Why are you assuming it’s even bad to enact them on animals? In the agricultural industry we stick tasers up the anuses of bulls to harvest their ejaculate. If you can tie a calf down to harvest veal for the pleasure of humans, why can’t you fight dogs for the pleasure of humans?
I’m not sure how your moral anti-realist views play into this, so it might be useful to explain how they’re influencing your answers.
I am two people removed away from a gentleman who has a sleep disorder that means he can never sleep more than two hours, and he’s otherwise healthy. That seems to suggest if there are negative effects from lack of sleep, they aren’t incurred from practical biological necessity, but from what our brains do to enforce sleep.
Also, OP, if you actually don’t have any ill effects from 6 or so hours of sleep, it’s possible you might have a similar genetic condition.
In the comments, I don’t understand why people seem to be so swayed by the comparison of sleep deprivation to fasting or exercise. The only thing that tells you is that things that might seem harmful sometimes aren’t, which is obviously the case. It doesn’t speak at all to whether or not acute sleep deprivation is good for you no more than it speaks to whether not getting occasionally getting blitzed is good for you.
Similarly, the idea of ‘variety is good’ as a general principle of health has so many obvious exceptions, and seems to be just be based on memes about nutrition. It doesn’t seem like a principle you could use to make accurate predictions about health science.
I’m very interested in the idea that most of the negative recorded effects of sleep deprivation are caused by sleepiness, not sleeplessness. However, there are some effects that you cannot attribute to sleepiness, like hormonal changes.
I would love to see more research done, but I think I’ve decided epistemically that I have to trust the body of knowledge before I trust somebody on the internet. It seems like you’re alleging an entire conspiracy in sleep science, and your evidence is not good enough to brook that.
In addition, using evidence like a sleep scientist falsifying data once to write a book does not actually help your case. Like a lot of your evidence, it’s n=1, and it adds to the perception that you’re alleging a conspiracy that really has no motive to exist.
Your example of a sleep deprivation expert one time saying that 5.5 hours can be alright is another n=1 case and it’s frustrating to read because you seem like someone who’s very passionate about this topic, but you need to write better and discriminate among evidence so that you lead with your best data.
Edit: Reversed stupidity is not brilliance. Saying that the state of sleep of sleep research is poor does not support making wild claims similarly supported by poor research.
He alleges a psyop. It’s alright to feel nervous about the content.
Elizabeth’s comment and one other that I remember but can’t find now.
Revisiting this, I dislike the analogy even more. Analogies aren’t how you do science, and I’d argue that a majority of the time, things that feel bad are bad. Exercise doesn’t even actually generally feel bad, it generally feels good. You don’t have to encourage children to run or skip or hop, you only have to do that with sedentary adults.
Also, the author says that the state of sleep research is “100% a psyop,” so I’m very sceptical of their thinking in general.
Maybe they do have legitimate points, and good ideas can come from people who think differently than the majority, but this article is full of red flags. Somebody else can sort this.
I don’t think Christians agree that the utility of heaven is finite, I think they think it is infinite they’re just not interested in thinking about the implications
How do you do that? Do you take their picture beforehand or something?
“Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s our land…We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours….That’s what makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.”
“We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.”
”Yes, but the bank is only made of men.”
″No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
What’s the basis for believing that intelligent alien life is likely to exist elsewhere in the universe? We have one data point for coordinated intelligent life coming about, and we don’t even know how much additional extinction risk lies between us and becoming interstellar.
I don’t know how you would even begin to try and calculate those odds.
From what I’ve seen the arguments for alien life come down to their being a lot of planets and a lot of time, but we have no idea what number we’re balancing with that. There is no way to establish a lower-bound on how unlikely the emergence of life is. The only evidence is an absence of evidence.
I am willing to bet 3% of my net worth that we will not be contacted by aliens in the next 1000 years.
[Policy makers]
A couple of years ago there was an AI trained to beat Tetris. Artificial intelligences are very good at learning video games, so it didn’t take long for it to master the game. Soon it was playing so quickly that the game was speeding up to the point it was impossible to win and blocks were slowly stacking up, but before it could be forced to place the last piece, it paused the game.
As long as the game didn’t continue, it could never lose.
When we ask AI to do something, like play Tetris, we have a lot of assumptions about how it can or should approach that goal, but an AI doesn’t have those assumptions. If it looks like it might not achieve its goal through regular means, it doesn’t give up or ask a human for guidance, it pauses the game.
I’m trying to find the balance between suggesting existential/catastrophic risk and screaming it or coming off too dramatic, any feedback would be welcome.
The point that humans are the most valuable resource in the modern age is a really great point and makes me much more optimistic for the future of democracy. It makes it look like supporting a middle class would be very much in everyone’s best interest, so any failure to that end is more likely to be a coordination problem and not oppression or something. Thank you for that point.