I don’t recall having argued that “proper sleep is necessary for x.” [1]
I’ve argued that sleep restriction impairs cognition, is associated with negative mood and suicidality (not only positive mood) and causes overeating. Not that you need a certain minimum amount of sleep to perform competently at something. So I still don’t think that the kind of evidence that you bring up is asymmetric.
I’ll come up with an example to explain the difference. Suppose that, after 8 hours of sleep, humans complete a task with an average accuracy of 83%. After 6 hours of sleep, the average accuracy decreases to 71%. And even after a full night of sleep deprivation, accuracy is still 60%, substantially better than a dart-throwing monkey (which would have, say, a 10% accuracy at the task). Suppose that accuracy above 50% is considered acceptable. You point out that the average accuracy of the sleep-restricted/deprived groups is still pretty good, and argue that this shows that sleeping 8 hours per night, or sleeping at all the previous night, is not necessary to complete the task acceptably. And obviously, you’ll be right — but that wouldn’t be an argument against the claim that sleep restriction impairs performance on that task.
you do not represent accurately in your comment—the participants were able to perform complex mental tasks and function in general at what appears to be ~full-capacity, not just “able to perform basic tasks”
I edited my comment. Notice, however, that it’s still unclear how people in the show would be doing in a rigorous assessment of cognition not subject to learning effects, and, as far as I know, we don’t know how well they did on their tasks compared to their baseline performance.
Claims of that sort would not be very general, and their truth-value would obviously depend on what you mean by “necessary,” so I don’t think they’re that interesting. Also, in some tasks there’s probably a very big difference between acceptable performance and peak performance.
I don’t recall having argued that “proper sleep is necessary for x.” [1]
I’ve argued that sleep restriction impairs cognition, is associated with negative mood and suicidality (not only positive mood) and causes overeating. Not that you need a certain minimum amount of sleep to perform competently at something. So I still don’t think that the kind of evidence that you bring up is asymmetric.
I’ll come up with an example to explain the difference. Suppose that, after 8 hours of sleep, humans complete a task with an average accuracy of 83%. After 6 hours of sleep, the average accuracy decreases to 71%. And even after a full night of sleep deprivation, accuracy is still 60%, substantially better than a dart-throwing monkey (which would have, say, a 10% accuracy at the task). Suppose that accuracy above 50% is considered acceptable. You point out that the average accuracy of the sleep-restricted/deprived groups is still pretty good, and argue that this shows that sleeping 8 hours per night, or sleeping at all the previous night, is not necessary to complete the task acceptably. And obviously, you’ll be right — but that wouldn’t be an argument against the claim that sleep restriction impairs performance on that task.
I edited my comment. Notice, however, that it’s still unclear how people in the show would be doing in a rigorous assessment of cognition not subject to learning effects, and, as far as I know, we don’t know how well they did on their tasks compared to their baseline performance.
Claims of that sort would not be very general, and their truth-value would obviously depend on what you mean by “necessary,” so I don’t think they’re that interesting. Also, in some tasks there’s probably a very big difference between acceptable performance and peak performance.