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“Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors

312 points by giansegato 6y ago

dang 6y ago
Past threads: “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22419958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22419958 - Feb 2020 (34 comments) “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850 - Nov 2019 (58 comments)
- allears 6y ago
  I wonder who keeps submitting this thread. Could it possibly be the same person who wrote the critique?
  - drannex 6y ago
    You can check the poster accounts, all very different. Likely just something people keep coming across.
    - wpietri 6y ago
      I still hear the book being referenced positively by people who don't know the topic well, so that seems plausible to me.
  - fsociety 6y ago
    I think thorough criticisms like this tend to be reposted because it is like a battleground for the mind - rather than being a coordinated effort.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
georgewsinger 6y ago
Tangential: Guzey's "Best of Twitter" (https://guzey.com/best-of-twitter/ https://guzey.com/best-of-twitter/) is the best Twitter curation list, bar none. He explores a lot of of interesting contrarian ideas and runs a lot of interesting self-experiments in productivity.
softwaredoug 6y ago
My biggest complaint about the book: it's simply terrifying. If you suffer from insomnia, don't pick up this book. It will have the opposite of the desired effect. It doesn't have a lot of practical guidance. And now, according to this article, much of the terror might be unfounded. Better books I'd recommend if you have insomnia are "The Sleep Solution" and "The Circadian Code"
- ddek 6y ago
  Absolutely. I found similar advice to that in this book propelled my insomnia about 4 years ago. My insomnia responded to CBT-I extremely fast. After 18 months, 2 nights of sleep deprivation (4 hours in bed) and the corner was turned. Now, if I feel my sleep is falling away, my solution is to cut sleep. It rebuilds habits too - what do I do at 6am except run?
  - onethought 6y ago
    But “Why We Sleep” - recommends CBT-I as “the one of the most effective treatments for insomnia “ ... so why is it bad for people who suffer from insomnia? Your experience seems to echo the point the book makes.
    - vericiab 6y ago
      My understanding is that fear of not being able to fall asleep often contributes to the perpetuation of insomnia. So while the recommendation of CBT-I might be helpful, if the book also increases someone's fear of not being able to fall sleep (or more specifically fear of the consequences thereof) it might be net unhelpful. As an analogy, imagine a book that recommends exposure therapy for arachnophobia and also describes in detail all of the ways that spiders can harm humans. Something that provides the recommendation without reinforcing the counterproductive fear is probably more appropriate.
      - onethought 6y ago
        He literally calls out exactly that problem as an “ethics quandary” for approaching this problem. Informing people of the risks can increase the risks. What do you propose he does differently? Just not talk about it at all?
Barrin92 6y ago
personal heuristic of mine, never read something that even remotely reeks of self-help. when it starts with "popular science person xyz charts a map of the most important scientific breakthrough of the decade" etc just put it back and pick something from the fiction section and you'll have a better time. Life isn't lived in the aggregate, you don't need "sleep science" to figure out how much you need to sleep. Are you tired? Sleep more, no? you're fine. This emerging health industrial complex has just one purpose: create neurotic people who try to optimise their life and then sell them answers.
- serjester 6y ago
  Calling his book a self help title is a stretch - the author is one of the top researchers in his field. He simply wrote a book making the research out there a lot more accessible to the layman. He isn't selling you anything past that. As for the field of "sleep science", you're drastically oversimplifying it. Your sleeping habits have tons of second order affects that aren't remotely intuitive. For example, you know alcohol wrecks your sleep quality? Over time that lack of quality sleep is associated to weight gain. Doesn't it make sense to have a solid understanding of something you spend a third of your life doing? Finally the author of the blog post has no background in this past reading articles on PubMed. I've read some genuine criticisms of the book, most of which Walker addressed, but these are incredibly weak. If you're attempting to synthesize entire fields of research, you should probably have a background in them.
  - nabla9 6y ago
    > He isn't selling you anything past that. He is selling speaking gigs, advises startups. He is cashing out and part of that is sensationalist book for general audience. > but these are incredibly weak. It's riddled with factual errors.
- lethologica 6y ago
  Self help books sell because they give they buyer a sense of having accomplished “something”. It’s similar to the person who wants to start running to get healthier. They go out, buy a nice pair of running shoes, grab some expensive name brand clothing and perhaps buy themselves a fitness tracker too and then call it a day feeling great. They have convinced themselves they have begun their journey to a life where they run marathons weekly but have in actual fact achieved nothing.
tayo42 6y ago
So how do i, a regular person without a neuroscience or sleep background, know who to trust? The about page on this page doesn't lead me to believe that this is another expert in the field. Maybe Guzey got it wrong, maybe they're both wrong? Why should I take this page at face value? I guess this leads to a bigger philosophical leaning question, how do I pick out good information when I don't know the field. This has been a struggle for me, I have a recent interest in neuroscience and how it relates to consciousness. This topic seems to have a wide variety of science based, philosophy based and some real out there stuff but it gets pitches as reliable. I really don't know how to pick good books to read. I don't know how to filter out the equivalent of like being antivax in a field i dont know about. To try to answer my own questions, I guess in some way, you can't ever know the truth? But relying on one book, blog, article, view point to base your understanding will definitely lead to being uniformed unless you are lucky enough to stumble on a god source the first time.
- MattRix 6y ago
  It’s true that it’s hard to know for sure, but there are a bunch of things you can do. One of the most obvious is to see what other reputable sources say about the author. What’s their track record in the past? Then for any specific piece, you can look at the arguments they’re making, and then look at the sources they reference. Are those sources reputable, etc. To put it another way, you need to have a bunch of sources you trust, and then see how strong the connections are from any new data back to those original trustworthy sources.
- dojitza1 6y ago
  You shouldn't trust anybody other than yourself and your ability to recognise scientific consensus. This process is not easy and as goes for most things in life, diversification is key. Basing your research on a single article/book/source is bad, and your confidence that you understand/are knowledgeable about a topic should rise as you do more research.
  - neolog 6y ago
    You can also trust individual people and institutions if you follow them for a while and know how they do things.
nikanj 6y ago
There seems to be a very strong correlation between popularity and scientific inaccuracy. For example, Sex at Dawn was a massive hit, and completely based on wistful thinking and speculation, like "We found multiple different kinds of arrowheads in one cave. It must mean the lady living in the cave had multiple lovers, in a happy and peaceful polyamorous utopia"
- CJefferson 6y ago
  I wonder if there is a strong correlation between popularity and scientific analysis. I sometimes see papers getting ripped to shreds by twitter for days, and while the papers are indeed bad, I've seen dozens of papers which are just as bad, just not as interesting to Twitter.
- RachelF 6y ago
  The errors that Matthew Walker make in "Why We Sleep" go beyond simple errors or conformation bias. The look like scientific fraud - inventing data.
- Tenoke 6y ago
  I think there's just little correlation in either direction. The accuracy levels are probably similar if you compare all popular science books to all non-popular books (perhaps above a threshold to exclude the biggest cranks).
fedorareis 6y ago
Something doesn’t quite sit right with me about him linking to a couple things that mention Walker’s rebuttal https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/why-we-sleep-responses-to-questions-from-readers/ https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/why-we-sleep-... but not linking to it directly. If you are trying to get people to think critically about the book it seems like they should at least be given the opportunity to see the authors response to your criticism.
- nabla9 6y ago
  In his response Walker walks back some of the most outrageous claims he makes, like the cancer claim. Had he put the same effort to sourcing the book and toning down the claims, there would have not been a controversy.
  - jkhdigital 6y ago
    It’s “human centipede” science: make up a false claim (“all animals sleep”) with a bogus but practically unverifiable citation, then have your claim repeated in papers which cite yours.
  - foolmeonce 6y ago
    > Had he put the same effort to sourcing the book and toning down the claims, there would have not been a controversy. Had he put effort into ruining the success of his book by toning down his claims, expressing caveats, adding footnotes of where he was using a small study, etc, then someone else willing to take the risks of not being diligent would get the fame and opportunity to defend their book.
- mikedilger 6y ago
  Interesting. I briefly checked into one of his retorts and it appears just as poorly sourced. Take this one: The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has stated that, “Insufficient sleep is a public health epidemic.” If you follow the link (which doesn't even go to the CDC site!), it's dead. If you go get the 473 page report from the CDC for 2014 (implied by the dead link) from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus14.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus14.pdf, you find the word sleep used only 3 times (once in the index) and no such quote.
binbag 6y ago
Great article. The percentage reduction bit is particularly bonkers.
onethought 6y ago
This feels cherry picked and dishonest. - Why we sleep literally calls out the example of treating depression with sleep deprivation. - The cancer reference was made with the context of “consistently less than 5 hours of sleep”, he then referenced many studies that assessed 4 hour sleeps. This essay misrepresents the context of that chapter. - As counter evidence throughout he references research done AFTER the book was written...
- nonbirithm 6y ago
  The problem is that there are both some inaccuracies with the takedown, the book is still factually inaccurate in dangerous ways even though it is accurate in others, and ultimately neither source gives a satisfactory conclusion to the question of how you should approach sleep issues. There is something about the Why We Sleep controversy that is uniquely frustrating to me, having dealt with sleep problems for years. If I hadn't read HN then I probably would have read that book for far longer than I did. What about the people that might not read HN and still aren't aware of the tangible harms it can cause? It currently has a 4.4 out of 5 on Goodreads and pages of written five-star reviews, proving the utter uselessness of such a metric for topics like health. It seems the solution is research from a variety of different sources. That worked pretty well for actually sorting out my sleep issues, because I was more careful. But the thing is, time is finite. In the programming realm we can't always do the same militant validation for the thousands of microdependencies a single npm project can pull in. The amount of available information is exploding, and much of it is becoming obsoleted constantly. There has to be a line drawn somewhere. And when we decide to trust the creator as being an "expert" as a compromise, we will inevitably encounter sources like these.
  - prostoalex 6y ago
    What makes it dangerous? Seems like most people supposedly misinformed by the book content would just pay more attention to their circadian cycle and try to go to bed earlier and avoid screens?
    - MauranKilom 6y ago
Ansil849 6y ago
The thing to remember is that popsci books are not peer-reviewed academic literature. They are the, generally unchecked, thoughts of the author. If you listen to them, you do so at your peril as you are effectively performing alterations to your life based purely on the thoughts of one person. Much like with medicine, you should seek multiple qualified opinions.
RocketSyntax 6y ago
sure, some of it is wishy-washy, but i've made adjustments based on it (no caffeine after 11:30am), and my health has dramatically improved. now i'm dreaming every night AND waking up with programming solutions because of it.
raphlinus 6y ago
They say "don't read the comments," but taking that advice would have led me to miss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUw3s4evhTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUw3s4evhTE . That is a 7 minute video of science comedy that had me laughing out loud at several points, and its punchline is directly relevant to the question at hand here.
pedalpete 6y ago
I personally believe sleep research is at the same stage as the food pyramid was in the 80s. As someone who is also currently doing sleep trials for our start-up (https://soundmind.co https://soundmind.co), I can understand why. Clinical sleep trials are time consuming and expensive. Try getting a volunteer to sleep in a lab for more than a few nights, then try to get thousands of people doing that, like you would in a drug trial, also try to factor in all the things that person would have done that day which would affect their sleep, as well as factoring in what their sleep was like the previous 3 or more nights, and how that would affect on going sleep. When I read Why We Sleep, I remember thinking that the conclusions Dr Walker was arriving at seemed wrong much of the time, and seemed sensationalist. At the same time, I've seen him interviewed where he walks back things like the link between circadian rhythm and blue-light. I'm not sure if the expectation is that he writes a rebuttal to his own work, or a living document about how the science has changed? I think we need to look at the emerging field and understand that sleep is still something we don't understand well, and that much of the research is still a moving target.
- d0mine 6y ago
  What conclusions are wrong?
  - pedalpete 6y ago
    I can't remember off the top of my head, I didn't do a point by point rebuttal like the OP. I didn't even know I was going to get into the sleep industry when I was reading it. It is on my list to re-read at some point.
hellbannedguy 6y ago
Yea, I get it—-sleep is important. I saw a guy get a ticket for sleeping in a public park the other day. I don’t know if he was homeless. I started thinking where could I could legally take a nap if tired. I live in one of the wealthiest liberal enclave (Marin County). Home of Gavin Neusome, and important stuff like taking a nap is against the law for all practical purposes. Yea—technically I could hike to BLM land? For myself I would be a 60 mile hike. And even then there’s a fee to get into the park, and there is no camping? Personally, I’ve given up on a good nights rest. I can go to sleep, but wake up 3-4 hours later. This has been going on for 20 plus years. I do take naps during the day though. If I had a do over I might have moved to a country that encourages siestas? (I know I’m not adding anything to this study. I’m just angry over the way we have made everything essentially against some law. And I’m venting?)
- wonnage 6y ago
  Marin, Atherton, etc. are the archetypical rich neoliberal enclaves... listen to NPR, slap a Biden sticker on your BMW, and vehemently oppose any policy that might result in you having to interact with or perceive a poor person
jimnotgym 6y ago
I had a purely practical issue with "Why we sleep". The book says multiple times that you cannot run a sleep deficit and then make it up later. So what should I do if I have run a deficit? If the deficit reduces cognitive function, and I can't make it up with more sleep, does it follow that for every short nights sleep I will have a permanent reduction in cognitive function? If I turn my alarm off and let my body decide it makes me sleep for longer after a deficit, is my body wasting its time? It doesn't feel like this can be 100% true
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Why is permanent damage so hard to believe? If you listen to loud noises, you get permanent damage that you can't undo by staying quiet. If you leave your hand on a hot stove too long, you can get permanent skin damage.
  - jimnotgym 6y ago
    Firstly because I can observe an immediate improvement after catch up sleep. Im pretty sure the book doesn't say 'you get better but lose 0.1% each time' it says you can't make it up at all. If I had 4 hours sleep tonight I would feel horrible tomorrow, but even a 20min power nap would improve things.
    - ianai 6y ago
      But you wouldn’t be as well off as if you had just slept a good nights sleep to begin with. It’s a highly nonlinear and even chaotic system - a living human being. The idea of “making it up” is a linear concept not entirely fit for the system. You can get back somewhat and you can’t undo everything.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  The book is best viewed as a lot of well-meaning exaggerations that are, nonetheless, exaggerations. The author really, really wants people to take sleep seriously, so he stretches the truth as much as possible to make sleep sound gravely important. He's writing to sell books and spread his message, not necessarily to win awards for posting accurate research. > If the deficit reduces cognitive function, and I can't make it up with more sleep, does it follow that for every short nights sleep I will have a permanent reduction in cognitive function? Obviously, the short-term cognitive deficits of sleep deprivation are reversed upon sleeping again. It's likely that some amount of long-term damage occurs when engaging in unhealthy activities like losing sleep, but the amount of damage is only significant when sustained over long periods of time. Think of like drinking alcohol: Drinking a bottle of wine in a night is not a healthy activity, but doing it a couple times a year will have negligible impacts on your health. However, drinking a bottle of wine every night for many years in a row will start to produce measurable effects on your liver, among other things. Sleep deprivation is similar. Missing a night of sleep isn't going to shorten your lifespan or doom you to early cognitive decline. However, depriving yourself of sleep for years on end is likely to produce some negative effects over time.
a_throwaway_6 6y ago
My first instinct when hearing of accusations of academic misconduct is to ask who is making those accusations: is it someone whose opinions I can trust? The author of the blog above has an About page where they introduce themselves as "a researcher with a background in Economics, Mathematics, and Cognitive Science". Instead of a list of academic achievements: publications, grants, chairs, awards, etc, as we would expect to see in a researcher's "about" page, the author continues their introduction with a few words on what they're "thinking about" at the moment and what their long-term goals are, then makes a peculiar plea: If you’re reading this and you do anything biology-related at all, I would love to talk to you and would especially appreciate you getting in touch. Then the author lists their favourite TV shows, personal essays, interviews etc. All this does not make the author of the article sound like a trustworthy source, but rather as someone desperate for attention. The next thing I usually look for in cases like this is whether the person accusing someone else of academic fraud has given an opportunity to the party they accuse to defend themselves. The author of this blog has not only not done that but is engaging in misleading tactics. The following text is in TFA: Also see UC Berkeley’s official response regarding this essay – all problems with the book I discovered are “minor”. The sentence "UC Berkeley’s official response" links to the following URL: https://yngve.hoiseth.net/articles/why-we-sleep-institutional-failure/ https://yngve.hoiseth.net/articles/why-we-sleep-institutiona... However, the linked resource is not "UC Berkeley's official response" at all, but rather a blog by a different blogger, Yngve Hoiseth, who claims they contacted someone -who is never named- at UC Berkeley about Alexey Guzey's post we are reading above. Yngve Hoiseth's blog itself claims to have uploaded "the entire exchange here", linking to the following URL: https://yngve.hoiseth.net/why-we-sleep-institutional-failure/email-exchange.eml https://yngve.hoiseth.net/why-we-sleep-institutional-failure... Which is dead and has not been archived by archive.org. All this makes the article above sound very difficult to take seriously. In all honesty, it sounds entirely like an attempt to kick shit up for the author's personal gratification. Or perhaps there is some strange ???-PROFIT scheme hidden somewhere in there, but even that is not particularlly interesting. Posting under a throwaway because the article's author sounds desperate enough to engage in all sorts of internet attacks to deter critics.
- karaterobot 6y ago
  > My first instinct when hearing of accusations of academic misconduct is to ask who is making those accusations: is it someone whose opinions I can trust? What does it matter who is making the accusations if they are verifiable?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
imron 6y ago
> Please do not use sci-hub to access them for free and do not use this trick (a) to easily redirect papers to sci-hub. Hilarious
- ivan_ah 6y ago
  For reference, the easy-redirect trick nobody recommends using is to add a bookmarklet with content: javascript:location.hostname+='.sci-hub.se' Test: WHEN closed-source URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6156439 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6156439 ON clicking the bookmarklet SHOULD redirect to https://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-hub.se/document/6156439 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-hub.se/document/6156439
tompark 6y ago
I just read this book last month on a friend's recommendation. I don't want to pile on whatever anyone else said, but I had noticed a contradiction in Chapter 6 that I found to be very distracting, and I'd love to hear from anyone else who knows the facts behind the subject. First, in Chapter 3, he introduces "light NREM sleep" as stage-2 NREM, while "deep NREM sleep" is stage 3-4 NREM. Then, throughout most of Chapter 6, he says that you get a huge "memory restoration" benefit from light stage-2 NREM, due to sleep spindles: * "The memory refreshment was related to lighter, stage 2 NREM sleep, and specifically the [...] sleep spindles." * "The more sleep spindles obtained during sleep, the greater the restoration of learning." * "The concentration of NREM sleep spindles" happen in stage-2 NREM, and you get the most of this type of sleep after 6 hrs of sleeping. * In the first 6 hrs, you've gotten all your deep NREM sleep: "we obtain most of our deep NREM sleep early in the night, and much of our REM sleep (and lighter NREM sleep) late in the night." * "Sleep six hours or less and you are shortchanging the brain of a learning restoration benefit that is normally performed by sleep spindles." * Furthermore, stage 2 NREM is important for other kinds of restorational benefit: "The increases in speed and accuracy, underpinned by efficient automaticity, were directly related to the amount of stage 2 NREM, especially in the last two hours of an eight-hour night of sleep [...]. Indeed, it was the number of those wonderful sleep spindles in the last two hours of the late morning—the time of night with the richest spindle bursts of brainwave activity—that were linked with the offline memory boost." So he firmly establishes this point about light NREM sleep throughout Chapter 6. However, but there's a section ("SLEEP-THE-NIGHT-AFTER LEARNING") where he makes a big deal about the distinction between deep NREM and light NREM sleep, calling it a "battle royal": > You will recall from chapter 3 that we obtain most of our deep NREM sleep early in the night, and much of our REM sleep (and lighter NREM sleep) late in the night. > After having learned lists of facts, researchers allowed participants the opportunity to sleep only for the first half of the night or only for the second half of the night. In this way, both experimental groups obtained the same total amount of sleep (albeit short), yet the former group’s sleep was rich in deep NREM, and the latter was dominated instead by REM. > The stage was set for a battle royal between the two types of sleep. The question: Which sleep period would confer a greater memory savings benefit—that filled with deep NREM, or that packed with abundant REM sleep? > For fact-based, textbook-like memory, the result was clear. It was early-night sleep, rich in deep NREM, that won out in terms of providing superior memory retention savings relative to late-night, REM-rich sleep. This doesn't necessarily contradict the idea that the spindles during light NREM sleep are restorative, but it says light NREM is less effective than deep NREM, and then he doesn't cite any more research on deep NREM's memory benefits. In chapter 7 he focuses on how deep NREM sleep has other benefits. The author does mention "deep NREM sleep" as important for cognitive benefits later in the book when it seems he meant to say "light NREM sleep". Also, to say they allowed participants to sleep "only for the second half of the night" is strange, and I don't know what that means. Looking at the original study https://www.jstor.org/stable/1414040 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1414040 it looks like there were ONLY TWO subjects, and it's not clear to me that this study was described accurately by Walker. If this point was already discussed elsewhere, I'm not aware of it, and would appreciate a link.
htfu 6y ago
> contrary, there’s strong evidence of no reduction in average sleeping time and perhaps even an increase in sleeping time over this approximate time period Followed by a source snippet looking at not average sleep time but prevalence of very short and very long sleep durations - outliers. Ie doesn't necessarily, or even likely, have anything to say on the subject. For such a meticulous takedown repeating exactly the kind of mistake you're criticizing seems really sloppy. And the alarm bells over "harm" seem overkill and somewhat shrill. That said, the book definitely has issues and it's good someone tries to point them out. I just feel this overshoots.
SZJX 6y ago
I have a feeling that the author might have had a strong opinion on the value of sleep deprivation therapy for depression and might have benefited from it, and that might be an important reason why he felt an obligation to rebut the book. However, those two things do not need to be contradictory after all. Acknowledging the validity of sleep deprivation therapy in some cases (maybe it does help your brain produce euphoric chemicals) does not negate the idea that in general good sleep hygiene is conducive in the long run for most people. It could well be that while your level of depression is reduced, your cognition suffers, especially if you have short sleep for a long duration of time, which is not sustainable and will lead to a rebound. I am in general also not a fan of bestselling science books going overboard with their claims (e.g. the book Grit). Though in this case I have a feeling that Guzey’s stance could be an overkill in the opposite direction. I think the general idea of the book might well still be valid despite the inevitable imperfections/exaggerations in it.
- guzey 6y ago
  I do not have depression and do not experience significantly notable mood changes when acutely sleep deprived. The general idea of the book is literally -- sleep 7-8 hours or you'll get some terrible disease -- is clearly not true. It is clearly true that we need sleep and that it's super important. But it's still not clear how much of it we actually need.
  - onethought 6y ago
    That isn’t the general idea of the book. The general idea is to provide a breath of knowledge regarding the state of current sleep research. If you are speaking literally, the book references short sleeping of < 4, < 5, < 6 hours and describes various levels of disease and impairment. All of these diseases and impairments are reduced at > 7 and there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of benefit at > 9. That is how the book presents the facts. You misrepresent this, and pick inconsequential “errors” that don’t change either the overall point or the validity of science, and claim false conclusions from your own opinion. It’s pretty clear how much we need (on average) > 7 <= 9. But he even points out these are averages, much like calorie recommendations. So yes some people are fine in 6ish and some need 10ish... that’s how standard deviations work.
austinjp 6y ago
The page linked by wpietri [0] [1] is worth reading. Guzey engages in a conversation with someone named Phil who did a "PhD in a circadian rhythms/sleep lab". No firm conclusions, but topics include how applicable animal models are to humans, and the difficulty of producing conclusive evidence about sleep in humans. Plenty of references, and little argument that aspects of Walker's book seem sensationalist. [0] wpietri's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684989 [1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/11/24/why-we-sleep-update-some-thoughts-while-we-wait-for-matthew-walker-to-respond-to-alexey-guzeys-criticisms/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/11/24/why-we-sle...

312 points by giansegato 6y ago

dang 6y ago

Past threads: “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22419958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22419958 - Feb 2020 (34 comments) “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850 - Nov 2019 (58 comments)

allears 6y ago
I wonder who keeps submitting this thread. Could it possibly be the same person who wrote the critique?
- drannex 6y ago
  You can check the poster accounts, all very different. Likely just something people keep coming across.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    I still hear the book being referenced positively by people who don't know the topic well, so that seems plausible to me.
- fsociety 6y ago
  I think thorough criticisms like this tend to be reposted because it is like a battleground for the mind - rather than being a coordinated effort.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

georgewsinger 6y ago

Tangential: Guzey's "Best of Twitter" (https://guzey.com/best-of-twitter/ https://guzey.com/best-of-twitter/) is the best Twitter curation list, bar none. He explores a lot of of interesting contrarian ideas and runs a lot of interesting self-experiments in productivity.

softwaredoug 6y ago

My biggest complaint about the book: it's simply terrifying. If you suffer from insomnia, don't pick up this book. It will have the opposite of the desired effect. It doesn't have a lot of practical guidance. And now, according to this article, much of the terror might be unfounded. Better books I'd recommend if you have insomnia are "The Sleep Solution" and "The Circadian Code"

ddek 6y ago
Absolutely. I found similar advice to that in this book propelled my insomnia about 4 years ago. My insomnia responded to CBT-I extremely fast. After 18 months, 2 nights of sleep deprivation (4 hours in bed) and the corner was turned. Now, if I feel my sleep is falling away, my solution is to cut sleep. It rebuilds habits too - what do I do at 6am except run?
- onethought 6y ago
  But “Why We Sleep” - recommends CBT-I as “the one of the most effective treatments for insomnia “ ... so why is it bad for people who suffer from insomnia? Your experience seems to echo the point the book makes.
  - vericiab 6y ago
    My understanding is that fear of not being able to fall asleep often contributes to the perpetuation of insomnia. So while the recommendation of CBT-I might be helpful, if the book also increases someone's fear of not being able to fall sleep (or more specifically fear of the consequences thereof) it might be net unhelpful. As an analogy, imagine a book that recommends exposure therapy for arachnophobia and also describes in detail all of the ways that spiders can harm humans. Something that provides the recommendation without reinforcing the counterproductive fear is probably more appropriate.
    - onethought 6y ago
      He literally calls out exactly that problem as an “ethics quandary” for approaching this problem. Informing people of the risks can increase the risks. What do you propose he does differently? Just not talk about it at all?

Barrin92 6y ago

personal heuristic of mine, never read something that even remotely reeks of self-help. when it starts with "popular science person xyz charts a map of the most important scientific breakthrough of the decade" etc just put it back and pick something from the fiction section and you'll have a better time. Life isn't lived in the aggregate, you don't need "sleep science" to figure out how much you need to sleep. Are you tired? Sleep more, no? you're fine. This emerging health industrial complex has just one purpose: create neurotic people who try to optimise their life and then sell them answers.

serjester 6y ago
Calling his book a self help title is a stretch - the author is one of the top researchers in his field. He simply wrote a book making the research out there a lot more accessible to the layman. He isn't selling you anything past that. As for the field of "sleep science", you're drastically oversimplifying it. Your sleeping habits have tons of second order affects that aren't remotely intuitive. For example, you know alcohol wrecks your sleep quality? Over time that lack of quality sleep is associated to weight gain. Doesn't it make sense to have a solid understanding of something you spend a third of your life doing? Finally the author of the blog post has no background in this past reading articles on PubMed. I've read some genuine criticisms of the book, most of which Walker addressed, but these are incredibly weak. If you're attempting to synthesize entire fields of research, you should probably have a background in them.
- nabla9 6y ago
  > He isn't selling you anything past that. He is selling speaking gigs, advises startups. He is cashing out and part of that is sensationalist book for general audience. > but these are incredibly weak. It's riddled with factual errors.
lethologica 6y ago
Self help books sell because they give they buyer a sense of having accomplished “something”. It’s similar to the person who wants to start running to get healthier. They go out, buy a nice pair of running shoes, grab some expensive name brand clothing and perhaps buy themselves a fitness tracker too and then call it a day feeling great. They have convinced themselves they have begun their journey to a life where they run marathons weekly but have in actual fact achieved nothing.

tayo42 6y ago

So how do i, a regular person without a neuroscience or sleep background, know who to trust? The about page on this page doesn't lead me to believe that this is another expert in the field. Maybe Guzey got it wrong, maybe they're both wrong? Why should I take this page at face value? I guess this leads to a bigger philosophical leaning question, how do I pick out good information when I don't know the field. This has been a struggle for me, I have a recent interest in neuroscience and how it relates to consciousness. This topic seems to have a wide variety of science based, philosophy based and some real out there stuff but it gets pitches as reliable. I really don't know how to pick good books to read. I don't know how to filter out the equivalent of like being antivax in a field i dont know about. To try to answer my own questions, I guess in some way, you can't ever know the truth? But relying on one book, blog, article, view point to base your understanding will definitely lead to being uniformed unless you are lucky enough to stumble on a god source the first time.

MattRix 6y ago
It’s true that it’s hard to know for sure, but there are a bunch of things you can do. One of the most obvious is to see what other reputable sources say about the author. What’s their track record in the past? Then for any specific piece, you can look at the arguments they’re making, and then look at the sources they reference. Are those sources reputable, etc. To put it another way, you need to have a bunch of sources you trust, and then see how strong the connections are from any new data back to those original trustworthy sources.
dojitza1 6y ago
You shouldn't trust anybody other than yourself and your ability to recognise scientific consensus. This process is not easy and as goes for most things in life, diversification is key. Basing your research on a single article/book/source is bad, and your confidence that you understand/are knowledgeable about a topic should rise as you do more research.
- neolog 6y ago
  You can also trust individual people and institutions if you follow them for a while and know how they do things.

nikanj 6y ago

There seems to be a very strong correlation between popularity and scientific inaccuracy. For example, Sex at Dawn was a massive hit, and completely based on wistful thinking and speculation, like "We found multiple different kinds of arrowheads in one cave. It must mean the lady living in the cave had multiple lovers, in a happy and peaceful polyamorous utopia"

CJefferson 6y ago
I wonder if there is a strong correlation between popularity and scientific analysis. I sometimes see papers getting ripped to shreds by twitter for days, and while the papers are indeed bad, I've seen dozens of papers which are just as bad, just not as interesting to Twitter.
RachelF 6y ago
The errors that Matthew Walker make in "Why We Sleep" go beyond simple errors or conformation bias. The look like scientific fraud - inventing data.
Tenoke 6y ago
I think there's just little correlation in either direction. The accuracy levels are probably similar if you compare all popular science books to all non-popular books (perhaps above a threshold to exclude the biggest cranks).

fedorareis 6y ago

Something doesn’t quite sit right with me about him linking to a couple things that mention Walker’s rebuttal https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/why-we-sleep-responses-to-questions-from-readers/ https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/why-we-sleep-... but not linking to it directly. If you are trying to get people to think critically about the book it seems like they should at least be given the opportunity to see the authors response to your criticism.

nabla9 6y ago
In his response Walker walks back some of the most outrageous claims he makes, like the cancer claim. Had he put the same effort to sourcing the book and toning down the claims, there would have not been a controversy.
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  It’s “human centipede” science: make up a false claim (“all animals sleep”) with a bogus but practically unverifiable citation, then have your claim repeated in papers which cite yours.
- foolmeonce 6y ago
  > Had he put the same effort to sourcing the book and toning down the claims, there would have not been a controversy. Had he put effort into ruining the success of his book by toning down his claims, expressing caveats, adding footnotes of where he was using a small study, etc, then someone else willing to take the risks of not being diligent would get the fame and opportunity to defend their book.
mikedilger 6y ago
Interesting. I briefly checked into one of his retorts and it appears just as poorly sourced. Take this one: The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has stated that, “Insufficient sleep is a public health epidemic.” If you follow the link (which doesn't even go to the CDC site!), it's dead. If you go get the 473 page report from the CDC for 2014 (implied by the dead link) from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus14.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus14.pdf, you find the word sleep used only 3 times (once in the index) and no such quote.

binbag 6y ago

Great article. The percentage reduction bit is particularly bonkers.

onethought 6y ago

This feels cherry picked and dishonest. - Why we sleep literally calls out the example of treating depression with sleep deprivation. - The cancer reference was made with the context of “consistently less than 5 hours of sleep”, he then referenced many studies that assessed 4 hour sleeps. This essay misrepresents the context of that chapter. - As counter evidence throughout he references research done AFTER the book was written...

nonbirithm 6y ago
The problem is that there are both some inaccuracies with the takedown, the book is still factually inaccurate in dangerous ways even though it is accurate in others, and ultimately neither source gives a satisfactory conclusion to the question of how you should approach sleep issues. There is something about the Why We Sleep controversy that is uniquely frustrating to me, having dealt with sleep problems for years. If I hadn't read HN then I probably would have read that book for far longer than I did. What about the people that might not read HN and still aren't aware of the tangible harms it can cause? It currently has a 4.4 out of 5 on Goodreads and pages of written five-star reviews, proving the utter uselessness of such a metric for topics like health. It seems the solution is research from a variety of different sources. That worked pretty well for actually sorting out my sleep issues, because I was more careful. But the thing is, time is finite. In the programming realm we can't always do the same militant validation for the thousands of microdependencies a single npm project can pull in. The amount of available information is exploding, and much of it is becoming obsoleted constantly. There has to be a line drawn somewhere. And when we decide to trust the creator as being an "expert" as a compromise, we will inevitably encounter sources like these.
- prostoalex 6y ago
  What makes it dangerous? Seems like most people supposedly misinformed by the book content would just pay more attention to their circadian cycle and try to go to bed earlier and avoid screens?
  - MauranKilom 6y ago

Ansil849 6y ago

The thing to remember is that popsci books are not peer-reviewed academic literature. They are the, generally unchecked, thoughts of the author. If you listen to them, you do so at your peril as you are effectively performing alterations to your life based purely on the thoughts of one person. Much like with medicine, you should seek multiple qualified opinions.

RocketSyntax 6y ago

sure, some of it is wishy-washy, but i've made adjustments based on it (no caffeine after 11:30am), and my health has dramatically improved. now i'm dreaming every night AND waking up with programming solutions because of it.

raphlinus 6y ago

They say "don't read the comments," but taking that advice would have led me to miss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUw3s4evhTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUw3s4evhTE . That is a 7 minute video of science comedy that had me laughing out loud at several points, and its punchline is directly relevant to the question at hand here.

pedalpete 6y ago

I personally believe sleep research is at the same stage as the food pyramid was in the 80s. As someone who is also currently doing sleep trials for our start-up (https://soundmind.co https://soundmind.co), I can understand why. Clinical sleep trials are time consuming and expensive. Try getting a volunteer to sleep in a lab for more than a few nights, then try to get thousands of people doing that, like you would in a drug trial, also try to factor in all the things that person would have done that day which would affect their sleep, as well as factoring in what their sleep was like the previous 3 or more nights, and how that would affect on going sleep. When I read Why We Sleep, I remember thinking that the conclusions Dr Walker was arriving at seemed wrong much of the time, and seemed sensationalist. At the same time, I've seen him interviewed where he walks back things like the link between circadian rhythm and blue-light. I'm not sure if the expectation is that he writes a rebuttal to his own work, or a living document about how the science has changed? I think we need to look at the emerging field and understand that sleep is still something we don't understand well, and that much of the research is still a moving target.

d0mine 6y ago
What conclusions are wrong?
- pedalpete 6y ago
  I can't remember off the top of my head, I didn't do a point by point rebuttal like the OP. I didn't even know I was going to get into the sleep industry when I was reading it. It is on my list to re-read at some point.

hellbannedguy 6y ago

Yea, I get it—-sleep is important. I saw a guy get a ticket for sleeping in a public park the other day. I don’t know if he was homeless. I started thinking where could I could legally take a nap if tired. I live in one of the wealthiest liberal enclave (Marin County). Home of Gavin Neusome, and important stuff like taking a nap is against the law for all practical purposes. Yea—technically I could hike to BLM land? For myself I would be a 60 mile hike. And even then there’s a fee to get into the park, and there is no camping? Personally, I’ve given up on a good nights rest. I can go to sleep, but wake up 3-4 hours later. This has been going on for 20 plus years. I do take naps during the day though. If I had a do over I might have moved to a country that encourages siestas? (I know I’m not adding anything to this study. I’m just angry over the way we have made everything essentially against some law. And I’m venting?)

wonnage 6y ago
Marin, Atherton, etc. are the archetypical rich neoliberal enclaves... listen to NPR, slap a Biden sticker on your BMW, and vehemently oppose any policy that might result in you having to interact with or perceive a poor person

jimnotgym 6y ago

I had a purely practical issue with "Why we sleep". The book says multiple times that you cannot run a sleep deficit and then make it up later. So what should I do if I have run a deficit? If the deficit reduces cognitive function, and I can't make it up with more sleep, does it follow that for every short nights sleep I will have a permanent reduction in cognitive function? If I turn my alarm off and let my body decide it makes me sleep for longer after a deficit, is my body wasting its time? It doesn't feel like this can be 100% true

alisonkisk 6y ago
Why is permanent damage so hard to believe? If you listen to loud noises, you get permanent damage that you can't undo by staying quiet. If you leave your hand on a hot stove too long, you can get permanent skin damage.
- jimnotgym 6y ago
  Firstly because I can observe an immediate improvement after catch up sleep. Im pretty sure the book doesn't say 'you get better but lose 0.1% each time' it says you can't make it up at all. If I had 4 hours sleep tonight I would feel horrible tomorrow, but even a 20min power nap would improve things.
  - ianai 6y ago
    But you wouldn’t be as well off as if you had just slept a good nights sleep to begin with. It’s a highly nonlinear and even chaotic system - a living human being. The idea of “making it up” is a linear concept not entirely fit for the system. You can get back somewhat and you can’t undo everything.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
The book is best viewed as a lot of well-meaning exaggerations that are, nonetheless, exaggerations. The author really, really wants people to take sleep seriously, so he stretches the truth as much as possible to make sleep sound gravely important. He's writing to sell books and spread his message, not necessarily to win awards for posting accurate research. > If the deficit reduces cognitive function, and I can't make it up with more sleep, does it follow that for every short nights sleep I will have a permanent reduction in cognitive function? Obviously, the short-term cognitive deficits of sleep deprivation are reversed upon sleeping again. It's likely that some amount of long-term damage occurs when engaging in unhealthy activities like losing sleep, but the amount of damage is only significant when sustained over long periods of time. Think of like drinking alcohol: Drinking a bottle of wine in a night is not a healthy activity, but doing it a couple times a year will have negligible impacts on your health. However, drinking a bottle of wine every night for many years in a row will start to produce measurable effects on your liver, among other things. Sleep deprivation is similar. Missing a night of sleep isn't going to shorten your lifespan or doom you to early cognitive decline. However, depriving yourself of sleep for years on end is likely to produce some negative effects over time.

a_throwaway_6 6y ago

My first instinct when hearing of accusations of academic misconduct is to ask who is making those accusations: is it someone whose opinions I can trust? The author of the blog above has an About page where they introduce themselves as "a researcher with a background in Economics, Mathematics, and Cognitive Science". Instead of a list of academic achievements: publications, grants, chairs, awards, etc, as we would expect to see in a researcher's "about" page, the author continues their introduction with a few words on what they're "thinking about" at the moment and what their long-term goals are, then makes a peculiar plea: If you’re reading this and you do anything biology-related at all, I would love to talk to you and would especially appreciate you getting in touch. Then the author lists their favourite TV shows, personal essays, interviews etc. All this does not make the author of the article sound like a trustworthy source, but rather as someone desperate for attention. The next thing I usually look for in cases like this is whether the person accusing someone else of academic fraud has given an opportunity to the party they accuse to defend themselves. The author of this blog has not only not done that but is engaging in misleading tactics. The following text is in TFA: Also see UC Berkeley’s official response regarding this essay – all problems with the book I discovered are “minor”. The sentence "UC Berkeley’s official response" links to the following URL: https://yngve.hoiseth.net/articles/why-we-sleep-institutional-failure/ https://yngve.hoiseth.net/articles/why-we-sleep-institutiona... However, the linked resource is not "UC Berkeley's official response" at all, but rather a blog by a different blogger, Yngve Hoiseth, who claims they contacted someone -who is never named- at UC Berkeley about Alexey Guzey's post we are reading above. Yngve Hoiseth's blog itself claims to have uploaded "the entire exchange here", linking to the following URL: https://yngve.hoiseth.net/why-we-sleep-institutional-failure/email-exchange.eml https://yngve.hoiseth.net/why-we-sleep-institutional-failure... Which is dead and has not been archived by archive.org. All this makes the article above sound very difficult to take seriously. In all honesty, it sounds entirely like an attempt to kick shit up for the author's personal gratification. Or perhaps there is some strange ???-PROFIT scheme hidden somewhere in there, but even that is not particularlly interesting. Posting under a throwaway because the article's author sounds desperate enough to engage in all sorts of internet attacks to deter critics.

karaterobot 6y ago
> My first instinct when hearing of accusations of academic misconduct is to ask who is making those accusations: is it someone whose opinions I can trust? What does it matter who is making the accusations if they are verifiable?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

imron 6y ago

> Please do not use sci-hub to access them for free and do not use this trick (a) to easily redirect papers to sci-hub. Hilarious

ivan_ah 6y ago
For reference, the easy-redirect trick nobody recommends using is to add a bookmarklet with content: javascript:location.hostname+='.sci-hub.se' Test: WHEN closed-source URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6156439 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6156439 ON clicking the bookmarklet SHOULD redirect to https://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-hub.se/document/6156439 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-hub.se/document/6156439

tompark 6y ago

I just read this book last month on a friend's recommendation. I don't want to pile on whatever anyone else said, but I had noticed a contradiction in Chapter 6 that I found to be very distracting, and I'd love to hear from anyone else who knows the facts behind the subject. First, in Chapter 3, he introduces "light NREM sleep" as stage-2 NREM, while "deep NREM sleep" is stage 3-4 NREM. Then, throughout most of Chapter 6, he says that you get a huge "memory restoration" benefit from light stage-2 NREM, due to sleep spindles: * "The memory refreshment was related to lighter, stage 2 NREM sleep, and specifically the [...] sleep spindles." * "The more sleep spindles obtained during sleep, the greater the restoration of learning." * "The concentration of NREM sleep spindles" happen in stage-2 NREM, and you get the most of this type of sleep after 6 hrs of sleeping. * In the first 6 hrs, you've gotten all your deep NREM sleep: "we obtain most of our deep NREM sleep early in the night, and much of our REM sleep (and lighter NREM sleep) late in the night." * "Sleep six hours or less and you are shortchanging the brain of a learning restoration benefit that is normally performed by sleep spindles." * Furthermore, stage 2 NREM is important for other kinds of restorational benefit: "The increases in speed and accuracy, underpinned by efficient automaticity, were directly related to the amount of stage 2 NREM, especially in the last two hours of an eight-hour night of sleep [...]. Indeed, it was the number of those wonderful sleep spindles in the last two hours of the late morning—the time of night with the richest spindle bursts of brainwave activity—that were linked with the offline memory boost." So he firmly establishes this point about light NREM sleep throughout Chapter 6. However, but there's a section ("SLEEP-THE-NIGHT-AFTER LEARNING") where he makes a big deal about the distinction between deep NREM and light NREM sleep, calling it a "battle royal": > You will recall from chapter 3 that we obtain most of our deep NREM sleep early in the night, and much of our REM sleep (and lighter NREM sleep) late in the night. > After having learned lists of facts, researchers allowed participants the opportunity to sleep only for the first half of the night or only for the second half of the night. In this way, both experimental groups obtained the same total amount of sleep (albeit short), yet the former group’s sleep was rich in deep NREM, and the latter was dominated instead by REM. > The stage was set for a battle royal between the two types of sleep. The question: Which sleep period would confer a greater memory savings benefit—that filled with deep NREM, or that packed with abundant REM sleep? > For fact-based, textbook-like memory, the result was clear. It was early-night sleep, rich in deep NREM, that won out in terms of providing superior memory retention savings relative to late-night, REM-rich sleep. This doesn't necessarily contradict the idea that the spindles during light NREM sleep are restorative, but it says light NREM is less effective than deep NREM, and then he doesn't cite any more research on deep NREM's memory benefits. In chapter 7 he focuses on how deep NREM sleep has other benefits. The author does mention "deep NREM sleep" as important for cognitive benefits later in the book when it seems he meant to say "light NREM sleep". Also, to say they allowed participants to sleep "only for the second half of the night" is strange, and I don't know what that means. Looking at the original study https://www.jstor.org/stable/1414040 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1414040 it looks like there were ONLY TWO subjects, and it's not clear to me that this study was described accurately by Walker. If this point was already discussed elsewhere, I'm not aware of it, and would appreciate a link.

htfu 6y ago

> contrary, there’s strong evidence of no reduction in average sleeping time and perhaps even an increase in sleeping time over this approximate time period Followed by a source snippet looking at not average sleep time but prevalence of very short and very long sleep durations - outliers. Ie doesn't necessarily, or even likely, have anything to say on the subject. For such a meticulous takedown repeating exactly the kind of mistake you're criticizing seems really sloppy. And the alarm bells over "harm" seem overkill and somewhat shrill. That said, the book definitely has issues and it's good someone tries to point them out. I just feel this overshoots.

SZJX 6y ago

I have a feeling that the author might have had a strong opinion on the value of sleep deprivation therapy for depression and might have benefited from it, and that might be an important reason why he felt an obligation to rebut the book. However, those two things do not need to be contradictory after all. Acknowledging the validity of sleep deprivation therapy in some cases (maybe it does help your brain produce euphoric chemicals) does not negate the idea that in general good sleep hygiene is conducive in the long run for most people. It could well be that while your level of depression is reduced, your cognition suffers, especially if you have short sleep for a long duration of time, which is not sustainable and will lead to a rebound. I am in general also not a fan of bestselling science books going overboard with their claims (e.g. the book Grit). Though in this case I have a feeling that Guzey’s stance could be an overkill in the opposite direction. I think the general idea of the book might well still be valid despite the inevitable imperfections/exaggerations in it.

guzey 6y ago
I do not have depression and do not experience significantly notable mood changes when acutely sleep deprived. The general idea of the book is literally -- sleep 7-8 hours or you'll get some terrible disease -- is clearly not true. It is clearly true that we need sleep and that it's super important. But it's still not clear how much of it we actually need.
- onethought 6y ago
  That isn’t the general idea of the book. The general idea is to provide a breath of knowledge regarding the state of current sleep research. If you are speaking literally, the book references short sleeping of < 4, < 5, < 6 hours and describes various levels of disease and impairment. All of these diseases and impairments are reduced at > 7 and there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of benefit at > 9. That is how the book presents the facts. You misrepresent this, and pick inconsequential “errors” that don’t change either the overall point or the validity of science, and claim false conclusions from your own opinion. It’s pretty clear how much we need (on average) > 7 <= 9. But he even points out these are averages, much like calorie recommendations. So yes some people are fine in 6ish and some need 10ish... that’s how standard deviations work.

austinjp 6y ago

The page linked by wpietri [0] [1] is worth reading. Guzey engages in a conversation with someone named Phil who did a "PhD in a circadian rhythms/sleep lab". No firm conclusions, but topics include how applicable animal models are to humans, and the difficulty of producing conclusive evidence about sleep in humans. Plenty of references, and little argument that aspects of Walker's book seem sensationalist. [0] wpietri's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684989 [1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/11/24/why-we-sleep-update-some-thoughts-while-we-wait-for-matthew-walker-to-respond-to-alexey-guzeys-criticisms/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/11/24/why-we-sle...