You’re confusing the superficial expressions of high-status and the nature of normal human interaction, which is nothing but status games. Your texts, this and others, very clearly signal high-status in this context. It is clearly not your sole motivation, not perhaps even a major one, but status moves are apparent throughout your texts.
“Having achieved some small degree of status in certain very limited circles, here’s what I do to try to avoid the status-makes-you-stupid effect”
Seriously, you saying that you have achieved “some small degree of status” is a huge understatement. If you used that expression, because stronger statement would make you vulnerable, I guess it makes sense, but do realize that it’s just another move in status-games. It’s basically a defensive move to counter possible attacks against your status. Ie. it lowers your status so that no one can make threats to your status. Had you said that “I am practically a Jesus in some circles”, which would have been close to the truth, this could have been challenged very easily. When it’s put the way you said it, it’s more of an compliment to yourself.
If you really think that you have achieved “some small degree of status”, I think you have a huge blind spot in the area of human social interaction.
“I try to feel a small flash of self-satisfaction whenever I publicly admit that I am wrong, over what a good rationalist I am being and what a good impression I am making.”
This is a status move to make your status higher.
I’m interested in knowing how you came up with the conclusion that it reduces your sleep need (or bed time) by one hour?
I can understand that taking melatonin would reduce bed time if it made you fall asleep faster, but personally I’ve had no trouble falling asleep quickly so there would basically be no difference. (In fact, I’ve experienced an opposite effect with the couple of times I’ve taken melatonin.)
It takes a lot more than just casual observations to conclude that there are other effects. Basically you’d need to measure your sleep debt some way and compare its development when taking the drug and when not. Unfortunately there is no direct way to measure sleep debt so it will require quite extensive tests to make any decisive conclusions about this hypothesis.
If you already have this data, please share it. If not, I’d be happy if you took a step back and really tried to measure and confirm this claim.
One final note is that current research has demonstrated that sleep has an important part in memory consolidation. If supplemental melatonin really does cut sleep need, it will necessary have effects on memory consolidation too. (For example, motor memory consolidation happens in REM and NREM-2 phases that most probably would be cut if daily sleep need was reduced.)