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 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.