Originally published here: https://guzey.com/ai/planes-vs-birds/ Note: Parts of this essay were written by GPT-3, so it might contain untrue facts. Introduction Many of my friends are extremely excited by planes, rockets, and helicopters. They keep showing me videos of planes flying at enormous speed, rockets taking off from the ground while...
Published originally (with all of the footnotes) on my site: https://guzey.com/theses-on-sleep/ Summary: In this essay, I question some of the consensus beliefs about sleep, such as the need for at least 7 hours of sleep for adults, harmfulness of acute sleep deprivation, and harmfulness of long-term sleep deprivation and our...
Originally published here: https://guzey.com/ai/planes-vs-birds/
Note: Parts of this essay were written by GPT-3, so it might contain untrue facts.
Many of my friends are extremely excited by planes, rockets, and helicopters. They keep showing me videos of planes flying at enormous speed, rockets taking off from the ground while creating fiery infernos around them, and of helicopters hovering midair seemingly denying the laws of gravity.
I've been on a plane already, and it was nothing special. It was just a big metal tube with a bunch of people inside. It was loud and it smelled weird and I had to sit in a tiny seat for hours. So what is it that makes planes so... (read 612 more words →)
I think that if you ask anyone who knows me in-person they will tell you that I'm an unusually emotionally intensive person. My writing is also usually very emotionally intense but it tend to go through getting feedback from like 20 people who tell me to remove all of the excessive language and to tone it down before publication, so it ends up sounding normal. Comment do not go through this kind of process.
I don't think you're engaging with the substance of the argument.
The crux is:
Also, notice that I could have written a post just like yours, with the same kinds of evidence that you use, but instead arguing that sleep deprivation impairs cognition and can worsen mood.
This is incorrect. If you argue that "proper sleep is necessary for x" and I show you a counterexample where a person has x but doesn't have proper sleep, then however many studies or arguments you give for why "proper sleep is necessary for x", the argument will remain invalidated, which I claim 4, 5.4.1., and 5.4.2. (which you do not represent accurately in your comment -- the participants were able to perform complex mental tasks and function in general at what appears to be ~full-capacity, not just "able to perform basic tasks") all demonstrate.
Hi Natália,
I want to apologize for lack of proper engagement with the post and lack of replies to you as well as a high level of combativeness in the comments I did leave.
This stuff makes me anxious and I feel like I'm just unable to properly explain what makes me disagree so much with you.
My best attempt is that my takes are some combination of:
Thanks for the taking the time to look into my essay.
Here's what Mendonça writes in her first point that so conclusively demonstrates that the point I make is "misleading":
[Guzey's] evidence from bipolar disorder patients is not representative of what you see in the general population: both long and short sleep duration are associated with depression
The paper Mendonça cites looks at long-term long sleep and long-term short sleep, with their association with depression. My claim and my evidence (from bipolar people) are concerned with short-term long sleep and short-term short sleep. That is, Mendonça's paper is simply not overlapping with with what I write about or... (read 799 more words →)
(I'll reply in more substance by the end of the week -- have a big deadline coming up this Thursday)
From skimming the post, three parts stand out to me
1. the fact that acute sleep deprivation relieves depression in ~50% of people with depression seems completely unaddressed and Natália's section about bipolar people seems to imply that this would not be happening. I specifically noted in this the section Natália addresses by writing:
... (read more)Lack of sleep is such a potent trigger for mania that acute sleep deprivation is literally used to treat depression. Aside from ketamine, not sleeping for a night is the only medicine we have to quickly – literally overnight – and reliably
re: persuasive intent -- yes, of course I want to persuade people but I'm believe I'm being very clear about the fact that some sections are just analogies.
My strongest objection to your writing style is the accusation that sleep researchers in general are doing shoddy research and culpable for the equivalent of killing people. This is the point at which I would have stopped reading your article (and lowered my likelihood of reading other things you write in the future), if it weren't for the fact that Elizabeth was the one who curated the piece.
I believe this is a very strong misreading of what I wrote. I did write that sleep researchers... (read more)
This I agree with. As I noted in another comment, Guzey's a lot of things right here, except that the tone and format of his post makes his argument feel hard to respect. It comes across as ranty, manic, highly motivated ("passionate"), the sort of style we now associate with Qanon. But this is LessWrong, and I think that here, at least, we should try to focus on substance over style.
Tbh I'm very confused about the issues you have with my tone. I very deliberately called the post "Theses" on sleep! And I believe I very explicitly wrote that these are my conclusions from my reading of the literature and in no... (read more)
Yep, if someone was majorly undersleeping for a few days, they are probably going to be more sleepy and make more mistakes of attention/find it more difficult to concentrate and absorb the kind of information that they would need a tutor to absorb!
As an experiment -- you can ask a couple of your students to take a coffee heading to you when they are underslept and see if they continue to make mistakes and learn poorly (in which case it's the lack of sleep per se likely causing problems) or not (in which case it's sleepiness)
Have you done an explicit calculation of your perceived increased risk in Alzheimer's and compared it to QALY (potentially) gained by decreasing amount of sleep?
Yep, I sometimes manage to ask my body to wake up at a certain time and it does it when there's something I care a ton about waking me up a few minutes before the alarm.
Published originally (with all of the footnotes) on my site: https://guzey.com/theses-on-sleep/
Summary: In this essay, I question some of the consensus beliefs about sleep, such as the need for at least 7 hours of sleep for adults, harmfulness of acute sleep deprivation, and harmfulness of long-term sleep deprivation and our inability to adapt to it.
It appears that the evidence for all of these beliefs is much weaker than sleep scientists and public health experts want us to believe. In particular, I conclude that it’s plausible that at least acute sleep deprivation is not only not harmful but beneficial in some contexts and that it’s that we are able to adapt to long-term sleep... (read 10065 more words →)