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“Why We Sleep” is riddled with scientific and factual errors (2019)
- marginalia_nu 4y agoIn general, criticism of this format is quite problematic and should be considered bad form. You see the format quite often in politically sensitive research and other infected areas (like nutrition), as a means of character assassination. For any given book, you can construct a list of accusations like these, laden with quotes and references. Some of the accusations may be absolutely true (it's rare for a book to be 100% accurate), or superficially seem to be true but actually more nuanced than that in a way that is not trivial to explain, some may even be fabrications. It's hard to tell for an outsider. Regardless of the accuracy of such a barrage of accusations, it takes an inordinate amount of time to respond to the criticism, as it will typically contain of several dozen points each of which require a lengthy response. And by that time it doesn't matter, the accusation will have already been accepted as true. If you're going to publish something like this, you should at least notify the author well ahead of time and give them ample opportunity to explain what you've found and construct a response.
- amadeuspagel 4y ago> in this essay, I’m going to highlight the five most egregious scientific and factual errors Walker makes in Chapter 1 of the book. This chapter contains 10 pages and constitutes less than 4% of the book by the total word count.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoThis doesn't really change anything. The problem is the large number of accusations, not the size of the work being accused of inaccuracies.
- MisterBastahrd 4y agoYou still haven't explained how pointing out 5 factual errors in the first 4% of the book is actually in bad form. This in particular: "it takes an inordinate amount of time to respond to the criticism" Ain't it. If you are going to present yourself as an authority on a segment of human knowledge, then you should necessarily EXPECT to receive challenge when you haven't actually done your own homework. Nobody who writes a book while acting as an authority should be incapable of showing their work.
- sammalloy 4y agoI think the point others are making is that you can make this accusation about most topics. Take the average, well-sourced Wikipedia article on a similar topic as an example. Choose it by random. You’ll find the same issue. Every subject has some amount of internal disagreements, controversies, and inaccuracies. There will always be more questions than answers.
- Dylan16807 4y agoFive is not a large number. And since they're all aimed at the first chapter, it's not cherrypicking.
- pastor_bob 4y agopoint 3 is some nitpicky claim about Fatal familial insomnia. I don't find it to be egregious
- wonnage 4y agomischaracterizing the entire disease is not "nitpicky" imo
- notRobot 4y ago> Regardless of the accuracy of such a barrage of accusations, it takes an inordinate amount of time to respond to the criticism, as it will typically contain of several dozen points each of which require a lengthy response. And by that time it doesn't matter, the accusation will have already been accepted as true. See also: the gish gallop: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop > The Gish Gallop is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort.
- skinnymuch 4y agoThe book is accepted as true by more people than the criticism. The author got away with it. Interesting all of the criticisms are individually weak arguments. Like you’re saying no argument is strong?
- notRobot 4y agoI'm saying nothing of the sort. I was just pointing out that there's a term for a certain practice. Not even saying that's what is happening in the OP article.
- skinnymuch 4y agoMy bad for assuming some bad faith. I start arguing with people on HN or Reddit…I’m being stupid.
- thatswrong0 4y agoThis same vacuous argument could be applied to the book itself: Pop-sci books like this make a million claims and take an inordinate amount of time to verify. And by that time it doesn’t matter, the claims will already have been accepted as true. See how pointless this is?
- marginalia_nu 4y agoIt is quite different. To argue against a book, you really only need to argue against its central theme. To combat a dozen accusations, you need to reply to each and every one to avoid being wounded by them.
- timr 4y ago> To argue against a book, you really only need to argue against its central theme. To combat a dozen accusations, you need to reply to each and every one to avoid being wounded by them. No, you don't get a pass just because your "central theme" is acceptable. If someone writes a book about a scientific topic, with a "central theme" that is uncontroversial but uninteresting (e.g. "sleep is good"), but otherwise riddles the book with factual and scientific inaccuracies, then they need to fix the problems. If they don't, they're writing science-themed fiction, at best. At worst, someone can do real harm by dressing up nonsense as science.
- actinium226 4y agoIt's like that quote from Einstein, when asked about what he thought about his many critics and detractors, he said something along the lines of "if I was wrong a single critic would be sufficient."
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoWhat would be a better form of criticism of accuracy of a book?
- marginalia_nu 4y agoThe intellectually honest thing is to assume not that the author is maliciously incompetent, but that you, the reader are missing something and inquire with the author about sources or reasoning for claims that contradict the apparent scientific consensus. If the author doesn't respond to such an inquiry within ample but reasonable time, then you can go loading up the shotgun with accusatory birdshot and take it to the court of public opinion. That's the last resort.
- Barrin92 4y agoThere's nothing problematic with the criticism. The book is riddled with false claims and what's actually problematic is that someone sold countless of copies of fraudulent self-help on a contentious topic like sleep because they knew exactly it would sell like hotcakes regardless of its scientific accuracy. You're right that it's excatly like nutrition advice or politics in that there's a 80%+ chance whenever someone sells a hugely popular book in this field that most of it is just made the f*** up. Other sleep experts have asserted that the book is so awful as to constitute research misconduct and what we should do is give posts correcting bad science the attention they deserve and hold shoddy scientists and public intellectuals accountable.
- Gatsky 4y agoI find this comment strange and wrongheaded. The world is better off for having this criticism out there, and we should thank Guzey for making the effort. Unlike Walker, he doesn’t get paid to do it.
- robswc 4y agoI haven't read the book, so I can't comment on that... but this comment resonates with me. I think its similar to how people will completely write off a book/movie/person for _one_ thing. I get some things have more weight than others and its hard to trust a book if you find one error... but I've seen people say entire books (technical ones) are "trash" because they disagreed with one or two issues. Seems like a modern phenomenon. Or maybe just rose tinted glasses... but it seemed people could disagree or even point out flaws while still being on the same "team."
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- barry-cotter 4y ago> In general, criticism of this format is quite problematic and should be considered bad form. You see the format quite often in politically sensitive research and other infected areas (like nutrition), as a means of character assassination. Interesting. It looks like it’s making an argument but if you read closely it’s nothing but insinuation and an opinion about the correct way to have disagreements so as to avoid scandal in front of the plebeians.
- wonnage 4y agoIt definitely feels like one of those strategies deployed when people can't actually attack the substance of an argument anymore. Basically "i ain't reading all that" but in a dress shirt
- weakfortress 4y agoExcept pop-sci books are cancers in and of themselves. The book has some interesting notes but in general prescribes really questionable conclusions to the data. For example, one poster here suggests sleeping less leads to cancer. I don't personally think the article was in any worse taste than the book. Just because someone cites studies doesn't mean they know how to relate data. There's two entire websites dedicated to this sort of fallacy, here (HN) and Reddit. Pop-sci is the most annoying part of the 21st century to me. I'm not convinced anyone actually understands sleep. We know too little and we can die. Too much, and we can die too. "Just enough" is the answer but as far as I can tell no one can quantify what this even means. I sleep enough to be rested. This seems to be >= 6 hours a night. The book would insinuate that I'm going to die of all sorts of terrible diseases as a result. The book itself isn't good science and I don't think a criticism of such a broad-strokes painting of a complicated subject needs to be any more kind. To address your greater point if there's any place where you can throw a rock and find bullshit it's nutrition and health "science". In fact, the industry is so rife with bullshit it's often difficult to tease out actual actionable data. More people need to directly criticize these people in such a fashion until they simply go away.
- meindnoch 4y agoAs a rule of thumb, any popsci book hyped up by techbro/Joe Rogan/Lex Friedman/etc. types is going to be riddled with factual errors and "creative" interpretations, especially if it's about longevity, nutrition, health, etc.
- have_faith 4y agoWhat does Lex have to do with the book?
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- reducesuffering 4y agoThe book's author was on Lex's podcast.
- have_faith 4y agoDid Lex hype it up?
- k__ 4y agoIsn't Friedman the counterexample to Rogan?
- sooheon 4y agoHe's the tuxedo winnie the pooh meme version of Rogan.
- fortuna86 4y agoNo he's the same right wing perspective, just with less jokes.
- __blockcipher__ 4y agoNeither Rogan nor Fridman are really "right wing", but of the two Fridman is certainly not. We're talking about a guy who spearheaded the "masks 4 all" push back at the beginning of COVID. If we're assigning arbitrary labels that definitely falls on the left half of the spectrum.
- prgmatic 4y agoI had no idea that some people benefit from sleep deprivation, but it makes a lot of sense to me experientially. I feel like I'm a bit more focused when I get 4-6 hours of sleep even though my body typically wants 7-8.
- sammalloy 4y agoI’ve seen some work on this. It turns out that some percentage of the population doesn’t need sleep like the rest of us. Nobody knows why.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoIIRC, they "don't need" as much to perform well in the short term. Even these super sleepers may suffer cumulative effects over the long term. There's also a risk that those who prefer sleeping less will declare themselves part of this elite group without any rigorous study.
- hnick 4y agoOne day of 4-6 hours sleep and I can get giddy, energetic, and focused. 2nd day kills me. Usually even if I get otherwise adequate sleep, there's a hangover effect.
- dahart 4y agoThe claimed benefit in the article is for depression. Depressed people who suffer sleep deprivation sometimes become less depressed. That could be true at the same time that cognitive performance and/or health suffers. I don’t know how long the sleep deprivation benefit works for depression, but just something to keep in mind; less sleep (or more sleep) is not necessarily a binary good or bad thing, it can be multiple goods and bads in some unknown weighted combination, and it can change over time and according to context, i.e., short term deprivation might help some people while long term deprivation does lasting damage.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago>Any book of Why We Sleep’s length is bound to contain some factual errors. Therefore, to avoid potential concerns about cherry-picking the few inaccuracies scattered throughout. In this essay, I’m going to highlight the five most egregious scientific and factual errors Walker makes in Chapter 1 of the book. This chapter contains 10 pages and constitutes less than 4% of the book by the total word count. Sometimes I write comedic science fiction with pseudoscientific argumentation from absurd angles so I don't hold the above against the authors, except they seem to think it should be taken seriously?
- Sniffnoy 4y agoRather than just being dismissive and expecting everyone to already agree with you, perhaps you could actually explain what problem you're seeing here?
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoI would think the point was obvious, the implication of the text is that in finding 5 errors in 4% of the book it can be assumed that there are 125 errors of equivalent severity in the rest of the book. The assumption is that errors in written work are evenly distributed (which is such a ridiculous assumption that I have a hard time not being dismissive) Otherwise there would be an evident concern that they cherry-picked a part of the book that had more egregious errors than other parts.
- Sniffnoy 4y agoYes, my point is that spelling this out is important; I didn't find it obvious what you were trying to convey at all. (And more generally that people will not find obvious the same things as you, and that it's helpful to be explicit where possible.)
- sooheon 4y agoI think the implication is that fact checking an entire book is more effort. One would think errors in a book are evenly distributed without any reasons to believe otherwise. I'd be biased towards thinking the introductory chapter received more editorial attention than the rest of the book, so it is possible the rest of the book contains more errors per page.
- dang 4y agoRelated: “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684519 - April 2021 (151 comments) Why We Sleep: A Tale of Institutional Failure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22844723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22844723 - April 2020 (52 comments) “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) Why We Sleep, and Why We Often Can’t - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18798366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18798366 - Jan 2019 (80 comments) Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401397 - Oct 2017 (295 comments) Sleep deprivation is increasing our risk of serious illness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15324195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15324195 - Sept 2017 (77 comments)
- scoofy 4y agoI read the book. I think it's fairly obvious that the research he presents is pretty speculative. That said, it's a very popsci book, which is not really where you should be getting your facts from. It's fine, and was an interesting read on the current state on some theories coming out of Berkeley. Ironically, this is why i really liked Freakonomics. All the studies they uses were just Levitt's studies, and you could just look them up and read them. I recently listened to a podcast criticizing the book and I couldn't even take it seriously, because you had a couple of laypersons who are politically aligned against the Chicago school and use that for the basis of their criticisms. I though it such a hilariously terrible "trashing" of the book that I couldn't stop shaking my head. If Books Could Kill: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5wHpooGMRsSBrUHhQZbOZp?si=4951cc63356149c3 https://open.spotify.com/episode/5wHpooGMRsSBrUHhQZbOZp?si=4... I would prefer if Walker provided the citations for what this author is asking for, but the entire point of a popsci book is that it's not a scholarly article. Walker isn't a doctor, he's a PhD in neurophysiology. I think the criticisms are warranted, but I think it's glaringly obvious from reading that the book isn't a work of serious scholarship.
- watwut 4y agoAfaik freakonomics is considered pseudoscience by people working in areas it writes about. I haven't seen anyone take freekonomics seriously for years at this point.
- scoofy 4y agoEvery chapter is about a peer review economics journal article. It's entirely likely that it doesn't align with peoples views working in those industries, but to suggest people can just casually wave away peer reviewed economics articles as pseudoscience is really kind of ridiculous.
- watwut 4y agoPicking up a single article and making huge conclusions from it is how pseudoscience works in general. The actual science is what emerges from many articles on the same topic, oftentimes having ambiguous or opposite conclusions, when scientific consensus forms. Doubly so when you are starting with economic article and make conclusions on social science. Economics in particular are pretty bad at reading what was already written about topic they are just discovering. Peer review ensures bare minimum of formal validity. It won't check your data, nor try to reproduce the study, nothing of the sort. Peer review is a great tool, but it is not not stomp of "settled and actually captures the whole topic".
- ludicity 4y agoTo respond to some concerns from marginalia_nu, I've spoken to Guzey once remotely and keep up with his writing from time to time. He is certainly not one to Gish Gallop someone, and generally I've been impressed by his forthrightness. Furthermore, Walker is aware of all the concerns raised in the original article (it was released a long time ago, not sure if it has been edited since). I dimly recall that most, if not all, of the concerns raised by Guzey turned out to be true. Walker essentially got away with it anyway. There's also a debate between the two of them on some British radio station, I believe, though at that point I declined to listen as I knew I'd get frustrated as it was clear you can just get away with this stuff. What's doubly weird for me is that I spent a year doing research at a prestigious sleep lab when I was studying, and honestly feel that Guzey's writing elsewhere is weirdly hostile to the concept of sleep. I'm extremely careful about it myself, and absolutely have massive performance degradation if I get anything less than eight hours. I,e. I don't even understand why Guzey is so opposed to pro-sleep messaging, but I think that's irrelevant when discussing Walker's conduct in writing the book. Asking Guzey to focus on just one or two undermines the thrust of his argument. Walker doesn't commit to a few big lies, truth throughout the entire first chapter is conveniently twisted for the sake of 'storytelling' that I saw done constantly in certain academic circles. The disdain for inconvenient facts (and oh boy, some of the graph edits seemed fraudulent to me when I last checked) is unacceptable if you have any respect for your audience or honesty. And I believe there was also a fabricated WHO quote? I just don't see how there can be nuance to this - the only thing I can see Walker hiding behind is a flimsy excuse like "it isn't a journal article". I don't expect pop science to be phenomenal, but I expect an academic not to falsify graphs: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-what-do-you-do-when-a-part-of-the-graph-contradicts-your-argument-you-cut-it-out-of-course https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-what-do-you-d...
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- choxi 4y agoThis seems incredibly nit picky. My summary of a few points below: #1: Walker claims sleep deprivation decreases life span, but so does sleeping too much. #2: Walker says sleep deprivation is always bad, but sometimes it helps people with depression. #3: Walker says that lack of sleep alone may kill you because it does for people who get "fatal familial insomnia" (FFI), but insomnia is a symptom and not the root cause of FFI. #4: Walker says the WHO claims we have a "sleep epidemic", but Walker's citation does not actually show that and there is conflicting research showing we may actually be sleeping more. #5: Walker said the WHO recommends 8 hours of sleep, but it's actually the National Sleep Foundation and they recommend 7-9 Here's Walker's response to some of this: 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-... EDIT: I added points #3 and #4 after just to be more charitable and give a full summary instead of just the ones I felt were most nit picky.
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- epivosism 4y agoThe points you listed feel like strong arguments to discredit a book - what makes you feel they're nitpicky? i.e. #1 is the author using a linear model where it doesn't apply, #2 is the author first promoting a super simplistic "more sleep = better" idea and then contradicting himself, #3 is misinterpreting a symptom as a cause etc.
- choxi 4y ago3 and 4 seem somewhat valid. 1 and 2 only apply to a minority of people so Walker’s statements are good advice for most people. 5 is just ridiculous, it’s reasonable to average 7-9 as a recommendation of 8 hours.
- epivosism 4y agobtw I didn't downvote you. Do you feel my questions are not productive to a useful conversation?
- Jorengarenar 4y ago>a sleep scientist at Google A scientist of what at where?!
- muststopmyths 4y agoThey’re researching injecting ads in your dreams
- Jorengarenar 4y agoThe worst part: I can imagine it
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- thenerdhead 4y agoEvery time I read this blog, I imagine that every popular author out in the world has one person on the internet who despises that author so much, they maintain a fact checked list and correspondence timeline as if it’s some way to discredit the author. Meanwhile the author gets even more famous and helps many get better sleep even if part of their magnum opus contains errors.
- dorchadas 4y agoYep. The only big takeaway I've had about Guezy, from various things posted on here, is that the person feels he doesn't need to sleep as much as Walker claims and sets out to prove every little tidbit wrong that Walker ever said. And perform experiments on himself (there was one where he intentionally sleep-deprived himself then tested his reaction time on a video game, if I recall correctly) to say "Look, we don't need to sleep that much!" Honestly, it seems he more has an issue with sleep and is looking to optimise for time awake, thus he basically hates Walker telling us we probably need more sleep. I've also found a lot of these points to be quite finnicky too, as [1] discusses [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34166889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34166889
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- mabbo 4y agoMy mother read this book. Now she's certain she has a serious condition, because she 'only' sleeps six hours per night. She's stressed out because the book says if she doesn't get eight hours of sleep, she'll get cancer. She's completely healthy otherwise (well, other than recovering from COVID just now). If you're going to make money giving people health advice, you have an ethical duty to be truthful to a level so high that it's hard to criticize it. Guzey shows here that Walker is not at that level.
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- nickff 4y ago>"She's stressed out because the book says if she doesn't get eight hours of sleep, she'll get cancer." I've read the book, and don't think it said that. Have you read the book?
- timr 4y agoI have. He doesn't come right out and say "lack of sleep causes cancer", but he insinuates it, repeatedly, by citing associative studies. This is the kind of stuff that infuriates most scientists -- we go out of our way to draw strong conclusions based on weak evidence, but people who are willing to do so can usually capture the public imagination with clear narratives and scary anecdotes. Even if the studies cited in "Why We Sleep" are correctly done, they're such extraordinary claims that they require extensive confirmation before they're to be believed. Laypeople don't understand this, so authors can cite "the scientific literature", sound authoritative, and still mislead.
- thenerdhead 4y agoI’m a layperson who read this book and I understand that consistent sleep leads to good health and inconsistent sleep could lead to health issues. How am I being misled if cancer is one of those potential issues? It makes sense in many ways. It’s like the old joke of when someone tells you that oxygen is slowly killing you. Most high school science teachers will tell you that fun fact, but you don’t lose sleep over it.
- actinium226 4y agoI feel like I gotta side with those people who are critical of guzey. He condenses his arguments into 5 facts which are disconnected and not all that relevant. At least for me, I'm interested in how sleep affects my day to day performance since that's what matters most. I couldn't care less if Walker was wrong about how sleep affects lifespan or risk of cancer. A million things affect those two things. The WHO didn't declare a sleep loss epidemic? "2/3rds of Americans don't get enough sleep" is false? That's what's wrong with this book? Not that part about how there are more driving accidents on the day we reset out clocks for DST? Not the part about how sleep affects traumatic memories in PTSD?
- porb121 4y agoif walker is mistaken about numerous small factual details, what makes you confident he's correct about anything meaningful?
- chrisdirkis 4y agoNot exactly a knockdown argument, but: if he was wrong about "something meaningful", Guzey probably would have added it to his list. More generally, if you make a claim and someone claims you're entirely wrong, it should be surprising if they don't attack the parts you consider meaningful. If they wanted to publicly demonstrate your incorrectness, why wouldn't they attack the important parts? Either they can't, or they chose not to, but the latter doesn't match the apparent motivations.
- Retric 4y agoIt’s often easier to rigorously disprove the small claims than big ones. Especially when the books author insinuates things rather than actually make bold claims. Making a long list of everything they said that we don’t have evidence for isn’t really debunking anything. After all a broken clock may occasionally show the correct time. But showing some specific study was misinterpreted or wrong is far more direct.
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- WhiteBlueSkies 4y ago[flagged]
- nequo 4y agoWould you care to list some examples?
- coldtea 4y agoA lot of the comments are of the "I've read the book and was convinced by it, and don't want to admit I was taken for a proverbial ride by bogus claims and sloppy science, so I'll support it, science be damned" variety. The kind that would scare someone like Sagan...
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- ziyal 4y agoRelated, Natália Coelho Mendonça's "Counter-theses on Sleep" - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sbcmACvB6DqYXYidL/counter-theses-on-sleep https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sbcmACvB6DqYXYidL/counter-th...
- ryloric 4y ago> No, a good night’s sleep is not always beneficial: sleep deprivation therapy in depression How the hell does this work?
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoWe don’t know.. it seems that sleep resets the state that the brain is in, and in depressed people, their reset state is where they experience the worst symptoms of depression. This[1] is a good read though I have forgotten the content of the essay. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-death https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-d...
- lebaux 4y agoi need a bit of that