I think that makes sense (and wasn’t what Natalia was saying, but is compatible with it. Bob could be smater than average, have a lower optimal sleep length, and have fewer consequences per hour of foregone sleep ). I want to highlight that there are many tasks that don’t benefit from the additional 15 IQ points, and if your total output depends more on those than on tasks that benefit from every last IQ point, then trading IQ points for more hours in the day can be the optimal move. But if Bob got smarter co-workers or became less resilient to sleep loss the trade-off might be different, and it’s beneficial for him to check the trade-offs periodicially.
I don’t think that’s what Alexey or Natalia were arguing, and it ignores health effects, but what I’m excited about in this discussion is rendering these kinds of trade-offs able to reasoned about
I agree about your point on making trade-offs possible to reason about. I’ve found that in discussing this away from LW, people will talk as if extra hours of sleep don’t come at the expense of waking hours. To them, at first glance, the decision is between “activity X, Y, and Z with 6 or 8 hours of sleep” rather than between “activity X and Y with 8 hours of sleep, or activity X, Y, and Z with 6 hours of sleep.”
When I point this out, the follow-up is “but what if the lost sleep makes activity Z a negative experience?” When we eventually anchor on that being the question at hand, rather than the assumption by default, the conversation can become productive and interesting.
I also agree with your bottlenecks-based framing. I think some tasks are bottlenecked by cognitive function (chess competitions), others usually aren’t but can be in rare/emergency circumstances that therefore require full-time high cognitive function (airline pilots), and many others aren’t bottlenecked by cognition (sailing races).
One counterpoint to that framing is that activities usually don’t take a fixed amount of time. There are many things that I’ve done where I’ll take a quarter of the time or less if I’m in a productive state rather than a non-productive state. Sometimes it might really be a trade off between “activity X, Y, and Z with 6 or 8 hours of sleep”, or even “activity X, Y, and Z with 8 hours of sleep, or activity X and Y with 6 hours of sleep”. I’ve also found that I’m less distracted with more sleep, so it could be “be productive for the most of the day with 8 hours of sleep, or browse social media for most of the day with 6 hours of sleep”. This all has been most obvious when I’ve been working on intellectual activities, like writing or developing software, but I also tend to have slower reflexes when I’ve been sleeping less, so physical activities are also relevant.
My personal sleep logs show that productive states are strongly correlated with the amount of hours of sleep I’ve gotten over the last month and the previous night. I don’t have proof that the math really works out, but I strongly suspect it does. Over longer term periods where I’ve had more or fewer hours of sleep, I’ve gotten more positive outside feedback (grades, feedback in monthly reviews) in the the periods with more sleep. But of course I have no proof that this applies to everyone, it’s correlation instead of causation, and it’s certainly no double blind study.
And of course the hardest problem is beating the akrasia to go to bed when I want to, but that’s a separate issue.
Agree! I think we are coming to a model where N hours of SD results in an average of X% loss in productivity per hour, and a change from Y to Z daily productive hours. We want to know the sign of XZ—Y.
Here, you may be arguing both that the performance loss is so great as to more than cancel out the increased number of working hours. You may also be arguing that we actually lose productive hours with sleep deprivation, despite being awake longer, because the loss of executive function makes us unable to focus on our work.
Alternatively, it may be that the additional productive hours from SD can be put into low-demand but time-consuming life maintenance or pleasurable occupations that otherwise might get neglected. For example, we can imagine a busy student choosing between 8 hours of sleep, or 6 hours of sleep plus 2 hours of socializing. Or between 8 hours of sleep, or 7 hours of sleep plus a trip to the grocery store. Or between 8 hours of sleep and 7 hours of sleep plus 1 hour of exercise.
Sacrificing sleep for efficiency-compounding tasks and meaningful occupations may cancel out or even reverse the cognitive impacts of SD itself. It may be that the worst effects of SD can be mitigated with a combination of practice, organizational supports, and stimulating activities and caffeine. It may also be that for some people, their baseline need for sleep is below the level recommended by sleep researchers, so that for them, reduced sleep comes at no cognitive cost.
So the question is twofold. Does non-strategic mild-to-moderate SD lead to net positive or net negative results on some outcome, like productivity, pleasure, health, or meaningful experiences? Furthermore, to what extent can an SD-management strategy mitigate the negative impacts of mild SD?
The stakes are rather significant. Consider that 2 hours of daily SD from age 20-60 adds up to 3.3 years of additional wakefulness, distributed across the most productive and healthy part of the lifespan. If it ruins the experience of life and damages productivity, that is an enormous detriment. On the other hand, if long-term strategically managed SD can be made neutral to positive, then that is the only intervention we currently have to more or less add healthy years to the natural lifespan.
Given the obvious complexities of managing sleep, even for adults people who are attempting to get a full 7-8 hours per night, it seems worth puzzling through it up front in order to establish an optimal sleep routine, given one’s individual preferences, bodily needs, and demands of life.
I think that makes sense (and wasn’t what Natalia was saying, but is compatible with it. Bob could be smater than average, have a lower optimal sleep length, and have fewer consequences per hour of foregone sleep ). I want to highlight that there are many tasks that don’t benefit from the additional 15 IQ points, and if your total output depends more on those than on tasks that benefit from every last IQ point, then trading IQ points for more hours in the day can be the optimal move. But if Bob got smarter co-workers or became less resilient to sleep loss the trade-off might be different, and it’s beneficial for him to check the trade-offs periodicially.
I don’t think that’s what Alexey or Natalia were arguing, and it ignores health effects, but what I’m excited about in this discussion is rendering these kinds of trade-offs able to reasoned about
I agree about your point on making trade-offs possible to reason about. I’ve found that in discussing this away from LW, people will talk as if extra hours of sleep don’t come at the expense of waking hours. To them, at first glance, the decision is between “activity X, Y, and Z with 6 or 8 hours of sleep” rather than between “activity X and Y with 8 hours of sleep, or activity X, Y, and Z with 6 hours of sleep.”
When I point this out, the follow-up is “but what if the lost sleep makes activity Z a negative experience?” When we eventually anchor on that being the question at hand, rather than the assumption by default, the conversation can become productive and interesting.
I also agree with your bottlenecks-based framing. I think some tasks are bottlenecked by cognitive function (chess competitions), others usually aren’t but can be in rare/emergency circumstances that therefore require full-time high cognitive function (airline pilots), and many others aren’t bottlenecked by cognition (sailing races).
One counterpoint to that framing is that activities usually don’t take a fixed amount of time. There are many things that I’ve done where I’ll take a quarter of the time or less if I’m in a productive state rather than a non-productive state. Sometimes it might really be a trade off between “activity X, Y, and Z with 6 or 8 hours of sleep”, or even “activity X, Y, and Z with 8 hours of sleep, or activity X and Y with 6 hours of sleep”. I’ve also found that I’m less distracted with more sleep, so it could be “be productive for the most of the day with 8 hours of sleep, or browse social media for most of the day with 6 hours of sleep”. This all has been most obvious when I’ve been working on intellectual activities, like writing or developing software, but I also tend to have slower reflexes when I’ve been sleeping less, so physical activities are also relevant.
My personal sleep logs show that productive states are strongly correlated with the amount of hours of sleep I’ve gotten over the last month and the previous night. I don’t have proof that the math really works out, but I strongly suspect it does. Over longer term periods where I’ve had more or fewer hours of sleep, I’ve gotten more positive outside feedback (grades, feedback in monthly reviews) in the the periods with more sleep. But of course I have no proof that this applies to everyone, it’s correlation instead of causation, and it’s certainly no double blind study.
And of course the hardest problem is beating the akrasia to go to bed when I want to, but that’s a separate issue.
Agree! I think we are coming to a model where N hours of SD results in an average of X% loss in productivity per hour, and a change from Y to Z daily productive hours. We want to know the sign of XZ—Y.
Here, you may be arguing both that the performance loss is so great as to more than cancel out the increased number of working hours. You may also be arguing that we actually lose productive hours with sleep deprivation, despite being awake longer, because the loss of executive function makes us unable to focus on our work.
Alternatively, it may be that the additional productive hours from SD can be put into low-demand but time-consuming life maintenance or pleasurable occupations that otherwise might get neglected. For example, we can imagine a busy student choosing between 8 hours of sleep, or 6 hours of sleep plus 2 hours of socializing. Or between 8 hours of sleep, or 7 hours of sleep plus a trip to the grocery store. Or between 8 hours of sleep and 7 hours of sleep plus 1 hour of exercise.
Sacrificing sleep for efficiency-compounding tasks and meaningful occupations may cancel out or even reverse the cognitive impacts of SD itself. It may be that the worst effects of SD can be mitigated with a combination of practice, organizational supports, and stimulating activities and caffeine. It may also be that for some people, their baseline need for sleep is below the level recommended by sleep researchers, so that for them, reduced sleep comes at no cognitive cost.
So the question is twofold. Does non-strategic mild-to-moderate SD lead to net positive or net negative results on some outcome, like productivity, pleasure, health, or meaningful experiences? Furthermore, to what extent can an SD-management strategy mitigate the negative impacts of mild SD?
The stakes are rather significant. Consider that 2 hours of daily SD from age 20-60 adds up to 3.3 years of additional wakefulness, distributed across the most productive and healthy part of the lifespan. If it ruins the experience of life and damages productivity, that is an enormous detriment. On the other hand, if long-term strategically managed SD can be made neutral to positive, then that is the only intervention we currently have to more or less add healthy years to the natural lifespan.
Given the obvious complexities of managing sleep, even for adults people who are attempting to get a full 7-8 hours per night, it seems worth puzzling through it up front in order to establish an optimal sleep routine, given one’s individual preferences, bodily needs, and demands of life.