

Read it, and similarly, it seemed to have all the hallmarks of some takedown more motivated by a quest for notoriety/popularity that any systemic failings in academic literature review.

It's an airport pop science book for goodness sake, it's not like fabricating results to get an article in Nature.

> It's an airport pop science book for goodness sake, it's not like fabricating results to get an article in Nature.

An article in Nature may be read by a few thousand people. An airport pop book will influence tens or hundreds of millions. Especially for health related subjects it's standard of truth ought to be a lot higher.

As a scientist, I haven't written any airport pop book, but I often interact with the general public through journalistic interviews and articles, public dissemination talks, panels, short pieces for media outlets, etc.

In any of these contexts, if you want to be rigorous, journalists typically won't even allow you to. Any nuanced take will be dismissed as "too long", "too complicated", "the public won't understand this, we need to simplify", "we cannot discuss this in so much detail because we need to engage the reader", "yes, I know this isn't 100% accurate but we need a catchy headline", etc. So when we go out of the scientific bubble, the standard of truth drops enormously.

Not sure how it works with pop books but I suppose there is some non-scientist editor telling you how to "reach" the public, so I wouldn't expect it to be too different.

Yes that's a really unfortunate tension and one I'm familiar with writing computer science pieces for popular media. That pressure to "dumb down" nuanced, complex issues is infuriating. Part of the problem is the editor/publisher having a low view of readers. We always seem to be pandering to the lowest common denominator, rather than the average mind.

But I believe that if one is a fairly good writer a lot of nuance can be cut without sacrificing substantial truth.

What I noticed during Covid19 was the public bypassing those "think-walls" and going straight to the source papers/data. When necessary, ordinary folks can digest raw stuff without having it mashed and the crusts cut off.

Of course citizen science-journalism created it's own problems when everyone became an armchair epidemiologist.

"undergraduate" appears here as a disparaging adverb?

Academia showed me that freshmen arrive green and wide eyed, but also filled with integrity and wondrous belief in science. Only after graduation, masters, doctorate and postdoc are they fully ground down into cynical, jaded, institutionalised husks. Before they have learned to play "institutional games" undergrads are the kids who see when the Emperor has no clothes.

Also they are naive and incompetent e.g. they are just laymen in an university.

wrt to it being a pop science book:

https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-is-why-we-sle...

This is a nothingburger. If we were to hold this blog post to the same standard that they expect to hold the book to:

  * The email exchange goes on about a single claim from another rebuttal from the reading of a single chapter that indulges in nitpicking on the interpretation rather than general ideas

  * The WordPress blog, where clarifications were posted, is Matthew Walker's blog and this can be trivially verified[1]. Yet, the author first claimed no such clarification existed and then when directly linked to it, claimed no indication that it indeed was Matthew Walker's blog. Who is being lazy / disingenuous now ? (Note that Walker's blog directly links to Alexey Guzey's takedown).

As an aisde, the omission of a bar that is clearly an outlier (indicating non optimal buckets, rather than invalidation of a trend) and imo is not enough to have the author spend so much time and energy into this, in the absence of malintent.

[1] linked from his website https://www.sleepdiplomat.com/author

The fetish for materialistic explanations and Science (TM) in general in our culture has created a market for here-today-gone-tomorrow "discoveries" about how to live our lives in the most efficient and productive manner. So anyone willing to slog through the mountains of trash produced by the publish or perish model and summarize the latest "findings" can potentially make a lot of money from the chattering classes that buy this tripe. The mistake this person has made is being young and naive. The purpose of these books is to buy them to have something to talk about at social gatherings to make you sound smart and then throw them in the trash, not take them as prescriptions for how to live. The publishers of these books know what they are for, so no investigation is necessary.

From a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38786253

> Even though I take pride in my ability to adjust my opinions in the face of new evidence, it can really hurt, and it sure did this time. Now what should I believe? And what fragments of false belief were left behind in my mind? On top of that, I had to notify the people I gave the book to. When there are that many errors in a single chapter, who knows how many there might be in the rest of the book? It was clear to me that the book could not be trusted.

I think these are great questions. I say believe nothing. If you verify something, now you're getting closer. Personal experience is also the golden source - I do not dismiss it as 'merely anecdotal' - its actually the only thing of which it can be said "I know!"

> I think we should demand a lot from institutions and very little from individuals. Humans can be lazy, selfish, biased and greedy. They can also be also hard-working, altruistic, fair and generous. But the dark side of humans isn't going away any time soon. Institutions, however, can do a lot better than individuals. (The scientific community is an example of such an institution — despite individual scientists' many imperfections, science keeps progressing.)

And here I disagree. I don't demand from other individuals. But nor do I demand anything from institutions. In fact - I demand less from them! What are institutions except grouped individuals, only now with many opportunities to avoid accountability, and many incentives to do whatever it takes for money?

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