I did not look into his claims about road accidents but given that Walker misrepresents and so much of the research (and sometimes falsifies it) on sleep, I would not be willing to believe such claim simply based on him saying this in the book.
I remember your arguments and they were bad. Here as well you claim the causal relationship between sleep and longevity while we have 0 good studies demonstrating it.
If I had the opportunity, I would not only downvote you a 1000 times, I would outright ban you from Hacker News. Your comments are uncharitable, careless, and abrasive.
>you over-analyze a situation that is relatively obvious, with a sample of 1, and simply by doing so you effectively suggest to generalize its results - which is wrong.
>You dropping a caveat mid-page in a single sentence is also the same thing scummy tabloids do: make a big title about something, then state the opposite somewhere in the actual small-print article.
The title of my study is:
>The Effects on Cognition of Sleeping 4 Hours per Night for 12-14 Days: a Pre-Registered Self-Experiment
Which clearly tells the reader that this is a n=1 study. I'm not just dropping a caveat mid-page. If you somehow missed this, it's your problem, not mine.
>It's the brogrammer equivalent of fake news: 22-yo kid "makes science" with a sample of 1, some videogames, and a few charts.
>You are 22 year old. Your body is at peak condition, built to go out and hunt for days on little food and little sleep. Of course it will work more or less fine for a few weeks.
I like this comment because its author can't decide whether my study is the "equivalent of fake news" or whether its results are obviously true.
PVT is a standard in psychology task used to assess sleepiness - no relation to video games
Note that the "getting lost in thought" happened when I slept 8 hours not 4. I think it just came to me taking hours upon hours of very similar tasks.
>I was extremely bored in the last 2 days of taking control measurements and sometimes got distracted and lost in thought, which resulted in me getting 3 and 4 lapses per session (as can be seen on Figure 1). I do not believe that these lapses represent my lack of alertness. ...
>The last low control score on the verbal section is a result of me becoming very bored with taking the SAT 5 days in a row, getting lost in thought for 10 minutes, and having to rush.
I will continue to experiment with sleep, mostly for myself :) and I'm planning to test memory and skill acquisition next time -- these are the two things people say are affected the most, so I'll try to figure out if that is true for me.
>I would imagine the group of people who immediately accepted everything this book claimed as fact and went on to immediately adjust their lifestyles to match may have a strong correlation with the group of people who are more susceptible to the placebo effect.
Yes, I believe that you should take this factor into account while reading my experiment. As I write:
>Lack of effect on cognitive ability is surprising and may reflect true lack of cognitive impairment, my desire to demonstrate lack of cognitive impairment due to chronic sleep deprivation and lack of blinding biasing the measurements, lack of statistical power, and/or other factors.
Sure, I have nothing against getting enough sleep but the book's first 10 pages contain so much misinformation and given that Walker outright falsifies the data in the book (https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-what-do-you-d...) I would struggle to call it anything other than bullshit.
I don't know about chess but I coded a lot during the experiment (on day 7 I spent 11 hours coding, starting with a big block between 8am and 2pm) and felt great.