A better answer: in the course of a week, you will naturally spend time eating and not eating, moving and not moving, and sleeping and not sleeping. Calling something “fasting” (as opposed to “not eating right this second”), “excess exercise” (as opposed to “moving”), or “sleep deprivation” (as opposed to “being awake”) is begging the question. It assumes you know the correct balance and are describing a departure from that balance. Meanwhile, stubbing a toe is always a worse state than not having stubbed a toe. The correct amount of toe-stubbing is zero, we can assume any deviation is bad (but then argue about what is slow-motion assault and what is deeply useful trigger point massage therapy).
[The immune system is not a member of the “all things in balance” class. Having zero pathogens and being adapted to an environment with zero pathogens is obviously superior, but the trade-offs are made weird by being an adversarial game with lock-in]
My model is that the finding balance between eating/not-eating, moving/not-moving, and sleeping/not-sleeping, is not always trivial. Your body sends imperfect signals, the right answer varies based on the environment, which changes a lot, and you’re making trade-offs you might not endorse if you had more info. Mild-to-moderate departures from your current balance can be informative in helping you find the correct balance and learn the trade-offs you’re making, even if the experiment ends up being net negative in the short term
You might argue that Alexey specifically used the words “sleep deprivation”. I think that’s a poor phrasing resulting from a bad model being embedded in the language, but if he comes back and says “no, I definitely meant deprivation-as-in-bad-for-you”, it won’t change my belief in this model.
A better answer: in the course of a week, you will naturally spend time eating and not eating, moving and not moving, and sleeping and not sleeping. Calling something “fasting” (as opposed to “not eating right this second”), “excess exercise” (as opposed to “moving”), or “sleep deprivation” (as opposed to “being awake”) is begging the question. It assumes you know the correct balance and are describing a departure from that balance. Meanwhile, stubbing a toe is always a worse state than not having stubbed a toe.
There is something that is similar to eating, moving and sleeping in that respect: exhaling. Over the course of a minute, you will naturally spend time exhaling and not exhaling. The correct amount of time to spend not exhaling is not zero. And failing to exhale acutely stresses your body. But it doesn’t seem to follow from those things that holding your breath once in a while is beneficial.
In exercise, breathing, eating, and sleeping, we can perhaps roughly model the system as being driven by an oscillatory forcing function, with some amplitude and frequency, such as of the form Acos(w*t). The point is that although instinct, intuition, and imitation allow us to find parameters compatible with life/cognitive function/acceptable performance, we don’t have the data to determine whether or not these parameters are optimal, achievable, or sustainable, nor under what conditions this is or is not true.
We should carefully reserve the word “optimal” and “optimize” for situations where we have some sort of proof or evidence relative to the claim. It’s preferable to use words like “target” or “conventional” or “standard” when we’re discussing parameters that seem likely to work, or that have been shown to work, but that haven’t been clearly shown to be the best for our use case.
We know that a standard sleep length of 8 hours per day for adults is compatible with cognitive function, life, and health, but the argument we are all having here is over whether the evidence is sufficient to say that this is robustly optimal.
My point here is just that the argument “X-to-a-greater-than-usual-extent is an acute stress, and therefore it is good for health” (which was Guzey’s argument) is bad even if X is something we naturally do to a nonzero extent.
I’m probably about as uncertain as you are about whether sleeping 8 hours per night is optimal. (Though my comment was indeed unclear about that before I edited it, so thanks for pointing that out).
I think we should understand Guzey’s argument as a gesture in the direction of saying “we should try to establish the base rate for these sorts of stressors [i.e. purposeful behaviors with a normal range of variation in frequency and intensity]” He’s pointing out a few salient behaviors in this reference class (diet and exercise), pointing out that what we might call “sensible variation” is believed to be good for you, and then noting that sleep also belongs in this reference class. You’ve also noted that breathing belongs in this reference class, and we can also find extensive traditions of breath work that are at least meant to promote health.
I agree with others here that toe-stubbing and other injury does not belong in this reference class, because they aren’t purposeful behaviors.
A stronger counterargument is that we may be suffering from availability bias in identifying members of this reference class. We receive lots of messages to breath deep, get exercise, and eat less. What about sensory stimulation vs. lack of stimulation, emotional variation vs. calm, social contact vs. solitude, focus vs. distraction? Do we expect that there’s a “normal range” here that gives you health benefits with “sensible variation?” For example, do we think that people receive health benefits from periodic meditation retreats due to the unusual level of social isolation, calm, and lack of stimulation? Or that they receive health benefits from attending a music festival (sober), due to the unusual level of social contact, excitement, and sensory stimulation?
My uncertainty here is that I don’t know whether we’re restricting this to physical health, and also that I don’t feel confident on what health impacts these additional sorts of reference class members tend to have. intuitively, it seems good for you to get some variety in your life, but on the other hand, will going to the occasional rock concert really improve my heart health (any dancing I might do aside)?
I think that getting some evidence here would be beneficial. However, I also suspect that most of the research is on extremes (i.e. attending too many loud concerts is bad for your hearing), rather than on moving from “moderate” to “sensibly going a little above or below moderate for a while.”
But a few examples of “clearly good for you” in the reference class along with a bunch of examples of “not sure” still puts the valence of “sensible variation” for a member of this reference class as on average positive, though with not much more than 50% confidence.
On the other other hand, the evidence we do have about the impact of sleep on cognitive function is not encouraging. Anyway, the more I think about it, the less clarity I have on how to even think about this question. It doesn’t seem likely to result in a knock-down argument either way, no matter how much we might research it. Too fuzzy.
A better answer: in the course of a week, you will naturally spend time eating and not eating, moving and not moving, and sleeping and not sleeping. Calling something “fasting” (as opposed to “not eating right this second”), “excess exercise” (as opposed to “moving”), or “sleep deprivation” (as opposed to “being awake”) is begging the question. It assumes you know the correct balance and are describing a departure from that balance. Meanwhile, stubbing a toe is always a worse state than not having stubbed a toe. The correct amount of toe-stubbing is zero, we can assume any deviation is bad (but then argue about what is slow-motion assault and what is deeply useful trigger point massage therapy).
[The immune system is not a member of the “all things in balance” class. Having zero pathogens and being adapted to an environment with zero pathogens is obviously superior, but the trade-offs are made weird by being an adversarial game with lock-in]
My model is that the finding balance between eating/not-eating, moving/not-moving, and sleeping/not-sleeping, is not always trivial. Your body sends imperfect signals, the right answer varies based on the environment, which changes a lot, and you’re making trade-offs you might not endorse if you had more info. Mild-to-moderate departures from your current balance can be informative in helping you find the correct balance and learn the trade-offs you’re making, even if the experiment ends up being net negative in the short term
You might argue that Alexey specifically used the words “sleep deprivation”. I think that’s a poor phrasing resulting from a bad model being embedded in the language, but if he comes back and says “no, I definitely meant deprivation-as-in-bad-for-you”, it won’t change my belief in this model.
There is something that is similar to eating, moving and sleeping in that respect: exhaling. Over the course of a minute, you will naturally spend time exhaling and not exhaling. The correct amount of time to spend not exhaling is not zero. And failing to exhale acutely stresses your body. But it doesn’t seem to follow from those things that holding your breath once in a while is beneficial.
In exercise, breathing, eating, and sleeping, we can perhaps roughly model the system as being driven by an oscillatory forcing function, with some amplitude and frequency, such as of the form Acos(w*t). The point is that although instinct, intuition, and imitation allow us to find parameters compatible with life/cognitive function/acceptable performance, we don’t have the data to determine whether or not these parameters are optimal, achievable, or sustainable, nor under what conditions this is or is not true.
We should carefully reserve the word “optimal” and “optimize” for situations where we have some sort of proof or evidence relative to the claim. It’s preferable to use words like “target” or “conventional” or “standard” when we’re discussing parameters that seem likely to work, or that have been shown to work, but that haven’t been clearly shown to be the best for our use case.
We know that a standard sleep length of 8 hours per day for adults is compatible with cognitive function, life, and health, but the argument we are all having here is over whether the evidence is sufficient to say that this is robustly optimal.
My point here is just that the argument “X-to-a-greater-than-usual-extent is an acute stress, and therefore it is good for health” (which was Guzey’s argument) is bad even if X is something we naturally do to a nonzero extent.
I’m probably about as uncertain as you are about whether sleeping 8 hours per night is optimal. (Though my comment was indeed unclear about that before I edited it, so thanks for pointing that out).
I think we should understand Guzey’s argument as a gesture in the direction of saying “we should try to establish the base rate for these sorts of stressors [i.e. purposeful behaviors with a normal range of variation in frequency and intensity]” He’s pointing out a few salient behaviors in this reference class (diet and exercise), pointing out that what we might call “sensible variation” is believed to be good for you, and then noting that sleep also belongs in this reference class. You’ve also noted that breathing belongs in this reference class, and we can also find extensive traditions of breath work that are at least meant to promote health.
I agree with others here that toe-stubbing and other injury does not belong in this reference class, because they aren’t purposeful behaviors.
A stronger counterargument is that we may be suffering from availability bias in identifying members of this reference class. We receive lots of messages to breath deep, get exercise, and eat less. What about sensory stimulation vs. lack of stimulation, emotional variation vs. calm, social contact vs. solitude, focus vs. distraction? Do we expect that there’s a “normal range” here that gives you health benefits with “sensible variation?” For example, do we think that people receive health benefits from periodic meditation retreats due to the unusual level of social isolation, calm, and lack of stimulation? Or that they receive health benefits from attending a music festival (sober), due to the unusual level of social contact, excitement, and sensory stimulation?
My uncertainty here is that I don’t know whether we’re restricting this to physical health, and also that I don’t feel confident on what health impacts these additional sorts of reference class members tend to have. intuitively, it seems good for you to get some variety in your life, but on the other hand, will going to the occasional rock concert really improve my heart health (any dancing I might do aside)?
I think that getting some evidence here would be beneficial. However, I also suspect that most of the research is on extremes (i.e. attending too many loud concerts is bad for your hearing), rather than on moving from “moderate” to “sensibly going a little above or below moderate for a while.”
But a few examples of “clearly good for you” in the reference class along with a bunch of examples of “not sure” still puts the valence of “sensible variation” for a member of this reference class as on average positive, though with not much more than 50% confidence.
On the other other hand, the evidence we do have about the impact of sleep on cognitive function is not encouraging. Anyway, the more I think about it, the less clarity I have on how to even think about this question. It doesn’t seem likely to result in a knock-down argument either way, no matter how much we might research it. Too fuzzy.