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"Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker summarizes quite a lot of research on sleep. It leaves little doubt - we currently know of no safe way to significantly cut dow

"Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker summarizes quite a lot of research on sleep. It leaves little doubt - we currently know of no safe way to significantly cut down sleep. I haven't seen the research presented in that book being refuted.

hpoe 6y ago
https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ For those interested in someone who created a refutation to Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep"
- piercebot 6y ago
  This refutation is authored by the same person who conducted the study to which these comments are attached :)
  - praptak 6y ago
    I did some digging and it is pretty solid to me. It's sad that Walker did not respond to this.
    - fossuser 6y ago
      He did (poorly) and not in a single easily read location.
    - texascloud 6y ago
      Proof of digging?
- texascloud 6y ago
  I wouldn't say this is refuting even a minority of claims in the book. It appears to be a thorough fact check of a small percentage of claims, some of which is going after the author over wording and inconsistencies. It's fair criticism, but by no means invalidates a majority of the information regarding sleep that Walker presents
  - balfirevic 6y ago
    After finding that the part of the book which actually got fact-checked is full of falsehoods and contains outright falsifications, your conclusion is "well, the rest of it must be fine"?
  - 0xddd 6y ago
    Except there are cases where Walker went so far as to remove portions of a graph to support his argument. This kind of manipulation shouldn't be allowed to stand and it's frustrating (though not surprising) to see a book that relies on this sort of dishonesty get so much uncritical attention and praise. I can't put it any better than Andrew Gelman: "If the data didn’t matter, then why did you include them in your damn book in the first place? If the removal of the bar from the graph didn’t matter, then why did you remove the damn bar?" https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/03/24/why-we-sleep-a-tale-of-institutional-failure/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/03/24/why-we-sle...
    - texascloud 6y ago
      Okay, he removed the 5 hour bar. I get what the author in your link is upset about, leaving out data points. But imo that's not good enough to make me throw out all the information in that book. It sounds like the author is upset a book about getting enough sleep is getting so much attention. If they're upset at the way Walker misrepresents information, then I'd hate to see the author's blood pressure while feverishly researching the bias of every article they come across
      - 0xddd 6y ago
        I'm genuinely surprised someone could read that whole blog post (I'm assuming here) and come away with that conclusion. Gelman addresses this so directly in the article: "Recall the Javert paradox. It’s completely reasonable to write about scientific misconduct, and yes sometimes we have to scream a bit to get heard over all the chatter of the scientist-as-hero press." ... "But we need real expertise, not fake expertise. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Gresham, baby, Gresham. If we don’t contest the fake expertise, I’m seriously worried it will be crowding out the real stuff." There is good research and there is bad research. The latter should not be given a pass just because all research has some amount of bias.
texascloud 6y ago
This 100%. I've read the book twice, coming back to certain chapters more than twice, because it's dense with information. It's scary really. The single most impactful thing you can do as a human for your life is to prioritize 8 hours of sleep per night, full stop.
- balfirevic 6y ago
  > because it's dense with information. It also appears to be dense with misinformation.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
acwan93 6y ago
An educational and insightful book, but it had me losing sleep because I got so anxious on needing more sleep. Talk about irony!
- fossuser 6y ago
  I think you shouldn't have to worry about it, a lot of claims in that book don't hold up to scrutiny: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
currymj 6y ago
there have been complaints by serious people about the work in this book, see https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/12/27/why-we-sleep-data-manipulation-a-smoking-gun/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/12/27/why-we-sle... now, it's obvious to me that if I don't get 8 hours of sleep a night, my brain stops functioning properly and my entire life goes to shit very quickly. So I was happy to see a very popular book advocating sleeping well, and hopeful that if lots of people read it, they might have more respect for other people's sleep schedules. The critic, Alexey Guzey, seems to be a guy who needs less sleep than I do, and also a guy who is into life-hacking/self-improvement type stuff. There's definitely a type of person who thinks "sleep is for the weak". I think he probably does have a bias towards sleeping less. But I think the problems he points out about the book are pretty serious. In particular, it seems that claims around sleep and longevity and other health outcomes (e.g. injury rates, cancer) are often unreliable or based on misinterpreted studies, and one case involves eliding data that contradicts the result. Now, having myself experienced chronic sleep deprivation, and dealt with people who think they don't need to sleep but definitely do, I think the basic argument of the book is probably correct. But as the last line of that post quotes, "Good ideas do not need a lot of lies told about them to gain public acceptance".
fossuser 6y ago
I think this book is mostly bullshit - the same author that wrote the linked HN post dug into that book and there was a ton of manipulative data and just straight up false claims. [0] I get a pretty strong pseudoscience vibe from it. From a previous post: I got a strong motivated reasoning/bullshit vibe from Walker in this interview: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/20/630792401/sleep-scientist-warns-against-walking-through-life-in-an-underslept-state https://www.npr.org/2018/07/20/630792401/sleep-scientist-war... Particularly this section: > “Sleep is not like the bank. So you can't accumulate debt and then try and pay it off at a later point in time. And the reason is this - we know that if I were to deprive you of sleep for an entire night - take away eight hours - and then in the subsequent nights, I give you all of the sleep that you want - however much you wish to consume - you never get back all that you lost. You will sleep longer, but you will never achieve that full eight-hour repayment as it were. So the brain has no capacity to get back that lost sleep...” I don’t think this follows - seems likely to me that sleep is not some linear time thing and that there’s a standard overhead that doesn’t need to be repeated to extend and make up the time. This feels like a symptom of not understanding the mechanism and making a bad assumption. I also found the “I won’t mention the cognitive failures I can detect” irritating. If there’s some actual thing to mention, say it - this kind of thing sets off alarms for me. It doesn’t surprise me that the rest is similarly bad. [0]: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
- wccrawford 6y ago
  I find this argument odd for a couple reasons. First, if you "can't get back lost sleep", wouldn't that mean that you were tired forever? I'm definitely more tired after 24 hours awake than 18. But I can sleep and get back to normal. Second, I once stayed up for almost 3 days straight. At the end of that, I slept for 24 hours straight. I woke up the next evening as if it were a normal morning, fully refreshed. (I went to bed about 5pm, and woke up about 5pm the next day.) If I didn't "bank" my tiredness and pay it back with sleep, how is that even possible?
  - deegles 6y ago
    Sleep is essential for memory and skill consolidation. What they mean by not being able to recover sleep is that if you (for example) try to learn something while sleep deprived, more of those memories will be lost the next day. Sleeping extra on the weekend will not make those memories come back. The benefits of sleep are "lost" forever.

hpoe 6y ago

https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ For those interested in someone who created a refutation to Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep"

piercebot 6y ago
This refutation is authored by the same person who conducted the study to which these comments are attached :)
- praptak 6y ago
  I did some digging and it is pretty solid to me. It's sad that Walker did not respond to this.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    He did (poorly) and not in a single easily read location.
  - texascloud 6y ago
    Proof of digging?
texascloud 6y ago
I wouldn't say this is refuting even a minority of claims in the book. It appears to be a thorough fact check of a small percentage of claims, some of which is going after the author over wording and inconsistencies. It's fair criticism, but by no means invalidates a majority of the information regarding sleep that Walker presents
- balfirevic 6y ago
  After finding that the part of the book which actually got fact-checked is full of falsehoods and contains outright falsifications, your conclusion is "well, the rest of it must be fine"?
- 0xddd 6y ago
  Except there are cases where Walker went so far as to remove portions of a graph to support his argument. This kind of manipulation shouldn't be allowed to stand and it's frustrating (though not surprising) to see a book that relies on this sort of dishonesty get so much uncritical attention and praise. I can't put it any better than Andrew Gelman: "If the data didn’t matter, then why did you include them in your damn book in the first place? If the removal of the bar from the graph didn’t matter, then why did you remove the damn bar?" https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/03/24/why-we-sleep-a-tale-of-institutional-failure/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/03/24/why-we-sle...
  - texascloud 6y ago
    Okay, he removed the 5 hour bar. I get what the author in your link is upset about, leaving out data points. But imo that's not good enough to make me throw out all the information in that book. It sounds like the author is upset a book about getting enough sleep is getting so much attention. If they're upset at the way Walker misrepresents information, then I'd hate to see the author's blood pressure while feverishly researching the bias of every article they come across
    - 0xddd 6y ago
      I'm genuinely surprised someone could read that whole blog post (I'm assuming here) and come away with that conclusion. Gelman addresses this so directly in the article: "Recall the Javert paradox. It’s completely reasonable to write about scientific misconduct, and yes sometimes we have to scream a bit to get heard over all the chatter of the scientist-as-hero press." ... "But we need real expertise, not fake expertise. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Gresham, baby, Gresham. If we don’t contest the fake expertise, I’m seriously worried it will be crowding out the real stuff." There is good research and there is bad research. The latter should not be given a pass just because all research has some amount of bias.

texascloud 6y ago

This 100%. I've read the book twice, coming back to certain chapters more than twice, because it's dense with information. It's scary really. The single most impactful thing you can do as a human for your life is to prioritize 8 hours of sleep per night, full stop.

balfirevic 6y ago
> because it's dense with information. It also appears to be dense with misinformation.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

acwan93 6y ago

An educational and insightful book, but it had me losing sleep because I got so anxious on needing more sleep. Talk about irony!

fossuser 6y ago
I think you shouldn't have to worry about it, a lot of claims in that book don't hold up to scrutiny: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

currymj 6y ago

there have been complaints by serious people about the work in this book, see https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/12/27/why-we-sleep-data-manipulation-a-smoking-gun/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/12/27/why-we-sle... now, it's obvious to me that if I don't get 8 hours of sleep a night, my brain stops functioning properly and my entire life goes to shit very quickly. So I was happy to see a very popular book advocating sleeping well, and hopeful that if lots of people read it, they might have more respect for other people's sleep schedules. The critic, Alexey Guzey, seems to be a guy who needs less sleep than I do, and also a guy who is into life-hacking/self-improvement type stuff. There's definitely a type of person who thinks "sleep is for the weak". I think he probably does have a bias towards sleeping less. But I think the problems he points out about the book are pretty serious. In particular, it seems that claims around sleep and longevity and other health outcomes (e.g. injury rates, cancer) are often unreliable or based on misinterpreted studies, and one case involves eliding data that contradicts the result. Now, having myself experienced chronic sleep deprivation, and dealt with people who think they don't need to sleep but definitely do, I think the basic argument of the book is probably correct. But as the last line of that post quotes, "Good ideas do not need a lot of lies told about them to gain public acceptance".

fossuser 6y ago

I think this book is mostly bullshit - the same author that wrote the linked HN post dug into that book and there was a ton of manipulative data and just straight up false claims. [0] I get a pretty strong pseudoscience vibe from it. From a previous post: I got a strong motivated reasoning/bullshit vibe from Walker in this interview: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/20/630792401/sleep-scientist-warns-against-walking-through-life-in-an-underslept-state https://www.npr.org/2018/07/20/630792401/sleep-scientist-war... Particularly this section: > “Sleep is not like the bank. So you can't accumulate debt and then try and pay it off at a later point in time. And the reason is this - we know that if I were to deprive you of sleep for an entire night - take away eight hours - and then in the subsequent nights, I give you all of the sleep that you want - however much you wish to consume - you never get back all that you lost. You will sleep longer, but you will never achieve that full eight-hour repayment as it were. So the brain has no capacity to get back that lost sleep...” I don’t think this follows - seems likely to me that sleep is not some linear time thing and that there’s a standard overhead that doesn’t need to be repeated to extend and make up the time. This feels like a symptom of not understanding the mechanism and making a bad assumption. I also found the “I won’t mention the cognitive failures I can detect” irritating. If there’s some actual thing to mention, say it - this kind of thing sets off alarms for me. It doesn’t surprise me that the rest is similarly bad. [0]: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

wccrawford 6y ago
I find this argument odd for a couple reasons. First, if you "can't get back lost sleep", wouldn't that mean that you were tired forever? I'm definitely more tired after 24 hours awake than 18. But I can sleep and get back to normal. Second, I once stayed up for almost 3 days straight. At the end of that, I slept for 24 hours straight. I woke up the next evening as if it were a normal morning, fully refreshed. (I went to bed about 5pm, and woke up about 5pm the next day.) If I didn't "bank" my tiredness and pay it back with sleep, how is that even possible?
- deegles 6y ago
  Sleep is essential for memory and skill consolidation. What they mean by not being able to recover sleep is that if you (for example) try to learn something while sleep deprived, more of those memories will be lost the next day. Sleeping extra on the weekend will not make those memories come back. The benefits of sleep are "lost" forever.