Circadian justice (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Circadian justice (2022)

eprints.lse.ac.uk

58 pointsanigbrowl22 comments

As a high school teacher with a multi ethnic classroom, I don't believe that scheduling is significantly a multi-cultural issue, but rather it's a specific school and community issue. For instance the time at which school starts is less downstream of puritan or protestant heritage, and more a matter of when the sun rises, and how far the busses have to travel. It emerges from lots of discussion with parents and staff.

One thing that came out of those discussion is a four-day school week. That is popular with rural parents across cultures.

The fact that some of our students come from a White or Hispanic or Native American heritage doesn't enter into the conversation, other than through their individual expressed preferences. Some cultures tend to speak more quietly and it's up to us to listen carefully. But we care about what those parents care about, not what our assumptions about their culture would lead us to guess they care about.

> more a matter of when the sun rises, and how far the busses have to travel

In the suburbs I'm familiar with it was 100% a bus scheduling constraint. The high schools had to start at the crack of dawn because by the time the same fleet of busses made it through the middle schools and on to the elementaries it was getting pretty late.

You could alternatively argue that it was a budget constraint (not enough money to 3x the bus fleet). Either way, it sure would have been nice to have robust city planning and public transit (and thus not need a large private bus fleet in the first place).

It's always seemed strange to me how the world agrees that it is fine to deprive someone of sleep if they happen to have a late sleep schedule (by e.g. starting school or work early).

To solve the issue we must answer several questions: What’s the alternative? How much it would cost for whole class and members of classmate families?

I don't think anyone is conspiring against people who go to bed late - as an early waker I've often had noisy neighbors playing loud music late at night to contend with. Sometimes it was a larger event like a wedding reception, so calling the police wasn't exactly an option either (not that I'd ever done that).

I would say the world simply agrees that things - whether schools, shifts or parties - should generally start sometime, and thus, by necessity, be less accommodating to some people than to others.

As someone who'd naturally stay up all night and sleep until noon, I've found that very tiny doses of melatonin (1 mg, preferably less) a few hours before bed work wonders to help me get proper sleep and stay on schedule with everyone else.

The abstract reads like one of these fake articles people would trick journals on humanities to publish for fun

The argument he’s making is coherent.

1) There are social, economic, and institutional norms surrounding sleep.

2) These norms are defined (or at least abided) by a majority group.

3) A minority of individuals can’t abide by these norms either due to physiological differences or necessity.

4) Some people benefit from the work that this minority does, and the minority is not adequately compensated in comparison to the benefits they generate.

Only because it uses words like "injustice" or "minorities".

It was my first impression as well, but if I get over my gag reflex and actually read the lines carefully, it seems the "injustice" basically means that people with different schedules are treated unfairly by society and the "minorities" are precisely those with different schedules.

To me it's the sum of that and using a term from hard science. But the whole article doesn't indeed look like the author is trying to do fake science.

Oh but as a person whose cognitive capabilities are highly dependent on the amount of sleep I get and as someone whose situation forced me to reduce my sleep hours at some point, I can fully relate. It's one of the problems you can be totally unaware of unless it touches you personally.

The author talks about certain groups, like offshored call center employees whose sleep schedule is shifted so that they can respond to needs of people in a different time zone... but wouldn't mobile phone usage have a more widespread (really pervasive) impact on sleep than irregular labor conditions for a few? There are studies showing significant associations of mobile phone use and poor sleep quality.[0] I don't get the feeling that a strong link between mobile phone use and poor sleep quality would appeal to the Journal of Political Philosophy, though.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9707689/ in India, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.... in UK

I didn't see those studies cited but it does specifically mention the use of communication devices in the bedroom.

That second one is about ‘smartphone addiction’ not smartphone use. They don’t even give the number of interviewees with smart phones, presumably because it’s 100%.

> The model of an eight-hour, unbroken sleep is a modern and western one, coinciding with the advent of electric lighting and the new routines of the workday, and achieved through class struggle in the emerging industrial workplace.

The scholarship on this isn’t good.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zutvcs/comme...

That tracks, it was a scandal-dogged publication that finally closed the year after this article was published, following the resignation of the editorial board.

End DST!

This makes me so happy to see, for so many people, now and in the future.

i'm not sure if this is still active looking at the 'in the press' section, but...

https://www.b-society.org/

> Given the difficulty and undesirability of restoring the practices that underpin those norms, the challenge is develop societies that no longer presuppose them.

Is this a joke? Instead of idk improving labour laws… more worker power / unionization… let’s just stop “oppressing” people with assumptions about their sleep schedule.

They’ve hit on something real, but their solution is bonkers.

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