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“Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
- Tomte 7y agoThat's interesting, but when reading the book my takeaways weren't really whether some cancer risks doubles or so. They were * what are REM/NREM, light and deep NREM sleep for? * some fascinating study about lucid dreaming * effects of coffein and sleep medication * sleep hygiene tips * some other things I can't recall right now Yes, you can read about these things elsewhere, too, but I still think the book is a tremendous introduction to the subject. But I don't have an academic interest in the subject, so the criticisms in the article do not matter much to me (except for some uneasy feeling about accuracy in general). If you're a student of medicine, cognitive sciences or whatever, you should probably get your introduction elsewhere anyway.
- guzey 7y agoThe criticisms should matter to you! Why do you believe that his representation of research on REM/NREM, light and deep NREM sleep is scientifically accurate? Why do you believe his representation of effects of coffein and sleep medication is scientifically accurate? I cover this in sections 14.3 and 14.4: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-common-objections https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-common-object...
- ebg13 7y agoI don't know why you were flagged, but I vouched you. You're absolutely right that demonstrating egregious errors in one part should necessarily cause one to not take the other parts at face value, aka Michael Crichton's ever-popular Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
- swyx 7y agoi heard about Gell-Mann from some reverential source, and was very tickled to check wikipedia and discover that it is thusly named because "because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have". the trolling is delicious.
- Broken_Hippo 7y agoThis, and exactly this! It doesn't matter if some of the information is correct - once untrue things are peppered in, all facts from the source are suspect and who knows which incorrect facts your brain has.
- copperx 7y agoYou and the parent poster spell caffeine as coffein. Is that an alternative spelling, or was it a joke?
- erituises 7y agoThank you so much for this article. I read his book and one of the points he made was you could never "make up" missing sleep. For example, if you pulled an all nighter, you couldn't make it up the next few days if you slept more. Basically the health effects of missing a day of sleep would affect you for the rest of your life. That was a quite shocking. Were you able to find any information on whether he was exaggerating this?
- guzey 7y agoI didn't look into this in particular but my impression from reading the literature is that this makes zero sense.
- efedorenko 7y agoThat was one of the things that confused the hell out of me as well.
- jedc 7y agoSpeaking for me, I believe Matthew Walker because he's been working in the field for almost twenty years, has published numerous peer-reviewed papers, etc. (Not that I believe everything but by default he gets a huge amount of credibility from me.) You've clearly put a lot of time into your research as your post cites. But you don't have twenty years experience in the field. Why should we believe your analysis? Your criticisms could also be tangential or taking things out of context.
- stuxnet79 7y agoIf I could summarize "Why We Sleep" in a single sentence though it would be: "Sleep or you will die" That grabs readers' attention. While the hyperbolic tone of the book can be justified given that sleep is so misunderstood ... it does invite skepticism at the same time so I appreciate that the author of this article has done such a thorough lookup. -- edited for clarity
- guzey 7y agoCould you point me to at least one hyperbole in my text?
- stuxnet79 7y agoMy apologies - I was referring to the book's hyperbolic tone not your article. The book is a nice enough summary of the current state of sleep research but its tone wasn't as balanced as I would have liked and I'm not surprised that some of the references are specious at best. Thanks for the write up. I enjoyed reading through it.
- ebg13 7y agoI believe they were talking about the book's hyperbole, not yours. Though I don't agree with or really understand the basis for their decision that spreading FUD is ok if the subject is widely misunderstood.
- bob_theslob646 7y agoThank you for taking the time to put this together. I am curious to see if Matthew Walker replies.
- niknetniko 7y agoThank you for this. I am very disappointed in Matthew Walker. In fact, if I were working in the same field as him, these findings would cast a doubt on most of his other work. The density of the errors almost makes me unsure which is worse: the errors are unintentional due to carelessness or they are deliberate to create a better sounding story. (Of course, the latter is worse as it is basically academic fraud.) I believe there should be more books that are scientifically sound, yet accessible to most people. I thought this was one such book, but alas.
- guzey 7y agoYou might enjoy the section where I cover a little bit of his academic work, in case you missed it: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-but-this-is-just-a-popular-science-book-why-such-scrutiny-how-academic-urban-legends-are-created https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-but-this-is-j... :)
- RachelF 7y agoThat's a lot of errors, and he only examined Chapter 1 of "Why we Sleep". Walker comes out looking like a charlatan.
- dsaavy 7y agoThis sparks an idea... what if there was a tool that crawled all academic studies’ sources. Basically allowing you to see the root source of every cited study back to square one. Would make it much easier to discover studies based on a pyramid of weaker/wrong studies.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoNothing is stopping anyone with access to the SciHub corpus from doing this.
- virtuallynathan 7y agoThis is fun to do, but you’ll rapidly find that the academic sources don’t even say what they claim to.
- dsaavy 7y agoThe foundations of modern science seem to be quite shaky...
- farrelmahaztra 7y agoAlthough you could infer bad studies by citations, external criticisms etc, ultimately wouldn’t you have to look at the content of the studies themselves? The ubiquitous paywalls in online academic repos seems like a big obstacle to this.
- djohnston 7y agoIt would be useful. You'd also hit a new paywall for each journal, and the tool would end up costing thousands of dollars for anyone to use. You could of course I terrace with scihub, imo one of the most important tools in the last 20 years, but then you can't build a business on it
- TooSmugToFail 7y agoThanks for this. 'Why we Sleep' was one of the books I was reading before reading your analysis, and you saved me from wasting any more time on that obviously inaccurate load of hyperbole. More importantly, you saved me from wasting even more time trying to apply any of the advice by what seems to be sensationalism passing off as science (and maybe even jeopardising my health in the process).
- swyx 7y agothe meta-analysis of this, tho, is how we can apply this level of rigor/accountability to all pop sci books, or is it complete bunkum at this point. i mean guzey sounds meticulous enough but i dont even know enough to know if they are full of crap
- roberson87 7y agoWow.....super disappointed to say the least. I actually bought the audiobook the other month and was looking to listening to it. I really enjoyed his episode on Joe Rogan and was the only one I've ever listened to twice. I don't understand why he would make up facts like fabricating statements from WHO? These are amateur mistakes a smart man doesn't make, which I'm sure Walker is (?). I haven't even finished reading this article but this part stood out: "Walker’s book has likely wasted thousands of hours of life and worsened the health of people who read it and took its recommendations at face value." First part is dubious but second part, seriously? How can extra of sleep "worsen" the health of people?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- guzey 7y agoSee Section 2: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#no-a-good-night-s-sleep-is-not-always-beneficial-sleep-deprivation-therapy-in-depression https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#no-a-good-night-s-slee... People for whom sleep deprivation therapy would be helpful but who decide to avoid it due to Walker will have their health worsened by the book. For a bit more speculative answer to this, see Section 14.1: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-common-objections https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-common-object...
- slothtrop 7y agoAs per the person you quoted, you can't equivocate a good night's sleep with "worsening someone's health" just because said person might alleviate depressive symptoms with deprivation therapy. Those are not the same things. Add to that, said restriction is not intended to be perpetual. There are good points in your analysis but shall we discount yours entirely as well for faults such as these?
- guzey 7y ago"worsening someone's health" refers to not getting therapy you need, based on Walker's misrepresentation. I believe this is exactly what I wrote in the comment you were responding to.
- dannykwells 7y agoThank you for this. I've been skeptical about Matthew since his association with Hello, the failed sleep gadget startup. This really drives home what a salesman he is. Id like to think there will be consequences...but I doubt it.
- copperx 7y agoUnfortunately, I trusted the author's UC Berkeley pedigree. I thought, "if the facts in this book weren't true, his academic colleagues would make him an academic pariah." I need to tune up my BS detector. Trust, but verify.
- unmole 7y ago> Walker’s book has likely wasted thousands of hours of life and worsened the health of people who read it How has it worsened the health of people?
- guzey 7y agoSee Section 2: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#no-a-good-night-s-sleep-is-not-always-beneficial-sleep-deprivation-therapy-in-depression https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#no-a-good-night-s-slee...
- audiometry 7y agoWould like to see the author’s rebuttal, if he does decide to rebut.
- TacoToni 7y agoWould be interesting if they were both on the Joe Rogan Podcast and had a debate.
- dpatrick86 7y agoTaken in light of the existence of the glymphatic system, a robust mechanism of clearance activated by slow wave sleep, what is more likely... misfolded protein accumulation is incidental to the loss of sleep during the course of fatal familial insomnia or loss of sleep is incidental to what is actually a disease of misfolded proteins?
- shermanmccoy 7y agoThank you! I was turned off even earlier by the glaring 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' logic error on the very first page of the text. Quoting from the second paragraph, following a load of claims of the maladies that come from lack of sleep: "Fitting Charlotte Bronte's prophetic wisdom that a 'ruffled mind makes a restless pillow', sleep disruption further contributes to all major psychiatric conditions..." It is plain that Charlotte Bronte was inferring psychiatric conditions lead to sleep disruption, not the other way around.
- guzey 7y agoThanks! Yes, your quote is another good example of the book's level of argumentation. Not going to include this because I get too many "nitpicking" charges against me already :)
- farrelmahaztra 7y agoWow. I’ve never read the book but it’s crazy something like that would be on the very first page
- lovestodonothin 7y agoThank you so much for this article! I usually have a lot of trouble sleeping and was panicking after I read the book. The side effects of not sleeping did seem kind of exaggerated, but glad to know someone actually took the time to corroborate all the claims.
- jholman 7y agoPedantry note: corroborate claims is exactly what this article did not do. Maybe you had a thinko or left out a word, I certainly that from time to time, but alternately maybe you want to look up what the fancy word means. HTH (Maybe you're just sleep deprived! (I kid, I kid))
- dean177 7y ago> No, not every living creature generates a circadian rhythm > This is false. Brewer’s yeast (S. cerevisiae) I don’t think most people would consider yeast a “creature“
- guzey 7y agoDo you think most people know that Brewer's yeast is alive?
- annamargot 7y agoProbably not. However, pointing out what many may consider a minor falsehood could set yourself for an easy counter. If Walker wanted to discredit your essay. He could give a sound bite like: “Ok, yes, yeast. You’re right, but that’s not something most people consider relevant to sleeping rhythms. Haha. The essay is nitpicking minor technicalities but on a whole my research is unblemished.” If I were his PR rep, I’d advise as such. You’re essay is too good to be vulnerable like that.
- guzey 7y agoI'm not sure if this is relevant. The point about Brewer's yeast is literally in the last appendix, here: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix I do agree that this is a minor point and included this mostly out of curiosity.
- farrelmahaztra 7y agoThe faux disclaimer at the start that “discourages” using SciHub to access the paywalled articles was a nice touch to an otherwise excellent read
- mendelmaleh 7y agoThe article before this one tho: https://guzey.com/fiction/hntop1 https://guzey.com/fiction/hntop1
- guzey 7y agoThis is actually hilarious because the sleep essay (this submission) was starting to take off, was clearly going to hit the front page, and then it got flagged! By the time it got unflagged by the moderators, it disappeared from the "new" page and by some miracle did not get completely lost..
- swyx 7y ago> I would probably give up a year of sex just to have this feeling again. wow idk about you but thats a poor trade in my book
- lajosbacs 7y agoThank you for this public service! I feel duped now after reading 1/3 of the book.
- eneveu 7y agoThank you Alexey for this great article. I was actually in the process of reading the book. I would be very interested in an analysis of the scientific and factual accuracies in the rest of the book.
- doctaC 7y agoEven after reading the article, I still believe, in general, more sleep is better for you. I'll continue to strive for 8 hours a night. I would still assume the majority of Americans aren't getting enough sleep. Maybe this does help the feelings of "If I don't get enough sleep I am going to die young" that some may come away with after reading the book. Overall, I'd still recommend the book. Also, who is "Big Sleep" that is mentioned at the end of the article? Mattress companies?