“Why We Sleep” is riddled with scientific and factual errors (2019)

The book does also say some people with certain gene only need 4 hours of sleep. She could be in this category and is only sleep more.

>"She's stressed out because the book says if she doesn't get eight hours of sleep, she'll get cancer."

I've read the book, and don't think it said that. Have you read the book?

> Not that part about how there are more driving accidents on the day we reset our clocks for DST?

This is kind-of a meme talking point these days, but the few studies on this haven’t shown that the cause is lack of sleep, they only show some correlations with the time change (i.e., there could be other factors such as putting commutes in the twilight hours.) There aren’t that many crashes supposedly attributed to DST either (e.g. it’s claimed to be like 30 fatal crashes out of more than 35,000 annually), and the supposed temporary increase in crashes is dwarfed by crash rates in the summer anyway. If you care about car crashes at all, DST is a teensy blip. The big problems are 1:speeding and 2:drunk driving. Making even a modest change to reduce speeding would do many many times more good than eliminating DST.

One massive problem with the cadre of people claiming DST change is so harmful is that the majority of people experience social jet lag on a weekly basis. The one hour time change twice a year is dwarfed by the number of people staying up several hours late Friday and Saturday night all year long. (Full disclosure, I’m skeptical of many of the claims made about DST, and I’ve done deep dives into many references only to find very weak to non-existant evidence being used to support extremely strongly worded claims. The voodoo claims about circadian misalignment that permeate DST “research” are bogus.)

It’d be interesting to self-measure your sleep & next-day performance, that might be a lot more informative than someone else’s summary. It’d be interesting to discuss how to design some self-measure tests. What kinds of performance are you thinking about? Do you want to know the risks of activities like driving, or are you thinking about job/school performance?

if walker is mistaken about numerous small factual details, what makes you confident he's correct about anything meaningful?

> I couldn't care less if Walker was wrong

That's not the main takeaway from Guzey, I think. The takeaway is that there appears to be deliberate misrepresentation of the facts in order to spin a narrative, which is poor form from an academic.

I don't see how "the author chopped off the part of the graph that contradicted his statement" is "not all that relevant"

>interested in how sleep affects my day to day

This. That said, the amount of people I know who has successfully modified their sleep habits to increase everyday performance is magnitude lower than people who have successfully dieted, which is not much to begin with. I wonder what's harder.

> I'm interested in how sleep affects my day to day performance since that's what matters most.

the evidence suggesting links between inadequate sleep and long term development of dementia seems at least as important to me than day to day performance in the short term.

Yep. The only big takeaway I've had about Guezy, from various things posted on here, is that the person feels he doesn't need to sleep as much as Walker claims and sets out to prove every little tidbit wrong that Walker ever said. And perform experiments on himself (there was one where he intentionally sleep-deprived himself then tested his reaction time on a video game, if I recall correctly) to say "Look, we don't need to sleep that much!" Honestly, it seems he more has an issue with sleep and is looking to optimise for time awake, thus he basically hates Walker telling us we probably need more sleep.

I've also found a lot of these points to be quite finnicky too, as [1] discusses

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34166889

Thanks for the summary. Some tired thoughts:

#1 the premise of the book is that we (both individually and societally) are the only species intentionally depriving ourselves of sleep due to hectic lifestyle and work pressure, which cause undersleeping. It’s a factor we can change. Sleeping “too much” is associated with mortality for different reasons, which according to the book is because of deceases that cause you to be able to sleep more (which would be because the body needs more time to perform the physical recovery function for longer). Most healthy adults can't sleep longer than ~9h for an extended period of time. That, at least, makes a good argument for treating them differently.

#2 Sleep deprivation therapy may work well for some people with depression, and I don’t see the conflict in being open minded. Perhaps walker is a bit too reactive in his tone? He is intentionally a little provocative, and that may indeed be harmful to people of literal-mindedness. But what’s the alternative? Putting a caveat in every paragraph that YMMV? Requiring a test that you understand aggregates and distributions in order to buy a book?

#3 I remember reading the book and getting exactly that impression. If indeed FFI is a neurodegenerative prion decease (same category as mad cow decease) it’s deeply dishonest to say death is due to lack of sleep. That’s very misleading, no excuses.

#4 was a misattribution to the WHO when it was in fact.. the CDC. Welp, I mean, shit happens. This definitely falls under honest mistake.

#5 ok? Thanks for the correction, lol.

The points you listed feel like strong arguments to discredit a book - what makes you feel they're nitpicky? i.e.

#1 is the author using a linear model where it doesn't apply,

#2 is the author first promoting a super simplistic "more sleep = better" idea and then contradicting himself,

#3 is misinterpreting a symptom as a cause

etc.

Afaik freakonomics is considered pseudoscience by people working in areas it writes about. I haven't seen anyone take freekonomics seriously for years at this point.

This same vacuous argument could be applied to the book itself: Pop-sci books like this make a million claims and take an inordinate amount of time to verify. And by that time it doesn’t matter, the claims will already have been accepted as true.

See how pointless this is?

I find this comment strange and wrongheaded. The world is better off for having this criticism out there, and we should thank Guzey for making the effort. Unlike Walker, he doesn’t get paid to do it.

> Regardless of the accuracy of such a barrage of accusations, it takes an inordinate amount of time to respond to the criticism, as it will typically contain of several dozen points each of which require a lengthy response. And by that time it doesn't matter, the accusation will have already been accepted as true.

See also: the gish gallop: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

> The Gish Gallop is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort.

> in this essay, I’m going to highlight the five most egregious scientific and factual errors Walker makes in Chapter 1 of the book. This chapter contains 10 pages and constitutes less than 4% of the book by the total word count.

There's nothing problematic with the criticism. The book is riddled with false claims and what's actually problematic is that someone sold countless of copies of fraudulent self-help on a contentious topic like sleep because they knew exactly it would sell like hotcakes regardless of its scientific accuracy.

You're right that it's excatly like nutrition advice or politics in that there's a 80%+ chance whenever someone sells a hugely popular book in this field that most of it is just made the f*** up.

Other sleep experts have asserted that the book is so awful as to constitute research misconduct and what we should do is give posts correcting bad science the attention they deserve and hold shoddy scientists and public intellectuals accountable.

I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on that... but this comment resonates with me.

I think its similar to how people will completely write off a book/movie/person for _one_ thing. I get some things have more weight than others and its hard to trust a book if you find one error... but I've seen people say entire books (technical ones) are "trash" because they disagreed with one or two issues.

Seems like a modern phenomenon. Or maybe just rose tinted glasses... but it seemed people could disagree or even point out flaws while still being on the same "team."

> In general, criticism of this format is quite problematic and should be considered bad form. You see the format quite often in politically sensitive research and other infected areas (like nutrition), as a means of character assassination.

Interesting. It looks like it’s making an argument but if you read closely it’s nothing but insinuation and an opinion about the correct way to have disagreements so as to avoid scandal in front of the plebeians.

What would be a better form of criticism of accuracy of a book?

Except pop-sci books are cancers in and of themselves. The book has some interesting notes but in general prescribes really questionable conclusions to the data. For example, one poster here suggests sleeping less leads to cancer.

I don't personally think the article was in any worse taste than the book. Just because someone cites studies doesn't mean they know how to relate data. There's two entire websites dedicated to this sort of fallacy, here (HN) and Reddit. Pop-sci is the most annoying part of the 21st century to me.

I'm not convinced anyone actually understands sleep. We know too little and we can die. Too much, and we can die too. "Just enough" is the answer but as far as I can tell no one can quantify what this even means. I sleep enough to be rested. This seems to be >= 6 hours a night. The book would insinuate that I'm going to die of all sorts of terrible diseases as a result. The book itself isn't good science and I don't think a criticism of such a broad-strokes painting of a complicated subject needs to be any more kind.

To address your greater point if there's any place where you can throw a rock and find bullshit it's nutrition and health "science". In fact, the industry is so rife with bullshit it's often difficult to tease out actual actionable data. More people need to directly criticize these people in such a fashion until they simply go away.

The claimed benefit in the article is for depression. Depressed people who suffer sleep deprivation sometimes become less depressed. That could be true at the same time that cognitive performance and/or health suffers. I don’t know how long the sleep deprivation benefit works for depression, but just something to keep in mind; less sleep (or more sleep) is not necessarily a binary good or bad thing, it can be multiple goods and bads in some unknown weighted combination, and it can change over time and according to context, i.e., short term deprivation might help some people while long term deprivation does lasting damage.

One day of 4-6 hours sleep and I can get giddy, energetic, and focused. 2nd day kills me. Usually even if I get otherwise adequate sleep, there's a hangover effect.

I’ve seen some work on this. It turns out that some percentage of the population doesn’t need sleep like the rest of us. Nobody knows why.

We don’t know.. it seems that sleep resets the state that the brain is in, and in depressed people, their reset state is where they experience the worst symptoms of depression. This[1] is a good read though I have forgotten the content of the essay.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-d...

They’re researching injecting ads in your dreams