The version of Alexey’s theses I most broadly support is “we treat sleep like one thing, when it is in fact multiple things with multiple purposes”. Natalia calls this epicycles
That sleep is multiple things is not something I am arguing against. (In fact, I don’t recall that being a point in Guzey’s post). What I uncharitably called “epicycles” was the additional complexity Guzey’s model has to have to explain why so many people feel dumber after sleep restriction, and why experimental studies say that sleep loss causes cognitive impairments, when ““not sleeping ‘enough’ makes you stupid” is a 100% psyop.”
It’s pretty clear to me that sleep has multiple effects, and that it might be the case that there’s something with all of sleep’s good effects and none of the bad ones that just hasn’t been discovered yet. Maybe digital people would only have to spend the subjective equivalent of a few seconds per day shut down in order to renormalize their weights or whatever, or might not need to be shut down ever at all to maintain their performance.
But I don’t think that is incompatible with the object-level claims in my post, any more than saying “humans don’t live to be 200 years old” is incompatible with knowing that the passage of time has multiple effects or with admitting the possibility of revolutionary life-extension methods being discovered that do allow humans to be 200 years old.
Sounds like we agree a lot- I think he got a lot of stuff wrong and was glad to see you correct it. I think he wildly overextrapolated from his own data. My opinion on mainstream sleep researchers is closer to his than yours, but agree he overextrapolated from the sailing sleep coach.
I spend a lot of time going “that person’s big idea is built on a foundation of factually inaccurate sand”, so it’s novel for me to be the one going “yes, mostly, but I still want to follow up”. I feel this way due to a combination of thinking Alexey brings up a lot of legit problems with existing sleep research, and that he put serious time into generating new data (although I was extremely disappointed in his data collection, and would have found even writing down his subjective score each day an improvement over nothing).
My opinion on mainstream sleep researchers is closer to his than yours
I feel this way due to a combination of thinking Alexey brings up a lot of legit problems with existing sleep research
Could you elaborate on what you mean by “mainstream sleep researchers” and/or “existing sleep research,” and what, in your view, the legit problems with the latter are? (Modulo Walker). These terms can mean many things and refer to very different sets of models. Researchers, the organizations that set guidelines, and clinicians in a certain field can often have very mistaken views about what the research in their field actually shows if they’re not personally involved in it. For example, some clinical psychiatrists promote the serotonin theory of depression even though the research body does not support it. Lumping together the clinicians with the research body as a monolithic “psychiatric field” obscures this. (I’m not sure that that’s what’s going on here but discussing what you mean specifically could be helpful.)
Some of Guzey’s points on Theses on Sleep and Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors are genuinely both counterintuitive to the general public (and some/most sleep researchers, guidelines-setters, and clinicians) and true. But Guzey’s evidence for those points didn’t come out of the ether (and most of it did not come from his own experiment). It largely came out of the academic research body on sleep, the same place in which I found evidence that sleep duration e.g. affects cognition but barely has a clear association with mortality. So it seems reasonable to me to dissociate the research body from the opinions of most people in the field.
(Also, I think it’s very unclear what view you’re ascribing to me in the first quote, but I suspect that I do not endorse it. I don’t expect sleep scientists to be that good at predicting reality in subfields or sub-subfields they’re not personally involved in.)
That sleep is multiple things is not something I am arguing against. (In fact, I don’t recall that being a point in Guzey’s post). What I uncharitably called “epicycles” was the additional complexity Guzey’s model has to have to explain why so many people feel dumber after sleep restriction, and why experimental studies say that sleep loss causes cognitive impairments, when ““not sleeping ‘enough’ makes you stupid” is a 100% psyop.”
It’s pretty clear to me that sleep has multiple effects, and that it might be the case that there’s something with all of sleep’s good effects and none of the bad ones that just hasn’t been discovered yet. Maybe digital people would only have to spend the subjective equivalent of a few seconds per day shut down in order to renormalize their weights or whatever, or might not need to be shut down ever at all to maintain their performance.
But I don’t think that is incompatible with the object-level claims in my post, any more than saying “humans don’t live to be 200 years old” is incompatible with knowing that the passage of time has multiple effects or with admitting the possibility of revolutionary life-extension methods being discovered that do allow humans to be 200 years old.
Sounds like we agree a lot- I think he got a lot of stuff wrong and was glad to see you correct it. I think he wildly overextrapolated from his own data. My opinion on mainstream sleep researchers is closer to his than yours, but agree he overextrapolated from the sailing sleep coach.
I spend a lot of time going “that person’s big idea is built on a foundation of factually inaccurate sand”, so it’s novel for me to be the one going “yes, mostly, but I still want to follow up”. I feel this way due to a combination of thinking Alexey brings up a lot of legit problems with existing sleep research, and that he put serious time into generating new data (although I was extremely disappointed in his data collection, and would have found even writing down his subjective score each day an improvement over nothing).
Could you elaborate on what you mean by “mainstream sleep researchers” and/or “existing sleep research,” and what, in your view, the legit problems with the latter are? (Modulo Walker). These terms can mean many things and refer to very different sets of models. Researchers, the organizations that set guidelines, and clinicians in a certain field can often have very mistaken views about what the research in their field actually shows if they’re not personally involved in it. For example, some clinical psychiatrists promote the serotonin theory of depression even though the research body does not support it. Lumping together the clinicians with the research body as a monolithic “psychiatric field” obscures this. (I’m not sure that that’s what’s going on here but discussing what you mean specifically could be helpful.)
Some of Guzey’s points on Theses on Sleep and Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors are genuinely both counterintuitive to the general public (and some/most sleep researchers, guidelines-setters, and clinicians) and true. But Guzey’s evidence for those points didn’t come out of the ether (and most of it did not come from his own experiment). It largely came out of the academic research body on sleep, the same place in which I found evidence that sleep duration e.g. affects cognition but barely has a clear association with mortality. So it seems reasonable to me to dissociate the research body from the opinions of most people in the field.
(Also, I think it’s very unclear what view you’re ascribing to me in the first quote, but I suspect that I do not endorse it. I don’t expect sleep scientists to be that good at predicting reality in subfields or sub-subfields they’re not personally involved in.)
[An earlier version of this comment said “do endorse it” when I meant the opposite, sorry for the confusion.]