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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 serio

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.

petertodd 6y ago
> 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. Not very ethical. But understandable. > He's writing to sell books and spread his message, ...and arguably that turns it into fraud. If not for the misrepresentation of the facts, would I have bought his book?
- alsetmusic 6y ago
  >> He's writing to sell books and spread his message, > ...and arguably that turns it into fraud. If not for the misrepresentation of the facts, would I have bought his book? Not to be overly-pedantic, but I think knowingly exaggerating the truth to sell books is more of a scam than a fraud. To me, fraud is closer to outright deception than exaggeration. Fraud is also better defined. Laws are written about fraud. Fraud, I think, is a weightier charge of duplicity. I base this only on my own internal reaction to the words. Here’s someone getting more into the lexicon: > In short, scam has no legal status as a term of law in most jurisdictions, except insofar as it may be defined as a type of fraud. The term fraud is broad but usually very carefully defined in statutory law. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/348183/whats-the-difference-between-scam-and-fraud https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/348183/whats-the...
  - petertodd 6y ago
    Interesting! I didn't know there was a distinction in law between those two terms. I think your definition of "scam" is closer to what I was trying to get at.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    I think that page supports the notion that it's fraud. People pay with money for the book because of its claims. The legal dictionary says: FRAUD. An intentional perversion of truth for the purpose of inducing another in reliance upon it to part with some valuable thing belonging to him or to surrender a legal right; a false representation of a matter of fact, whether by words or by conduct, by false or misleading allegations, or by concealment of that which should have been disclosed, which deceives and is intended to deceive another so that he shall act upon it to his legal injury. It's a pretty broad definition. Certainly a strong case could be mounted that this fits, however, academics are basically never prosecuted for fraud and there would be enormous institutional resistance to doing so, given the prevalence of fraud in the research literature.
jkhdigital 6y ago
> 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. You have citations to support this? Or are you just recycling Walker’s claims with slightly less exaggeration?
- staticautomatic 6y ago
  Perhaps I should be more intellectually vigilant but this claim strikes me as so likely to be true that I wouldn’t bother trying to find a citation for it.
  - TheDong 6y ago
    In my experience, the people who are frequently sleep deprived for a few years don't seem to be worse for it afterward. My main sources of anecdote for this are grad school students with hectic school and advisor setups (who often are partly sleep deprived for much of 3+ years), and parents who have several children in short succession (ensuring their sleep is ruined for roughly 2 years). In neither case do those groups seem to suffer significant long-term effects that are obviously from the sleep deprivation.
  - Udik 6y ago
    > this claim strikes me as so likely to be true that I wouldn’t bother trying to find a citation for it This seems to be the source of just every factoid. You took something that just sounds true to you and made it into an objective statement.
    - staticautomatic 6y ago
      I didn’t make it into anything and I don’t take it as axiomatic, I just wouldn’t spend time looking it up. It also sounds true to me based on my knowledge of biology, upon which I get to draw inferences I think are reasonable.
gls2ro 6y ago
I am not sure about years, but I think that there are a large number of couples with newborns that are loosing some significant amount of sleep for at least 1 year or so. Not every day perhaps, but I think as new parents we run pretty much on sleep debt. I asked most of my friends and parents and this seems to be the case for all of them. If my experience is not local and limited then someone has to do a study about loss of sleep and the effects this have on parents. I found a lot of articles about the lack of sleep and the effect on mental health or health in general, but I am not finding a good explanation about how come if this is true people still become parents, then they go back to work and seems to function well. Is something special about parenting and recovery from lack of sleep? Or we all parents will remain forever with the negative effects due to sleep deprivation happening in early years of parenting? Just sharing another personal experience: think book came out exactly in the year my kid was born. After reading some reviews and finding out that it does not give any advice about how to handle sleep deprivation I refuse to read it then as I was afraid it will make me more anxious about the small amount of sleep I was getting thus making me sleep even less :)

petertodd 6y ago

> 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. Not very ethical. But understandable. > He's writing to sell books and spread his message, ...and arguably that turns it into fraud. If not for the misrepresentation of the facts, would I have bought his book?

alsetmusic 6y ago
>> He's writing to sell books and spread his message, > ...and arguably that turns it into fraud. If not for the misrepresentation of the facts, would I have bought his book? Not to be overly-pedantic, but I think knowingly exaggerating the truth to sell books is more of a scam than a fraud. To me, fraud is closer to outright deception than exaggeration. Fraud is also better defined. Laws are written about fraud. Fraud, I think, is a weightier charge of duplicity. I base this only on my own internal reaction to the words. Here’s someone getting more into the lexicon: > In short, scam has no legal status as a term of law in most jurisdictions, except insofar as it may be defined as a type of fraud. The term fraud is broad but usually very carefully defined in statutory law. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/348183/whats-the-difference-between-scam-and-fraud https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/348183/whats-the...
- petertodd 6y ago
  Interesting! I didn't know there was a distinction in law between those two terms. I think your definition of "scam" is closer to what I was trying to get at.
- thu2111 6y ago
  I think that page supports the notion that it's fraud. People pay with money for the book because of its claims. The legal dictionary says: FRAUD. An intentional perversion of truth for the purpose of inducing another in reliance upon it to part with some valuable thing belonging to him or to surrender a legal right; a false representation of a matter of fact, whether by words or by conduct, by false or misleading allegations, or by concealment of that which should have been disclosed, which deceives and is intended to deceive another so that he shall act upon it to his legal injury. It's a pretty broad definition. Certainly a strong case could be mounted that this fits, however, academics are basically never prosecuted for fraud and there would be enormous institutional resistance to doing so, given the prevalence of fraud in the research literature.

jkhdigital 6y ago

> 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. You have citations to support this? Or are you just recycling Walker’s claims with slightly less exaggeration?

staticautomatic 6y ago
Perhaps I should be more intellectually vigilant but this claim strikes me as so likely to be true that I wouldn’t bother trying to find a citation for it.
- TheDong 6y ago
  In my experience, the people who are frequently sleep deprived for a few years don't seem to be worse for it afterward. My main sources of anecdote for this are grad school students with hectic school and advisor setups (who often are partly sleep deprived for much of 3+ years), and parents who have several children in short succession (ensuring their sleep is ruined for roughly 2 years). In neither case do those groups seem to suffer significant long-term effects that are obviously from the sleep deprivation.
- Udik 6y ago
  > this claim strikes me as so likely to be true that I wouldn’t bother trying to find a citation for it This seems to be the source of just every factoid. You took something that just sounds true to you and made it into an objective statement.
  - staticautomatic 6y ago
    I didn’t make it into anything and I don’t take it as axiomatic, I just wouldn’t spend time looking it up. It also sounds true to me based on my knowledge of biology, upon which I get to draw inferences I think are reasonable.

gls2ro 6y ago

I am not sure about years, but I think that there are a large number of couples with newborns that are loosing some significant amount of sleep for at least 1 year or so. Not every day perhaps, but I think as new parents we run pretty much on sleep debt. I asked most of my friends and parents and this seems to be the case for all of them. If my experience is not local and limited then someone has to do a study about loss of sleep and the effects this have on parents. I found a lot of articles about the lack of sleep and the effect on mental health or health in general, but I am not finding a good explanation about how come if this is true people still become parents, then they go back to work and seems to function well. Is something special about parenting and recovery from lack of sleep? Or we all parents will remain forever with the negative effects due to sleep deprivation happening in early years of parenting? Just sharing another personal experience: think book came out exactly in the year my kid was born. After reading some reviews and finding out that it does not give any advice about how to handle sleep deprivation I refuse to read it then as I was afraid it will make me more anxious about the small amount of sleep I was getting thus making me sleep even less :)