Related:<p><i>“Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684519" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684519</a> - April 2021 (151 comments)<p><i>Why We Sleep: A Tale of Institutional Failure</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22844723" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22844723</a> - April 2020 (52 comments)<p><i>“Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22419958" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22419958</a> - Feb 2020 (34 comments)<p><i>“Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850</a> - Nov 2019 (58 comments)<p><i>Why We Sleep, and Why We Often Can’t</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18798366" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18798366</a> - Jan 2019 (80 comments)<p><i>Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401397" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401397</a> - Oct 2017 (295 comments)<p><i>Sleep deprivation is increasing our risk of serious illness</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15324195" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15324195</a> - Sept 2017 (77 comments)
My 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.<p>She's completely healthy otherwise (well, other than recovering from COVID just now).<p>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.
I 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.<p>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.<p>The WHO didn't declare a sleep loss epidemic? "2/3rds of Americans don't get enough sleep" is false? <i>That's</i> 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?
Every 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.
To 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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: <a href="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" rel="nofollow">https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-what-do-you-d...</a>
This seems incredibly nit picky. My summary of a few points below:<p>#1: Walker claims sleep deprivation decreases life span, but so does sleeping too much.<p>#2: Walker says sleep deprivation is always bad, but sometimes it helps people with depression.<p>#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.<p>#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.<p>#5: Walker said the WHO recommends 8 hours of sleep, but it's actually the National Sleep Foundation and they recommend 7-9<p>Here's Walker's response to some of this: <a href="https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/why-we-sleep-responses-to-questions-from-readers/" rel="nofollow">https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/why-we-sleep-...</a><p>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.
I read the book. I think it's fairly obvious that the research he presents is pretty speculative. That said, it's a <i>very</i> 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.<p>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.<p>If Books Could Kill: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/5wHpooGMRsSBrUHhQZbOZp?si=4951cc63356149c3" rel="nofollow">https://open.spotify.com/episode/5wHpooGMRsSBrUHhQZbOZp?si=4...</a><p>I would prefer if Walker provided the citations for what this author is asking for, but the entire point of a popsci book <i>is that it's not a scholarly article</i>. 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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I had no idea that some people <i>benefit</i> 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.
A 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.<p>The kind that would scare someone like Sagan...
As 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.
>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.<p>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?