This comment should be upvoted for its rigor and contribution to the discussion. But I am a bit disappointed that this comment is so highly upvoted and that Alexey’s response fails to communicate the higher level crux. [CoI: Alexey and I are best friends; I have benefited from his takes on sleep.]
The high-level objection I want to raise is something like “ugh, it’s not how you should think about mad science.” Ozzie Gooen described the difference between disagreeables and assessors quite well. This post is of highly-disagreeable-noticing-a-conspiracy-against-humanity-mad-science type and the comment is careful-measured-assessor type. Peter’s comment and even Alexey’s response were operating under “assessing,” which is fair but misses quite a bit as the essay is titled “Theses on Sleep” and not “A Systematic Review of Sleep.”
I can’t imagine the mindset behind this comment producing the core ideas of the post. Like, it’s very hard for me to imagine someone who is not overly dismissive of sleep science (e.g., thinking that it is 100% psyops) bearing through a harsh sleep-deprivation self-experiment and seriously considering that modern sleep is a superstimulus, contributes to depression, is unnecessary. It’s correct to point out that not every single piece of evidence about sleep has been fabricated and used in psyops but I think this ~passion is a cost of taking mad ideas seriously enough to engage with them.
While the above comment is epistemically virtuous on the level of evaluating the strength of evidence and noticing the priors, I think it misses the larger picture[1]: discoveries are often made in bizarre circumstances and look like epicycle upon epicycle [see: SMTM on scurvy (one, two) and The Copernican Revolution from the Inside].
We surely want to reward hypothesis generation. Ideally, great hypotheses would be generated by people who hedge and bow appropriately, but in practice, it takes bull-headedness.
This comment should be upvoted for its rigor and contribution to the discussion. But I am a bit disappointed that this comment is so highly upvoted and that Alexey’s response fails to communicate the higher level crux. [CoI: Alexey and I are best friends; I have benefited from his takes on sleep.]
The high-level objection I want to raise is something like “ugh, it’s not how you should think about mad science.” Ozzie Gooen described the difference between disagreeables and assessors quite well. This post is of highly-disagreeable-noticing-a-conspiracy-against-humanity-mad-science type and the comment is careful-measured-assessor type. Peter’s comment and even Alexey’s response were operating under “assessing,” which is fair but misses quite a bit as the essay is titled “Theses on Sleep” and not “A Systematic Review of Sleep.”
I can’t imagine the mindset behind this comment producing the core ideas of the post. Like, it’s very hard for me to imagine someone who is not overly dismissive of sleep science (e.g., thinking that it is 100% psyops) bearing through a harsh sleep-deprivation self-experiment and seriously considering that modern sleep is a superstimulus, contributes to depression, is unnecessary. It’s correct to point out that not every single piece of evidence about sleep has been fabricated and used in psyops but I think this ~passion is a cost of taking mad ideas seriously enough to engage with them.
While the above comment is epistemically virtuous on the level of evaluating the strength of evidence and noticing the priors, I think it misses the larger picture[1]: discoveries are often made in bizarre circumstances and look like epicycle upon epicycle [see: SMTM on scurvy (one, two) and The Copernican Revolution from the Inside].
We surely want to reward hypothesis generation. Ideally, great hypotheses would be generated by people who hedge and bow appropriately, but in practice, it takes bull-headedness.
Another big picture miss is that evidence has been strongly filtered by authority-prestige forces [see: post-structuralism and hard programme in sociology of science].
“Hypotheses on Sleep” would have been more accurate but would have undersold his Martin Luther energy.
(I am wondering if this is sort of what outsiders mean when they say “EA is too systematic and not speculative enough.”)