I’m biased in favor of this. I started sleeping enough when I got very ill (proper sleep on a routine schedule is the most important thing I can do besides medication to manage my disease) and it has made such a difference to my experience of life. I’m beginning to suspect overstimulation in general is a hugely underappreciated cause of pysical and psychological dysfunction.
My only hesitation is that the solutions that are forthcoming aren’t exactly in EA’s wheelhouse, but that could be because I’m not thinking creatively enough. Sleep deprivation is important and neglected, but might not be very tractable and effective solutions may or may not be scalable. There’s not some cheap supplement that everyone needs that we could just hand out. You have to be dedicated to making an against-the-grain personal behavior change to sleep more, and that’s complicated and hard. (As I say, only severe illness was able to move the needle for me.) My first thoughts are all policy solutions: later school start times, more mandatory sleep breaks for hospital workers, shift workers, etc., some way of regulating smartphones to cut into sleep less? One of those might rise to EA criteria.
There’s not some cheap supplement that everyone needs that we could just hand out. You have to be dedicated to making an against-the-grain personal behavior change to sleep more, and that’s complicated and hard. (As I say, only severe illness was able to move the needle for me.)
I am just hopeful that reading the book (or some equivalent experience that educates one about the benefits of sleep and costs of sleep-deprivation) is enough to make some people change their sleep habits.
If I let my hopefulness run wild, I imagine these few people that changed their sleep habits (like you and me) telling their friends and families about its positive consequences, who would in turn tell their friends and families, and so on.
Also, I think that advocacy is something that the EA community can be quite effective at. For example (though it is just my guess—I don’t have evidence for that), I guess the EA community helped a lot in making people less dismissive about the risk of unaligned AI.
(Honestly, I don’t think there is any neglected problem that the EA community would be ineffective against. It seems to me that this community includes many highly capable people, and so as long as some problem is quite neglected, I am sure EAs can at least find some of the low hanging fruit, as long as they direct their attention toward that problem.)
Although I don’t think it’s a likely EA cause area, I definitely think it’s good for the world to raise awareness about the costs of sleep deprivation among EAs! I’d love to see norms in our community of respecting sleep, like not having events too late, not making them too overstimulating, not relying on alcohol to make something a social event, rejecting startup-y “always on” culture on by doing business mostly by daylight, etc.
I’m biased in favor of this. I started sleeping enough when I got very ill (proper sleep on a routine schedule is the most important thing I can do besides medication to manage my disease) and it has made such a difference to my experience of life. I’m beginning to suspect overstimulation in general is a hugely underappreciated cause of pysical and psychological dysfunction.
My only hesitation is that the solutions that are forthcoming aren’t exactly in EA’s wheelhouse, but that could be because I’m not thinking creatively enough. Sleep deprivation is important and neglected, but might not be very tractable and effective solutions may or may not be scalable. There’s not some cheap supplement that everyone needs that we could just hand out. You have to be dedicated to making an against-the-grain personal behavior change to sleep more, and that’s complicated and hard. (As I say, only severe illness was able to move the needle for me.) My first thoughts are all policy solutions: later school start times, more mandatory sleep breaks for hospital workers, shift workers, etc., some way of regulating smartphones to cut into sleep less? One of those might rise to EA criteria.
I am just hopeful that reading the book (or some equivalent experience that educates one about the benefits of sleep and costs of sleep-deprivation) is enough to make some people change their sleep habits.
If I let my hopefulness run wild, I imagine these few people that changed their sleep habits (like you and me) telling their friends and families about its positive consequences, who would in turn tell their friends and families, and so on.
Also, I think that advocacy is something that the EA community can be quite effective at. For example (though it is just my guess—I don’t have evidence for that), I guess the EA community helped a lot in making people less dismissive about the risk of unaligned AI.
(Honestly, I don’t think there is any neglected problem that the EA community would be ineffective against. It seems to me that this community includes many highly capable people, and so as long as some problem is quite neglected, I am sure EAs can at least find some of the low hanging fruit, as long as they direct their attention toward that problem.)
Although I don’t think it’s a likely EA cause area, I definitely think it’s good for the world to raise awareness about the costs of sleep deprivation among EAs! I’d love to see norms in our community of respecting sleep, like not having events too late, not making them too overstimulating, not relying on alcohol to make something a social event, rejecting startup-y “always on” culture on by doing business mostly by daylight, etc.