Most states start school too early in the morning
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I'm starting to dislike the phrase "the science", since I usually hear it used as a conversational bludgeon. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommended 8:30 AM as a minimum start time, that's not the same as "the science" definitely saying one thing or another. I don't have kids, and don't really care when schools start, so this is less a comment about that as it is about how annoying "the science" is as a phrase, how it's not a good description of how science works, and how it's usually misapplied to end conversations in favor of your prior opinion.
This also goes up there with the "in this house we believe SCIENCE IS REAL" signs.
We're currently living through the replication crisis and are awash in fraudulent academic journals. I don't think people who say this stuff would actually engage with you in a conversation about proper p-values for given sample sizes. So it's really just shorthand for trying to associate yourself to a certain intellectual class.
In general, it's filling the vacuum left by religion. One part of that is what you identified: people generally need something greater than themselves to identify with, and "intellectual" is a tempting option.
Another part of it is that people generally crave certainty and fear the unknown. Religion fills that need by providing crisp, clean answers that don't provide a lot of room for questions and "what if"s. In the absence of a traditional organized religion, people try to fill that void with what seems to be the new, popular replacement—science.
Unfortunately, science is by design all about uncertainty. As soon as it becomes a dogma it ceases to be science.
If anyone "believes", "trusts", "follows", etc. science, then they are doing science wrong.
The most fundamental element to science is skepticism. Following the essays of a scientist is no different than following the teachings of a priest.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38859965
"Believing", "trusting", "following" science means using information from an entity that presumably follows the scientific method to ascertain their information, and is otherwise fallible and subject to change pending new data.
This is in contrast to "believing" information from an entity that did not procure information via the scientific method, and is usually infallible and not subject to change pending new data.
We probably agree on the right way to apply “skepticism” re science.
But the self-described “skeptics” I know often ignore evidence. Which is one way the word (Words! They suck!) can be validly interpreted.
I would say the fundamental element of science is “the evidence based search to continually improve our current understanding”.
I particularly like how “understanding” inoculates against the more static, subjective, bias friendly, identity and ideologically based, implications of “belief”.
What's the alternative? Following every single argument every researcher makes back to the beginning and replicate their work before you base any further work or thought on what they did or said? That's not really feasible in most domains.
And, personally, I'd rather call the basis of science curiosity and not (just) skepticism.
It's not a surprise that people put "science" up on a pedestal when science education is too often about getting the correct answer to questions. Instead of asking questions and understanding the limitations of any approach to answering them. Restraint and humility aren't exciting, but they're so important.
It strikes me as a response to a trend callousness and deliberate ignorance.
Signs like these take a strawman version of "the other side" and define the residents of the home in opposition to that strawman. It's evidence that the person who put it up views themselves as part of the culture war, not evidence that they strive to be kind to and understanding of people who are different than them.
I This House We Believe That
Simplistic Platitudes
Trite Tautologies
And Semantically Overloaded Aphorisms
Are Poor Substitudes
For Respectful And Rational Discussions
About Complex Ideas
I wonder if whoever coined the phrase knew it was a joke deprecating whoever buys it. Like those movies where the point is "those monsters are horrible, aren't they? yeah, you are doing basically the same right now."
'Science' isn't something to believe in, it's a testable thing instead. That's kinda the core idea.
You don't have to believe in science, if anything science says that you should be skeptical until you do the experiments yourself.
I disagree in that, I don't think this is a divisive topic. I have not heard of a valid critique for school start times should be later aside from schools being a daycare supplement for working parents. But that's not science, its politics/economics. "The science" is, in my experience, very clear that young people should be allowed to wake-up later in the day to better conform with their natural sleep cycles.
For a personal perspective, when I was in high school, if I had needed to take the bus, I would have had to get on it before 6 AM, since I was at the beginning of the route (first or second stop, IIRC). Luckily, some family friends had a daughter who was an upperclassman at the same school, and she drove me. I would guess there are few parents well-served by their teenagers getting up at five in the morning.
Do you really think all the states and people that decided these things in the past were all stupid, or not following "the science" back then, or just picked start times at random? Do you really think you know better than all those states and people? Did the science change since then? Did the reasons to start school early/late change since then? Maybe they did. But if they did, you could maybe elaborate on that rather than just saying "the science is so clear" and dictating the way things should be.
I don't really disagree with your point, but... Have you looked at the overall quality of the decisions those people made?
They were not stupid, but the overall amount of real information they dealt with was ridiculously low. And the overall amount of fake information they dealt with was ridiculous high. The odds of any random choice they made being a good one aren't very high.
Yes. Why do you believe otherwise?
> or just picked start times at random
No, they chose based on when they needed daycare to start, because the workday was starting. Or, because the children needed to be available to work the fields during certain hours. Things have changed.
> Do you really think you know better than all those states and people
Yes.
> Did the science change since then
Yes.
> you could maybe elaborate on that rather than just saying "the science is so clear"
Does every discussion need to re-articulate the accumulated evidence? Can't there be some assumption of informed debate?
https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/features/schools-start-too-early.h...
let's look back at the 1800s when school became commonplace. at that time science decided what was the best time to get up and milk the cows. and how to make the most of the available daylight. work and school had to fit into that schedule. so in a way science was used to decide school times indirectly. what is important is to consider that school has not changed since then.
however in the meantime new research suggests that we should rethink schools, and so here we are questioning whether current school starting times are still adequate. this is not saying that in the past people were stupid or picked the times at random, only that the factors that led to those choices have changed.
> your viewpoint really feels like, to phrase it as a software engineering analogy, a new developer that comes into a 20 year old project, looks at what currently exists, calls it all trash, says the people that came before you were dumb and didn't know what they were doing, and you just start rewriting all the code.
Do you think society has peaked and our understanding of civics hasn't evolved? That nothing can ever be better? To continue your analogy, your (unstated) viewpoint is like the stodgy programmer stubbornly sticking to PHP "because it works" and refusing to accept that webtech has evolved and there are better tools. Or a more contemporary way, an old C programmer stubbornly refusing to learn Rust because "C just works". Does it make sense to put Rust into the project? Possibly not, there are many excellent reasons not to. But its a discussion worth having.
> Do you really think all the states and people that decided these things in the past were all stupid, or not following "the science" back then, or just picked start times at random?
If I were to hazard a guess, I imagine most school systems are still bound by the legacy of farmwork and the start/end times are holdovers from that. I doubt the timing has significantly changed since schooling became a primary factor of our lives. But that's just a guess. I would certainly hope that the people who start a new school district are taking into account many factors before dictating a start time.
> Do you really think you know better than all those states and people?
I do not feel the need to be beholden to history for history's sake. My own post acknowledged (one) challenge with changing the start time. But...
> Did the science change since then? Did the reasons to start school early/late change since then?
This is exactly what I and others have posited, yes.
> Maybe they did. But if they did, you could maybe elaborate on that rather than just saying "the science is so clear" and dictating the way things should be.
Others in this thread have posted extensive good research on this very subject for your consumption. I myself have posted a reference to a book I found useful and entertaining. Not every single comment needs to be a doctoral thesis containing every possible scrap of information or interpretation on a subject. This, and other subjects of the like, are artifacts _with context_. Within context of this post, it is in direct response to an article that explains the reason with even more links and a friendly bulleted list.
A mildly provocative analogy is demanding a link to every peer-reviewed journal when discussing climate change. I don't feel the need to point out every scrap of research to state a claim that "Climate change is real". I will merely state, especially in a comment to an article discussing legacy policy around climate change, that climate change is real.
That already crosses into politics. Science can answer if-then statements. Once you start using the word "should", you are talking about morality, preference, and tradeoffs.
In that case, I will also cross over into politics by expressing the opinion that answers to if-then statements should, when they are available, be taken into account in political decision-making.
It can, given sufficient inputs in terms of desired outcomes.
Of course, desired outcomes are where subjectivity enters into things. :)
It presumes that this single thing is the one we should all build our lives around and there are no other priorities to balance.
All of us in our lives "ignore the science" in some form or other.
This is a nitpick at best. From outside a given field, one generally has no option but to pick one or some sources as authoritative and refer to them (or to declare no source is authoritative).
In other words, if I say “the science says XYZ” this is shorthand for “my preferred authoritative sources of information on the relevant field assert XYZ”
Can this be incorrect? Yes. Is this often used as a bludgeon? Yes, and reasonably so: without piercing the research veil, what discussion could exist besides disagreeing on a sources’ authority?
If I say “the science says kids shouldn’t wake before 8 am”, and you respond with some neuroscience argument that childrens brain can adapt to waking up before 8 am, you are essentially making an off topic argument: I am referencing an authoritative position, not arguing why that position is correct. In that sense, yes, I am applying a bludgeon; and I right well should, because I can’t have a meaningful engagement with your scientific position anyways.
I see your sentiment often and even though I agree that usage of “the science says” is a poor description of how science works, nonetheless language is an evolving construct and “the science says ___” is a mainstream construct in English language dialogue at this point
There’s nothing wrong with appealing to authority. Often times it’s the best we can do. Sometimes authority is not sufficiently convincing and in such situations it’s fine to point out that whatever “the science” refers to needs more evidence supporting their claims
There’s something to be said by beginning a conversation with a shared understanding of what is considered a reasonable ground truth.
Am Acad. of Sleep Medicine Consensus guidelines with 26+ references: https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.6558
Good science happens when the best scientist is wrong.
I dislike it when it is used to describe something that is not science.
> I don't have kids, and don't really care when schools start
As a taxpayer, your money is being wasted trying to teach sleepy teenagers who are not the right physical state for learning. Given that these are future coworkers and the people that will be funding the government when you are retired, it might be wise to suggest maybe spend monty teaching teens when they are awake and physically ready to learn?
This bizarre and historically unprecedented scenario where parents simultaneously must both work but be prosecuted for doing so will likely be a blip in history.
Where do you live? There are many, many places in the US where it is indeed usually the case. (Possibly depending on your definition of "far away")
(for the record: primary school encompasses what US calls elementary and middle schools here)
My very liberal definition of "far away" would probably be something like "more than 1.5km" (the distance I was going by foot to a swimming pool as a kid), more if we consider public transport and bikes too - though those of course won't necessarily be viable options everywhere and at every age.
Some of my fondest childhood memories involve conversations with peers from these walks. I think it's an incredible shame that I can't let my children do the same, even at 8, and even though my 8yo is miles more mature than I was at his age.
at one point my oldest was in a school that did not allow kids to go to school or go home on their own. so in the afternoon i had to go to the school and pick him up. they would not let him leave until i showed up. however they could not force me to accompany him in the morning. because, well, what were they going to do when the kid was at the school gate and i wasn't there?
And this is in L.A., home to probably the least-challenging weather in the country. We have entire generations of junior-high and high-school kids who are apparently too feeble to ride their bikes, walk, or take the bus to school. Pathetic.
Weather is a minor factor vs. the population-size/density/quality of a place like LA.
Just watch some of the George Floyd protest videos from LA to get a sense of what likely really concerns LA parents. No amount of snow, sleet, wind, and sub-zero temps can hold a candle to those apocalyptic scenes.
Nobody is advocating sending kids out into a riot. So that leaves... I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say probably 364.8 riot-free days a year suitable for playing or moving about outside.
You can just stay indoors when the weather forecast is bad. There's no way to keep all the riff-raff locked inside while your kid walks home from school. In a place like LA, there's a lot of riff-raff. Just because there's no active riot doesn't mean the riff-raff is gone, they're just not all in a frenzy showing their true colors simultaneously. They continue to exist, and continue to be a potential risk, at all times.
Are you wilfully ignoring the actual thread of context we're discussing? I was replying to your reply to the following:
> Just watch some of the George Floyd protest videos from LA to get a sense of what likely really concerns LA parents. No amount of snow, sleet, wind, and sub-zero temps can hold a candle to those apocalyptic scenes.
Good night.
In my county the kids are not permitted to walk or bike to the school; they can only take the bus or be driven (and they have to be picked up by a parent or someone on an approved list). I assume that stops when they're of driving age but I wouldn't be shocked if the 16-year-olds are allowed to drive but not to bike....
That's the PRIMARY function, eh?
If babysitting was the primary function, there are much cheaper and easier ways to achieve it.
Given that the vast majority of cost and effort is spent on the educational aspect, I would argue that is indeed the primary function.
Additionally, if you look to history, schooling originated long before the need for babysitting.
The initial argument for public education was civics- if you want a nation of competent and driven citizens, they need to be armed with a good, comprehensive education.
A lot changed in the Post-War era. Women entered the workforce, and the role of the public school has mutated to the point that many families depend upon it as the primary caregiver for non infant children (hence the complaints when the school week gets shortened from 5 days to 4).
Also you seem to believe that school being expensive somehow guarantees it’s primary purpose is education. Many districts spend that money incredibly inefficiently. We have lots of touchscreen devices and giant stadiums. And yet teachers are forced to provide their own basic school supplies for the kids every year. Ancient musical instruments failing in kids hands due to rot. It’s really not good out there.
Indeed, I am making a cost based case to define the ordering of goals.
Education, or even the wasteful pretext of education, is the primary driver of cost. Therefore, it is clearly the focus of our spending.
Education is also the primary driver of the structure and form of our schools.
If the primary goal was just daycare, they would look very different. California, for example, spent ~$24k/student in 2023. For that cost, you could pay for a home babysitter.
We could argue about whether the schooling system is sufficiently meeting those long term goals, but that doesn't mean they take a back seat to the immediate consequences of school closures.
If the pipes in your house burst right now, your immediate emergency would be to pretty much stop everything and stop your house from completely flooding.
That doesn't mean that the primary purpose of your life is a pipe-fixer.
I think you made the classic mistake of confusing urgency with importance.
> primary purpose of your life
In this thread, we're not talking about the primary purpose of one's life, we're talking about the primary purpose of school as it relates to parents. In that way, the pipes are analogous to the school and, as you said:
> If the pipes in your house burst right now, your immediate emergency would be to pretty much stop everything and stop your house from completely flooding.
Just like
> If every school were to close the immediate emergency would be that people would have no one to watch their kids.
Specifically because the schools are as important to watching kids as pipes are to moving and containing water.
The tl;dr of how it applies is tht industrialization mandates finding something for young people to do (that isn't working) in a way that previous eras did not. In the era of, say, sail, you could be a 14-year-old sailor. A 14-year-old in a factory was decided (over years and lessons paid in blood) to be not only counter-productive, but dangerous for the 14-year-old. We outlawed it. But that does cause the demographic problem: you can't have these young folks roaming free getting into trouble, so what do you do with them?
The hypothesis that forms is high school is less about education and more about containment (making sure, essentially, that we babysit / warehouse our young adults until they ripen enough to be productive industrial-society members).
Why should that be self-evident? What is wrong with kids 'roaming free'?
I might be wrong though. I haven’t completed my Cynicism 101 course yet.
(you're never gonna finish Cynicism 101 if you don't get your act together!)
There's an alternative, though. Instead of monitoring your child for the entire school day, the school will put your child in a room with all the other children of parents too busy to monitor them. They'll be given an iPad, Wi-Fi, access to a bathroom, and a reasonably nutritious meal. They will receive no formal education, but the staff will make sure they don't hurt themselves or anyone else. This will enable you to go to work. Your earnings will be $37,290 a year.
These are your only two options. The state requires you to choose one of them, or you'll go to jail. Also, if you choose the second option, your taxes won't go up next year.
Which would you choose? Which would people in your demographic choose?
+ Sad that some downtrodden drones try to bury this sentiment instead of demanding better treatment.
Though I admit I'm just making this up and I could be completely wrong. How common was it to mothers to work in the 60s, 50s, and before? Was state-funded K-12 as ubiquitous back then as it is now?
Granted, just one piece of anecdata from just one U. S. state. But without evidence to the contrary, I'm having a hard time picturing any adult in the process, parents or school employee, being content with uneducated ignoramuses as long as they get the pigs fed.
They do this so high school—and nb many high schoolers can get themselves to school in the morning, so parents don't necessarily have to be home for that—can start earlier (no district has so many buses they can start all schools around the same time—they have to stagger them), to leave more time after school for sports practice and other extracurriculars (but really, for sports).
> If it started later, that time would be replaced with pre-school care/activities.
Even without ours being the way it is, that would still just mean more time in (typically paid) after-school care. The hours absolutely do not overlap well enough to provide convenience, only relief from part of the cost of childcare.
Oh wow, it’s still a thing: https://www.nj.gov/labor/youngworkers/find-a-job/working-pap...
Took me years to get over a kind of situation-induced SAD that I'm pretty sure was caused by that. Like, 15 or so years.
More broadly, how many folks have nightmares about school for years into adulthood? Mine didn't stop until my mid-30s—they were practically the only nightmares I still had, and were frequent. And my experience in high school was relatively good!
High school's... kinda horrible, as practiced. Being cooped up in bad lighting during Winter with at least a few total assholes you can't escape and the school can't kick out unless they get really bad, and add hormones to the mix. Work expectations and judgement harsher and far less flexible than anything I've experienced in the "real world". No wonder people have nightmares. I'd drop a job with those conditions as soon as I could find another, if not sooner.
As others have said, my instinct is that if you gave high school me a later start time I would have simply stayed up later. My bedtime was almost never dictated by sleepiness, but rather things like homework, hanging out on AIM with friends, video games, etc.
Surely this is something that has been studied already. Is there a correlation between school start time and student bed times? Or a statistically significant difference in teenage bedtimes between standard and daylight savings time?
School has become a place where children stay so that their parents can work. While there is nothing inherently bad about trying to solve two problems with only one solution, for the specific case of the educational system, conceptualizing schools as places for taking care of kids instead of a place for learning is very problematic in so many aspects that it's hard to even start.
I'm an early riser, so it's not a problem for me.
For them, it's always been a challenge :(
It does eventually settle into some kind of rhythm, although the agreement that they should not take their devices into their bedrooms at bedtime definitely helps with them actually going to sleep at a sensible time.
Probably ended up being an inch or 2 shorter, due to bad sleep cycles during adolescence, which led to many other issues.
Whatever the actual reason for the schedule, it is not this, at least not as the only or original reason. There are plenty of other reasons. It may be difficult or dangerous to practice outdoor sports after school in some parts of the country if you end the day too late. There's some housekeeping that needs to be done by the school staff after the kids leave, whether that be literally cleaning the school or grading homework, and the staff probably doesn't want to be doing that super late into the evening. It's fairly sensible to intentionally be offset from office-induced rush hours, so the day may start earlier than a typical workday for that reason. Kids who work after school can more easily do so if they get off school before the typical start of a late work shift.
I'm not intending to personally endorse any of these as good enough reasons to continue the early day, and I will also gladly admit that I've been an early bird my entire life so the schedule worked out fine for me even as a child. For what it's worth, my elementary school actually had two different schedules for cohorts called "early birds" and "late birds." The early birds started the day at 7 AM and the late birds at 10 AM. This was in LA County in the mid 80s. I have no idea how widespread that ever was or why my middle school and high school didn't do the same thing.
As we both work, we pay for a school club that will look after the kids from 7:40, and after school until 18:00. Although thankfully our work is flexible enough that we generally only have them in there from 8:30-17:00.
So the time of start is really determined by when people need their kids out of their hair so they can work, not because it's some optimal time for the kids...
Not sure what the solution they are suggesting here. Triple the number of buses and bus drivers on the road? Let high schoolers sleep in so that grade schoolers can stand on dark streets at 7:30am? Have grade schoolers stay home until 10:30am stay at school until evening?
Also, having been a teenager [citation needed], I have strong doubts about the "the science" as presented. Had school started two hours later, my natural sleep cycle would probably have... also been delayed two hours.
Logistically it makes sense-- high school kids can get themselves to school even if their parents have already left for work. Sucks for little kids though. My five year old has to be in bed by 7:00pm and even then waking him up is a chore. He sleeps until 8:00 or 8:30 if left undisturbed on weekends.
Another is to have high schools start last so they can watch their mid-school age siblings while parents go to work.
* cries in American *
Your entire premise ("duplicating public and school buses") assumes a public bus infrastructure in the first place. That... is not in general a good assumption for any but the largest US cities.
In the rural area where I grew up, and the few others I am familiar with, the school bus picked all students of all ages at once, because the routes were up to 25 miles one way and it was more efficient to drive them once rather than three times.
I had questions about how this is averaged... I know that in Seattle schools start after 8:50am. But it has Washington as a dark orange.
But given that Washington's 2 most populous urban areas (Encompassing Spokane, Seattle, and Tacoma) both start their schools after 8:40am, I'm wonder how this has Washington as averaging 7:56am to 8:05am.
Additionally, the more I check the counties in Washington, the more I doubt that this is correct. School start times seem to be consistently after 8:30am, which would align with what I know about the state.
So I looked at their source: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ntps/tables/ntps1718_table_05_s1...
And their information for Washington is just wrong, from their own source. It's also for the years 2017-2018.
(??)
it should be a legal right to accommodate working times and locations so that parents can take care of their kids. there need to be benefits for companies hiring parents so that they are not favoring childless employees.
That's one conclusion but not the only one. Another is that COVID was never shown to be a severe risks to children (symptoms were generally mild, in great majority of cases) and being out of school would stunt their education and impact their friend relationships, mental health, and more. Parents who pushed for their kids to stay in school (whether one agrees with the argument) did so out of concern for their well-being.
In other words, you’re just parroting the propaganda of that time that was fairly provably wrong. Maybe some parents thought it was actually “better” for their kids, but they were still accepting some risk over convenience even if they believed the lie.
Using language like this is just belittling me, and this is no longer an earnest discussion.
1) The reason melatonin does not build up in kids anymore is because the lights are on, and the screens are on. Those actually prevent melatonin build up in the brain.
Turn off the lights in the house, and get the screens dimmed to nearly the lowest level.
2) Wake up early on purpose. Your body will SET your go to bed time based on your wake up time. Even if you miss some sleep because of it, waking up at 6 (and staying up all day) will almost certainly make you wake up at 6 the next day and cause your body to get tired when it is supposed to.
But, you're all right, just keep whining about this. Maybe if whining keeps wining we'll all have school at 8pm at night because people keep shifting things for the next 100 years. But don't worry, because education is racist, school will only last 15 minutes.
I figure this is why parents (and moms, in particular, since historically they've been the one to rear children) are so revered: they put up with all that crap, and now we all feel guilty for it.
> Early school starts are not the only cause of teenage drowsiness, but they are a crucial factor—especially because natural sleep cycles make it difficult for post-puberty teenagers to fall asleep before 11 p.m.
(We have one post-puberty teenager and two other kids) ... our experience is that this does depend on whether you let your kids keep their phones and tablets in their bedrooms.
As many adults will confirm, going to sleep sure is easier without distractions.
Source: I was a teen once in an era without smartphones. Turns out lights out at 10pm didn't help me sleep at all, I just tossed and turned for a few hours until my body said it was time to sleep.
Yes, you can probably distract someone into not sleeping who would be sleeping well otherwise. Most people however will struggle with sleeping at unnatural hours regardless of any distractions, and may use their phones and tablets in their bedrooms in hopes to help themselves fall asleep earlier.
You're fighting biology.
>Early school starts are not the only cause of teenage drowsiness, but they are a crucial factor—especially because natural sleep cycles make it difficult for post-puberty teenagers to fall asleep before 11 p.m.
The answer is (surprisingly to most) complicated and illusive.
Laying down in bed at 9pm doesn't guarantee a person falls asleep right away. For some people, yes, their natural cycle syncs up with an ideal work/life sleep schedule, or their bodies are just better at adapting.
But that isn't the case for everyone.
For example, the change in an animal's coat type (summer vs winter) is triggered by the number of hours of sun they are exposed to. Once the days get shorter, the summer coat falls out and the winter coat starts growing in.
Presumably that means someplace your body has the equivalent of an accumulator running measuring hours of sun exposure. :-D (This is also why people deprived of light, or exposed to non-stop light, quickly find a lot of their body's rhymes get way out of wack.)
Anyway AFAIK that system is part of how we adjust, eventually, to changes in time zone.
A lot of other things in our bodies are cyclical throughout the day, month, and seasons. Including men's hormone levels, with testosterone "peaking in October and ebbing in April" [https://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/03/hormones#:~:text=Men%27s....]
I guess my TL;DR is that we're still animals and we can't logic / alarm clock our way out of biology.
People's daily clock is naturally (i.e if kept in a dim light constantly) slightly longer than a day (exactly how long varies by a few hours), but it becomes synchronised to changes in light level (there are actually specific light receptors in your eyes that do this, independent of vision). Exactly what 'phase' this clock has compared to the change in light levels varies from person to person, and throughout their life. There's a decent body of evidence that teenagers naturally shift towards being more delayed as they go through puberty. There are even disorders where it can become very far out of whack: people who will want to sleep very early or very late, or in the most extreme case (usually people who are totally blind in a way that also disrupts these specialised receptors, but also some people who have functioning sight), where the synchronisation doesn't work at all and their natural sleep cycle will drift freely with respect to the day-night cycle.
depending on which physician you ask, it can actually be worse to just lie in bed for hours and hours without sleeping.
it's definitely bad to put yourself in a situation where you must go to sleep at X PM and wake up at Y AM, and then you're repeatedly failing to fall asleep so now you rely on things like sleeping pills, or you're perpetually exhausted and underperforming at tasks like classes or work and the stress creates a feedback loop of even worse sleep.
it certainly wasn't good for me when i was younger!
This gets even more important for kids and teenagers because your chronotype can shift drastically as you transition towards young adulthood until it settles into a certain rhythm.
I have 2 children, school starts at 845 and it's within a 15 minutes walk. We get to sleep until 745,which is great.
Our bedtime is always the same 8 in bed, about 830 asleep and for the adults between 1030 and 11 (I need 9 hours). As you can see pretty consistent sleep schedule.
My sleep is somewhat disturbed, as in I wake up a minute 2-3 times per night. Not alwaya, but frequent.
Last time with new year (no alcohol), I went to sleep at 3 am, and I forgot how good is it. I'm a former night owl, at 3 am ny body feels tired, it takes zero effort to sleep, I closed my eyes and I passed out, deep sleep for 6 hours, the use washroom and another 2 hours of sleep.
It was incredible. Society doesn't allow that, but the difference between "have to go to bed" and "go to bed when ready" is huge
¹(sunrise ~7:11a in the winter, we'd wake up at 6a. ~40m for breakfast/morning routine, ~1h for transit, and a little bit of wiggle, since you'd want to be there by ~7:40a at the latest.)
(… and there are routinely threads on HN where people advocate for moving that wakeup to ~5a standard by futzing with DST.)
When I was a teenager the TV shows I wanted to watch usually dictated when I went to bed.
bedtime = school_start - time_to_get_ready - 9_hours
Short version: Young people sleep schedules naturally deviate and it is legitimately difficult for a large segment to "Just go to bed earlier".
I still think the book has merit as an accessible way for people to learn more about sleep.
It may be true that the book is based on some weak studies but anyone can cherry pick a few individual sentences out of their context and from that write an essay about how wrong someone is (essentially the first 4 points that don't relate to a data error are summed up this way).
In fact, even some of the studies that person is referencing don't agree with the theses presented.
As one real basic example: The author of that blog is disingenous when they take the sentence:
> the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span
Out of context from the rest of the page: https://archive.org/details/why-we-sleep/page/n9/mode/2up
Within context it's clear the author is speaking about specifically getting too little sleep as short sleep. In that context, shorter doesn't mean what is implied by the blog author's response (less in hours).
It's not just weak studies. Guzey provides multiple examples of demonstrably false statements in the book. There is also evidence of flagrant data manipulation. For example, rather than reproducing a chart from a study, Walker presents a modified chart with the data removed that contradicts the claim he wants to make. This calls into question the quality of the entire book and Walker's integrity as a researcher.
At the same time, I think Guzey's analysis is often brought up in order to dismiss the core claim of the book, which is that most people should be getting more sleep. I'm willing to believe that in fact people should be getting more sleep, and I'm also willing to believe that 90% or more of the scientific research referenced by the book is valid. It's just unfortunate that the book seems to be sloppily (and borderline fraudulently) written and researched.
> It's not just weak studies. Guzey provides multiple examples of demonstrably false statements in the book. There is also flagrant data manipulation. For example, rather than reproducing a chart from a study, Walker presents a modified chart with the data removed that contradicts the claim he wants to make. This calls into question the quality of the entire book and Walker's integrity as a researcher.
I did not see any examples of actual research being misrepresented. Where does this happen?
Throughout the post, Guzey is effectively saying: "Walker's book says X but a study says Y" without mentioning the study was released after the book, sometimes years. This is literally the first study linked to that suggests there's no correlation between sleep length and longevity (2018 meta analysis, book released 2017), which is a point the author isn't making in that first section, when viewed in context. If the argument is it's poor communication on Walker's part in the book, sure, I'll agree to that. That's not what Guzey is arguing though; rather he's arguing a statement that doesn't seem to be made. To put it plainly, these two statements are very different:
- If you do not get enough sleep, there is a correlation to worse health effects, worse health outcomes, and less lifespan
vs
- If you don't sleep a minimum number of hours, you will have a shorter lifespan
Walker appears (in context) to suggest the former, while Guzey is arguing against the latter. One of the first problems with any study (let alone meta-analysis) in sleep has to contend with is the fact that the individual data points may require a different number of hours of sleep to be properly rested, and that sleep quality can vary greatly. Simply counting the hours is insufficient.
Really, maybe there's a bigger discussion to be had around the reproducibility crisis as a whole and what it means for people who author books. The problem with books and subjects like this is that they can be an in-time snapshot of knowledge, which are often incorrect when further reviewed (see: Power posing and related). Maybe ethically social scientists should be barred from publishing.
Beyond that, there are plenty of examples of Walker making strong claims without citing sources. For example, there is no citation for the claim that sleeping less than 6 hours per night doubles risk of cancer, the existence of fatal insomnia (a neurodegenerative disease) doesn't prove that lack of sleep will kill somebody, the WHO never declared a sleep loss epidemic, etc.
> Of the 112 athletes studied, 64 athletes (57%) sustained a total of 205 injuries; 48 athletes (43%) were not injured. Of those who were injured, 42 athletes sustained >1 injury (38%). Table 1 includes a summary of the injuries by anatomic location.
And then:
> Sixty-five percent of athletes (56/86) who reported sleeping <8 hours per night were injured, compared with 31% of athletes (8/26) who reported sleeping ≥8 hours per night. Figure 1 shows the likelihood of injury over the 21-month period of reporting, based on hours of sleep per night.
And then the graph is provided which shows the likelihood of injury very strongly correlates to lack of sleep. With a sample size of 86, that 15% difference in the <5hrs group is basically 1 person. We don't know because we don't have the study's raw data that I can find (quickly, at any rate) but 3/5 people reporting < 5 hrs of sleep seems plausible, given that the < 5 hrs group is exactly 60% and given the other percentages for other groups present on the graph.
You can choose to believe dropping the < 5 hrs group is malicious manipulation I suppose but we're probably talking about a sample size of 5/112 for that particular data point. Would it have been better to show the full chart with the raw numbers of participants? Absolutely.
Ironically, Guzey then goes on to indicate the following:
> As an aside, that 9 hours of sleep column is based on exactly 1 child being injured out of 6 children who reported sleeping for 9 hours.
Whenever I see someone being this disingenuous (mentioning the detailed numbers when advantageous, leaving it out when disadvantageous) it makes me question their motives.
Absent knowing the real raw data, I have to consider that Walker's omission on the graph is still in line with the findings of the referenced study:
> In conclusion, lack of sleep and increasing grade in school appear to be associated with increased injury risk in an adolescent athletic population. Encouraging young athletes to get optimal amounts of sleep may help protect them against athletic injuries
Guzey's omission seeks to undermine this point. Perhaps criticism should be levelled at the study itself if that's the goal. Certainly sample size is probably an important factor, or other limitations identified by the study's authors, such as:
> A limitation of this study was that it was conducted at a single academically demanding, urban, private, combined middle school/high school, and the findings may not be generalizable to other populations in different geographic, socioeconomic, and educational settings. Further, the data are based on the self-reported survey responses of adolescents. Another possible limitation is that this study examines the adolescents’ reported chronic sleep deprivation. Acute sleep deprivation, such as getting minimal sleep on a more limited basis, may also put the athlete at increased risk of injury but would not have been captured by this survey as the average amount of sleep might be sufficient. In addition, the athletes were not asked about their dietary intake or specific medications, which may have an effect on their sleep or injury risk. We also did not account for napping in this population as a source of additional sleep. Several authors have shown that daytime napping can improve performance of both athletic and cognitive tasks.
Neither kind of omission are good approaches to presenting science and IMO raw numbers should be as available as possible for all of this kind of data.
[1]: M. D. Milewski et al. “Chronic lack of sleep is associated with increased sports injuries in adolescent athletes, Journal of Paediatric Orthopaedics 34, no. 2 (2014): 129-33. at: https://journals.lww.com/pedorthopaedics/Fulltext/2014/03000...
When I was a teen, I didn't get tired until nearly midnight.
Even when I was getting up for school at 6 AM. My parents would send me to bed some time between 9 and 10, and I'd toss and turn wide awake for 2 hours. Even with sleep deprivation stacking up over the week as I was only getting 6 hours of sleep, I still couldn't get to sleep as I was simply not tired.
The problem of course is that they make high school start earlier than middle school despite the tendency to want to rise and sleep later so that high school kids can arrive home before their possible younger elementary school siblings and watch them.