Something doesn’t quite sit right with me about him linking to a couple things that mention Walker’s rebuttal https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/why-we-sleep-... but not linking to it directly. If you are trying to get people to think critically about the book it seems like they should at least be given the opportunity to see the authors response to your criticism.
Interesting. I briefly checked into one of his retorts and it appears just as poorly sourced. Take this one:
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has stated that, “Insufficient sleep is a public health epidemic.”
If you follow the link (which doesn't even go to the CDC site!), it's dead. If you go get the 473 page report from the CDC for 2014 (implied by the dead link) from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus14.pdf, you find the word sleep used only 3 times (once in the index) and no such quote.
Reading the CDC blog post, it seems like an exaggerated use of "epidemic". An epidemic is something that has arisen, or is spreading, in some growing of transient fashion.
The blog article describes a problem that exists, and may have always existed. A behavior that contributes to bad health outcomes - well that's tremendously common. There are probably many thousands of human behaviors that have negative consequences. Would you say there's an "epidemic" of poor posture in the world? No, it just is a constant reality - something we need to work on continuously.
Overall, while it might have been an accurate source - it's not a very meaningful notion or weighty reference.
None of this was called into question as far as I understand.
The problem in the initial critique was that the author of the book misattributed the epidemic claim to WHO. He subsequently admitted that he misremembered and really it was the CDC. He provided a source to back this up on the blog.
The poster above then seemingly called the veracity of that into question, based on a brief investigation.
This prompted me to do my own investigation, because I wanted to know what was true after all. Up to that point I was unconvinced of any malicious intent on the author's part.
And it turned out that the author was not lying. That's all.
***
As for the use of the word "epidemic" I agree -- it might have been an exaggeration/hyperbole or colloquial use (a bit out of place then) on CDC's part. This is probably why they eventually changed it to "problem".
The article was online however for close to 6 years under the original headline and even though it was updated long before the book was published, I would not hold it against the author, because the book was most likely written over a long period of time.
That there are mistakes and errors, shows to me that it might have been a bit rushed towards the end.
None of these significantly alter the validity of the message and the author admitted and corrected them -- a revised edition of the book is apparently in print. To me this means that he cares.
***
On a personal level, I feel the message of the book comes from a good place. It does point to real problems that are systematically overlooked/ignored/marginalized/ridiculed and it is completely plausible to me that taking steps to fixing them might significantly improve society. Some exaggeration might be in order.
I read the book and the information did contribute to substantially improving my life. I verified some data in it by self-experimentation. It is harmless and scientifically-sound enough to offer people looking for solutions to their sleeping problems.
For the unfortunate these are absolutely not trivial and incomparable to bad posture. Bad sleep can make one's life absolutely miserable. A lot of miserable people makes for a miserable society.
As it happens, I've been going through an extremely stressful time since last September. I've learned to sleep by listening to Star Trek while I sleep. I think the sound of familiar voices, and the distraction to prevent me from dreaming naturally (which currently turns into stress nightmares) has really saved me. Two of my colleagues have turned to medication, and I can see they're having a harder time of all this.
I have been struggling with bad sleep for most of my life -- seems to run in the family (now I suspect it might be a common chronotype). What finally improved my life and has now been working better and longer than anything before (and I implemented this after reading the book) is properly establishing my circadian rhythm/chronotype and adjusting to it. Now I sleep on a regular schedule and my total sleep time has actually decreased.
Unfortunately this is rather difficult and requires radical lifestyle changes if you are a night type trying to exist on a typical work schedule. I was desperate and in a position to introduce the changes, and fortunately it's worked for me. Hard to recommend to everybody though at this point -- that's why a societal change is needed and that's where this book does good.
From indirect experience, echoing the book, I would strongly advise against medication, in particular zolpidem. It is very highly addictive, may have terrible side-effects, especially mixed with other substances, and ultimately doesn't really work. Honestly it is so much worse than so many illegal substances that from my point of view the only explanation for its continued proliferation is profit.
Definitely respect the author for standing against that in the book.
Guzey's appendix addresses it directly: Between late 2010/early 2011 and August/September 2015 [1 (a), 2 (a), 3 (a), 4 (a)], CDC had a page on its site titled “Insufficient Sleep Is a Public Health Epidemic”. More than 2 years before Why We Sleep was published, the page changed the word “epidemic” to “problem”, so that its title became “Insufficient Sleep Is a Public Health Problem”.https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#possible-origin-of-the...
I just linked to Walker's response at the top of my essay. (I did not link to it when it was published because Walker never acknowledged being the author and it took a while for UC Berkeley to confirm authorship at which point I had already stopped thinking about this. Notably, Walker still never acknowledged being the author of that post)
It’s “human centipede” science: make up a false claim (“all animals sleep”) with a bogus but practically unverifiable citation, then have your claim repeated in papers which cite yours.
> Had he put the same effort to sourcing the book and toning down the claims, there would have not been a controversy.
Had he put effort into ruining the success of his book by toning down his claims, expressing caveats, adding footnotes of where he was using a small study, etc, then someone else willing to take the risks of not being diligent would get the fame and opportunity to defend their book.
He still seems to be twisting and misrepresenting the NSF guidelines of 7-9 hours to mean the point value of 8 hours.
No, Walker, 63 percent of people don't have unmet sleep needs, as you are still falsely claiming. You're either being dishonest or you are too innumerate to understand what an interval is.
I had a purely practical issue with "Why we sleep". The book says multiple times that you cannot run a sleep deficit and then make it up later. So what should I do if I have run a deficit? If the deficit reduces cognitive function, and I can't make it up with more sleep, does it follow that for every short nights sleep I will have a permanent reduction in cognitive function? If I turn my alarm off and let my body decide it makes me sleep for longer after a deficit, is my body wasting its time?
The book is best viewed as a lot of well-meaning exaggerations that are, nonetheless, exaggerations.
The author really, really wants people to take sleep seriously, so he stretches the truth as much as possible to make sleep sound gravely important. He's writing to sell books and spread his message, not necessarily to win awards for posting accurate research.
> If the deficit reduces cognitive function, and I can't make it up with more sleep, does it follow that for every short nights sleep I will have a permanent reduction in cognitive function?
Obviously, the short-term cognitive deficits of sleep deprivation are reversed upon sleeping again.
It's likely that some amount of long-term damage occurs when engaging in unhealthy activities like losing sleep, but the amount of damage is only significant when sustained over long periods of time.
Think of like drinking alcohol: Drinking a bottle of wine in a night is not a healthy activity, but doing it a couple times a year will have negligible impacts on your health. However, drinking a bottle of wine every night for many years in a row will start to produce measurable effects on your liver, among other things.
Sleep deprivation is similar. Missing a night of sleep isn't going to shorten your lifespan or doom you to early cognitive decline. However, depriving yourself of sleep for years on end is likely to produce some negative effects over time.
I am not sure about years, but I think that there are a large number of couples with newborns that are loosing some significant amount of sleep for at least 1 year or so. Not every day perhaps, but I think as new parents we run pretty much on sleep debt. I asked most of my friends and parents and this seems to be the case for all of them.
If my experience is not local and limited then someone has to do a study about loss of sleep and the effects this have on parents.
I found a lot of articles about the lack of sleep and the effect on mental health or health in general, but I am not finding a good explanation about how come if this is true people still become parents, then they go back to work and seems to function well.
Is something special about parenting and recovery from lack of sleep? Or we all parents will remain forever with the negative effects due to sleep deprivation happening in early years of parenting?
Just sharing another personal experience: think book came out exactly in the year my kid was born. After reading some reviews and finding out that it does not give any advice about how to handle sleep deprivation I refuse to read it then as I was afraid it will make me more anxious about the small amount of sleep I was getting thus making me sleep even less :)
> Sleep deprivation is similar. Missing a night of sleep isn't going to shorten your lifespan or doom you to early cognitive decline. However, depriving yourself of sleep for years on end is likely to produce some negative effects over time.
You have citations to support this? Or are you just recycling Walker’s claims with slightly less exaggeration?
Perhaps I should be more intellectually vigilant but this claim strikes me as so likely to be true that I wouldn’t bother trying to find a citation for it.
I didn’t make it into anything and I don’t take it as axiomatic, I just wouldn’t spend time looking it up. It also sounds true to me based on my knowledge of biology, upon which I get to draw inferences I think are reasonable.
In my experience, the people who are frequently sleep deprived for a few years don't seem to be worse for it afterward.
My main sources of anecdote for this are grad school students with hectic school and advisor setups (who often are partly sleep deprived for much of 3+ years), and parents who have several children in short succession (ensuring their sleep is ruined for roughly 2 years).
In neither case do those groups seem to suffer significant long-term effects that are obviously from the sleep deprivation.
>> He's writing to sell books and spread his message,
> ...and arguably that turns it into fraud. If not for the misrepresentation of the facts, would I have bought his book?
Not to be overly-pedantic, but I think knowingly exaggerating the truth to sell books is more of a scam than a fraud. To me, fraud is closer to outright deception than exaggeration. Fraud is also better defined. Laws are written about fraud. Fraud, I think, is a weightier charge of duplicity.
I base this only on my own internal reaction to the words. Here’s someone getting more into the lexicon:
> In short, scam has no legal status as a term of law in most jurisdictions, except insofar as it may be defined as a type of fraud. The term fraud is broad but usually very carefully defined in statutory law.
I think that page supports the notion that it's fraud. People pay with money for the book because of its claims. The legal dictionary says:
FRAUD. An intentional perversion of truth for the purpose of inducing another in reliance upon it to part with some valuable thing belonging to him or to surrender a legal right; a false representation of a matter of fact, whether by words or by conduct, by false or misleading allegations, or by concealment of that which should have been disclosed, which deceives and is intended to deceive another so that he shall act upon it to his legal injury.
It's a pretty broad definition. Certainly a strong case could be mounted that this fits, however, academics are basically never prosecuted for fraud and there would be enormous institutional resistance to doing so, given the prevalence of fraud in the research literature.
Interesting! I didn't know there was a distinction in law between those two terms. I think your definition of "scam" is closer to what I was trying to get at.
That might be the literal interpretation of what is said, but it's not how I interpreted it.
To me there is an implied "in the short term". So if I go without 4 hours of sleep today, I cannot just choose to sleep an extra 4 (or more) hours tomorrow. It's not an even trade. At some point more sleep has diminishing returns.
This does not mean more sleep has no value. Maybe it will add up over the next few days and we'll be back to good. People with sleep deprivation tend to have an REM rebound effect and personally when I've had a few poor nights in a row I will sleep noticeably deeper.
If someone is awake multiple days then sleep-like behaviour happens while they are still awake. They start to hallucinate or dream with eyes open, or enter microsleeps that they don't remember. It's not inconveivable to me (personal conjecture warning) that our diminished state is because some of our brain is doing the necessary upkeep normally relegated to sleep, so we're catching up while we are awake. It's just not something we notice until it gets really bad.
So, this would remove any permanent cognitive reduction, however you'll probably forever lose any memories that weren't correctly stored and so on.
In my opinion his claim was in regards to memory. If you lose sleep you can’t get that memory correctly “written” to your long term storage. And once you miss the timeframe when that memory was relevant you can’t recover it by simply sleeping more. So in effect, your short term memory suffers irrecoverable damage if you skip on sleep. Cognitive function does require adequate sleep and recovers to normal operation.
I have not read the book, but could the author simply mean that the recovery period for sleep deprivation is the same regardless if one try to make it up with more hours of sleeping than is regularly necessary?
Let say an individual is working 20 hours a day for 5 days, and in order for the brain and endocrine system to return to normal it takes 14 days of recovery. A few days of 12+ hours of sleep might not have any beneficial effect because the involved biological systems are too slow to get any benefit from the extra sleep, and the excessive amount of sleep might even cause additional problems which hinder recovery.
Making an educated guess, endocrine system is likely a big culprit here. Some hormones are specifically secreted during sleep, while the recipients of hormones are often triggered based on relative changes in hormone levels. If you have first a period of very low levels, followed by a period of sudden spikes, getting back to normal might take a while.
Over the last 2 years I’ve had several periods of sleeping 0-2hrs/night for up to a week at a time (sick kid in the hospital).
One time, I was able to try to “catch up” in the following weeks by sleeping as much as I wanted. The other times, I was limited to my typical 7-8hrs.
No matter what, my recovery time was about 2 days of proper sleep for every day of sleep deprivation. Sleeping excessively (10+ hours) didn’t seem to accelerate recovery.
I can't be entirely sure what was meant but my sense from talking to people in this area is that statements like that are being made very literally. As in, if you do not sleep at all one night, its not like you can sleep an extra 8 hours the next day and be totally restored. The recovery process might involve a couple of days of sleeping an extra 3 hours, just for example.
I get the sense exercise and injury are good analogies. If you overexercise, cutting back by the amount you overdid it is too oversimplified; if you stop exercising for a month, you cant just expect to need or suffice with a month's worth later.
Firstly because I can observe an immediate improvement after catch up sleep. Im pretty sure the book doesn't say 'you get better but lose 0.1% each time' it says you can't make it up at all. If I had 4 hours sleep tonight I would feel horrible tomorrow, but even a 20min power nap would improve things.
But you wouldn’t be as well off as if you had just slept a good nights sleep to begin with.
It’s a highly nonlinear and even chaotic system - a living human being. The idea of “making it up” is a linear concept not entirely fit for the system. You can get back somewhat and you can’t undo everything.
I know from personal experience that however long you've stayed up, that 8 hours of sleep is the most you can do to help at that point, in other words after 20 hours of 'lost sleep' you can really only sleep for 8. (Edit: you can sleep for more but it will make no difference).
Or - if you lose a few hours every night during the week, you cannot 'catch up' on the weekend, it doesn't work like that.
A person who lives for years at 5 hours a weeknight but 11 on the weekends will be in poorer health than someone who just did 8 hours a night consistently.
So how do i, a regular person without a neuroscience or sleep background, know who to trust? The about page on this page doesn't lead me to believe that this is another expert in the field. Maybe Guzey got it wrong, maybe they're both wrong? Why should I take this page at face value?
I guess this leads to a bigger philosophical leaning question, how do I pick out good information when I don't know the field. This has been a struggle for me, I have a recent interest in neuroscience and how it relates to consciousness. This topic seems to have a wide variety of science based, philosophy based and some real out there stuff but it gets pitches as reliable. I really don't know how to pick good books to read. I don't know how to filter out the equivalent of like being antivax in a field i dont know about.
To try to answer my own questions, I guess in some way, you can't ever know the truth? But relying on one book, blog, article, view point to base your understanding will definitely lead to being uniformed unless you are lucky enough to stumble on a god source the first time.
One way to do it is looking at what other experts say. I'm a long-time reader of statistician Andrew Gelman, who has a lot of good critiques of shoddy science. He responds to Guzey's critique here: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/11/24/why-we-sle...
Even well credentialed experts aren't strictly trustworthy, because they can often be wrong or have big gaps in knowledge. Credentials can be faked or bullshitted into. Even honest experts can fall into self corrupting games that force them to spread bad information to maintain their position in their field.
As individuals, we're going to constantly mess up and follow the wrong ideas. The best we can do is hold lightly to them and be willing to be proven wrong and always be weighing the risks of an idea being wrong. Always ask what the incentives of a person sharing an idea are. Profit incentives distort rational thinking. We all worship the thing that feeds us.
It's important in some cases to take leaps of faith so that you don't become paralyzed to inaction from the vast uncertainty of the world. Just be wary that you don't get stuck on a sinking island or take overly absurd leaps that don't have the reward to justify the risk.
Hopefully, the human colossus is marching closer to truth, even if we as individuals can never achieve it.
You shouldn't trust anybody other than yourself and your ability to recognise scientific consensus. This process is not easy and as goes for most things in life, diversification is key. Basing your research on a single article/book/source is bad, and your confidence that you understand/are knowledgeable about a topic should rise as you do more research.
I'd probably rephrase "trust" to "maintain appropriate confidence intervals on your beliefs"
that being said, there's clearly something to trusting yourself beyond rational levels. How far would Kanye have gotten if not for boundless self belief?
That’s only slightly marginally better than randomly trusting any well respected source. In the end no single source should ever be viewed as definitive.
On the other hand you can’t spend all that much time researching every individual topic. Which is where the problem comes from, but trick is to hold options lightly.
It feels better, but in terms of actual evidence it’s not. One core issue is everyone makes mistakes, and nobody can research everything. So, the minimum error rate in all human content isn’t that great.
Perhaps I should have been more precise (since you ommited a key part of my sentence) in pointing out that any person on their own is probably wrong about a lot of things. Only by taking into consideration a large enough sample of opinions can you begin to formulate your own with sufficient confidence of it being correct. Outsorcing your opinions to an 'expert' is giving up critical thinking.
You are correct in that there are fundamental problems with a statement as simple as the one I made. Don't take it at face value though. If you ignore your surroundings and formulate an opinion that is obviously different, I'd argue your ability to recongnise scientific consensus is severely lacking - Distilling it into something like "Don't trust anyone other than the scientific consensus" might be better.
If you are highly intelligent, and recognize your own ignorance, then this works quite well. Anti-vaxxers get it wrong because they lack intellectual humility.
I thought we'd stop using "anti vaxx" as a slur now most of Europe and multiple world leaders have spent the last four months spreading or consuming anti-vaxx propaganda. It's not like that's a fringe position anymore.
I guess it depends how you define it, but France, Germany, Italy, Denmark etc all have been suspending the AZ vaccine as 'dangerous' although the actual reports of side effects are far less than the claimed danger from COVID. I admit I haven't made a formal list of every country and ticked them off to see if it's literally >50% of countries, but it's certainly >50% of Europe by GDP at this point.
This is a good demonstration of the Lindy Effect. [0] Essentially, the longer something has been around, the more chance it has of still existing in the future.
This is exactly the same approach I take when I’m trying to learn a new field, especially one in which I have little to no background. I always begin with the texts that have survived the longest and are still recommended to this day.
While this could very well be valid in natural science fields, I’ve heard that in humanity fields as well as in something as controversial and largely unknown as neuroscience (different from traditional hard science fields such as maths and physics), the consensus gets overthrown so quickly/gets a makeover almost every decade, that old research might appear completely different from the newest consensus in the field. Of course you still have to draw a conclusion yourself in the end by synthesizing all available information, but I wouldn’t say that old information would necessarily be more trustworthy in this case. A lot of understanding in psychology/health from a few decades ago seem to be deemed nonsensical nowadays, and in many of the cases I agree with the newer conclusions.
> A lot of understanding in psychology/health from a few decades ago seem to be deemed nonsensical nowadays, and in many of the cases I agree with the newer conclusions.
This is why the Lindy heuristic mentioned by a sibling comment to yours is relevant.
If X% of the consensus in a field was overturned twenty years ago, then again ten years ago, your expectation should be that in ten years, X% of the current consensus will be thrown out as nonsense as well. So it's not necessarily that the old information was more accurate, but you can't interpret the new information well without it. What's X in your field? Maybe 5%, maybe 80%, then you should look at the field very differently.
Of course, you could be living through another annus mirabilis, where a new consensus is established that then stands for centuries. But this is by definition unlikely, so there must be strong evidence available.
Can’t recommend this approach more. I’m a PhD student in cryptography and I often find that my understanding of a particular problem area is dramatically improved by reading stuff from 20-30 years ago (crypto is a young field) rather than recent publications.
The way I see it, something doesn’t need to be undeniably “True” to have utility. As humans we don’t actually need to be correct about everything we encounter, just correct enough. A working understanding can be perfectly sufficient because most of us aren’t neuroscientists who study sleep. It’s okay for us to be wrong and society will forget about this book in a short time. Someone will write a more “accurate” book about sleep that’ll get popular. But in the meantime if we start paying more attention to sleep hygiene that’s good enough for me.
It’s true that it’s hard to know for sure, but there are a bunch of things you can do. One of the most obvious is to see what other reputable sources say about the author. What’s their track record in the past? Then for any specific piece, you can look at the arguments they’re making, and then look at the sources they reference. Are those sources reputable, etc.
To put it another way, you need to have a bunch of sources you trust, and then see how strong the connections are from any new data back to those original trustworthy sources.
For one, don't go to pop sci books expecting the truth. You'll have a better shot with a peer-reviewed textbook. For sleep, try Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine by Kryger.
There seems to be a very strong correlation between popularity and scientific inaccuracy. For example, Sex at Dawn was a massive hit, and completely based on wistful thinking and speculation, like "We found multiple different kinds of arrowheads in one cave. It must mean the lady living in the cave had multiple lovers, in a happy and peaceful polyamorous utopia"
I wonder if there is a strong correlation between popularity and scientific analysis.
I sometimes see papers getting ripped to shreds by twitter for days, and while the papers are indeed bad, I've seen dozens of papers which are just as bad, just not as interesting to Twitter.
I think there's just little correlation in either direction. The accuracy levels are probably similar if you compare all popular science books to all non-popular books (perhaps above a threshold to exclude the biggest cranks).
My biggest complaint about the book: it's simply terrifying.
If you suffer from insomnia, don't pick up this book. It will have the opposite of the desired effect. It doesn't have a lot of practical guidance. And now, according to this article, much of the terror might be unfounded.
Better books I'd recommend if you have insomnia are "The Sleep Solution" and "The Circadian Code"
Absolutely. I found similar advice to that in this book propelled my insomnia about 4 years ago.
My insomnia responded to CBT-I extremely fast. After 18 months, 2 nights of sleep deprivation (4 hours in bed) and the corner was turned. Now, if I feel my sleep is falling away, my solution is to cut sleep. It rebuilds habits too - what do I do at 6am except run?
I need to figure something out for this. I have narcolepsy and depression and I've fallen into this cycle where I'm tired, so I sleep, then I wake up still tired because I don't get restful sleep, so I go back to sleep. When I'm not at work, I'm unmotivated and bored and I'd rather be asleep, so I go to sleep. Then I wake up tired and so on and so forth. Essentially if I'm not at work and don't absolutely have to do something, I'm asleep.
While I'm at work, I'm daydreaming about sleeping. When a friend manages to get me out of the house, I'm thinking how much I'd rather be asleep. I've got meds for the narcolepsy and meds for the depression, and they make it less bad, but I'm still miserable most of the time. The narcolepsy meds make me able to function and the depression meds keep me from killing myself, but being awake and alive isn't the same as content and fulfilled.
It doesn't help that I work a late shift and have been averaging 60 hours a week for the last 6 months.
Sleep deprivation therapy is news to me and you seem like you might have some knowledge about the subject. So do you have any recommendations as far as therapies and strategies I could look into for this anti-insomnia?
1) It sounds like you really just need a break. Can you take one? Can you ask a friend for help? 60 hrs+ on a whack sleep schedule is tough. Do you have blackout curtains, eye mask, or earplugs to protect your sleep?
2) How is your diet? Under stress if you are eating a crap diet (refined carbs, heavy sugars, caffeine, etc) that will impact your body far more and can even cause cyclical swings of anxiety that impact your ability to rest. See:
3) Come up with an image of relaxation in the highest detail. It needs to be a scene where you feel safe, secure, and feeling the warmth of compassion from someone you trust. Maybe you're on the beach, in the forest, whatever, it needs to be as high detail as you can and engage all the senses. Colors, shapes, smells, textures, temperature, touch. Write it down, draw it out, own it, envision it using every single sense and emotion you can. Practice entering this scene for 20 minutes a day (set a timer) and feel every aspect of it. Take notice of the various details as you are in your scene. Don't expect anything from it, but just work on spending time meditating on and building it for 30 days. Practice this every day regardless of if you feel like it "works" for sleep. After about 3-6 months you'll have a tool you can use to relax pretty quickly, the feelings should follow about 15-30 minutes after spending time in your scene.
4) Insomnia blows ass, I've been there, but the long-term recovery is taking breaks as you need them, writing down a few key actions in your relaxation + nighttime ritual and sticking to it, exactly. Ex: Get tea at 11pm, enter scene at 11:20pm for 20 minutes, read book until I feel tired. Even if it feels like things "aren't working"... Also, get out of bed if you toss and turn. If you're not sleeping anyway, there's no point. Associating wherever you sleep with anxiety needs to end.
There will be ups and downs but you will recover. But absolutely please schedule in breaks to look forward to.
But “Why We Sleep” - recommends CBT-I as “the one of the most effective treatments for insomnia “ ... so why is it bad for people who suffer from insomnia? Your experience seems to echo the point the book makes.
My understanding is that fear of not being able to fall asleep often contributes to the perpetuation of insomnia. So while the recommendation of CBT-I might be helpful, if the book also increases someone's fear of not being able to fall sleep (or more specifically fear of the consequences thereof) it might be net unhelpful. As an analogy, imagine a book that recommends exposure therapy for arachnophobia and also describes in detail all of the ways that spiders can harm humans. Something that provides the recommendation without reinforcing the counterproductive fear is probably more appropriate.
He literally calls out exactly that problem as an “ethics quandary” for approaching this problem. Informing people of the risks can increase the risks. What do you propose he does differently? Just not talk about it at all?
Agreed. I got this book when I started to suffer from insomnia, hoping I could learn something useful about how to cure it or cope with it. The book merely scared me.
- Why we sleep literally calls out the example of treating depression with sleep deprivation.
- The cancer reference was made with the context of “consistently less than 5 hours of sleep”, he then referenced many studies that assessed 4 hour sleeps. This essay misrepresents the context of that chapter.
- As counter evidence throughout he references research done AFTER the book was written...
The problem is that there are both some inaccuracies with the takedown, the book is still factually inaccurate in dangerous ways even though it is accurate in others, and ultimately neither source gives a satisfactory conclusion to the question of how you should approach sleep issues.
There is something about the Why We Sleep controversy that is uniquely frustrating to me, having dealt with sleep problems for years. If I hadn't read HN then I probably would have read that book for far longer than I did. What about the people that might not read HN and still aren't aware of the tangible harms it can cause? It currently has a 4.4 out of 5 on Goodreads and pages of written five-star reviews, proving the utter uselessness of such a metric for topics like health.
It seems the solution is research from a variety of different sources. That worked pretty well for actually sorting out my sleep issues, because I was more careful. But the thing is, time is finite. In the programming realm we can't always do the same militant validation for the thousands of microdependencies a single npm project can pull in. The amount of available information is exploding, and much of it is becoming obsoleted constantly. There has to be a line drawn somewhere. And when we decide to trust the creator as being an "expert" as a compromise, we will inevitably encounter sources like these.
What makes it dangerous? Seems like most people supposedly misinformed by the book content would just pay more attention to their circadian cycle and try to go to bed earlier and avoid screens?
I have read that several people had their lives worsened because they got worried and/or tried to enact change for no gain after the book told them they were not getting enough sleep (even though they had felt comfortable with their sleeping habits thus far). Which in turn caused them to get less healthy sleep due to feeling bad about their sleeping habits, trying to "fix" it, or just being stressed about not being able to fall asleep early enough.
It's not that the first-order advice of "avoid blue light in the evening" is necessarily bad. Rather, telling people (in no uncertain terms) that if they do <x> they are hurting themselves and that they must change what they do, may cause second-order problems. This is one of the reasons why you should not get medical advice from the internet or pop science books.
(FWIW, I have read the book, before learning of the scientific critiques. I must agree that the presentation of the book is usually much stronger than what the data presented admits. It's not that the small-scale studies in question seem particularly flawed or that the interpretations are downright unreasonable, but I think it's borderline unscientific to present as fact a story woven from more or less isolated data points in the form of individual studies.)
I know, I thought the same thing. All that work, citations of research done after the writing of the book, and some how still misunderstood the points made by the author.
Curious also why this isn’t published in a journal, and be peer refereed... or has it? That is the standard required for a “takedown”.
Edit: Or at least allow a right of reply from the author. Having just read the book you have intentionally misrepresented a number of (perhaps even all) points. I can only think you are trying to generate controversy to build your own profile.
I personally believe sleep research is at the same stage as the food pyramid was in the 80s.
As someone who is also currently doing sleep trials for our start-up (https://soundmind.co), I can understand why. Clinical sleep trials are time consuming and expensive. Try getting a volunteer to sleep in a lab for more than a few nights, then try to get thousands of people doing that, like you would in a drug trial, also try to factor in all the things that person would have done that day which would affect their sleep, as well as factoring in what their sleep was like the previous 3 or more nights, and how that would affect on going sleep.
When I read Why We Sleep, I remember thinking that the conclusions Dr Walker was arriving at seemed wrong much of the time, and seemed sensationalist. At the same time, I've seen him interviewed where he walks back things like the link between circadian rhythm and blue-light.
I'm not sure if the expectation is that he writes a rebuttal to his own work, or a living document about how the science has changed?
I think we need to look at the emerging field and understand that sleep is still something we don't understand well, and that much of the research is still a moving target.
I can't remember off the top of my head, I didn't do a point by point rebuttal like the OP. I didn't even know I was going to get into the sleep industry when I was reading it. It is on my list to re-read at some point.
personal heuristic of mine, never read something that even remotely reeks of self-help.
when it starts with "popular science person xyz charts a map of the most important scientific breakthrough of the decade" etc just put it back and pick something from the fiction section and you'll have a better time.
Life isn't lived in the aggregate, you don't need "sleep science" to figure out how much you need to sleep. Are you tired? Sleep more, no? you're fine. This emerging health industrial complex has just one purpose: create neurotic people who try to optimise their life and then sell them answers.
This heuristic sadly doesn't always work, it's like saying you don't need "food science" and should just go for that sugary drink if you want it, or not exercising because you're not feeling like it
I dunno. When I ate junk food and gained weight, I started getting out of breath easily from not that much exertion. Signals of poor diet and exercise are fairly self-evident - you don't need to read a bunch of anxiety inducing books about the right diet and best exercises to do - just a little basic self assessment. It's a heuristic; it shouldn't be taken to extremes.
That's not what I was saying. I didn't say you don't need to exercise or eat healthy, I said you don't need a nutrionist or a wellness coach. Do you know how I know I need to exercise or cut down on sugar? When my belt starts to get tight, when my posture gets bad, when I lose muscle and when I wheeze running up the stairs. Then I know I need to switch the beer for water and take the bike instead of the train to work, problem solved.
Never in my life have I ever wasted a minute installing exercise apps on my phone, reading exercise books, instead I've just gone to public pool and done my laps and for some reason I'm in better shape than some of my peers who seem to spend hundreds of dollars per month on books, peloton courses and exercise audiobooks.
Sure, this sound reasonable. But you needed scientists to figure out at some point that it's optimal for most people to eat some things, and not other. E.g. you can stay lean eating only fruit, but you'll lack some micronutrients.
Also there are some long term longevity effects (or at least people doing studies and claiming such effects).
And even with 'noticing' you feel tired, it doesn't always work, at least not for everyone. Obviously most people would feel suboptimal if they start sleeping 4h/day, for example.
But anecdotally, I dont notice any subjective difference as long as I slept something like 6.5h+. Sometimes I feel a little sleepy but then it goes away quickly.. sometimes I feel like crap till afternoon even though I slept a lot. And making long term observations is hard because it's hard to compare how tired you're feeling now with how tired you were a week ago.
the book was appealing because it was something to point to that might convince your boss or friends to let you sleep, rather than acting like wanting to sleep more than 6 hours a night is a sign of weak moral character.
many people hold this attitude, it’s appealing to have something “objective” when trying to justify going to sleep.
unfortunately it does have these many scientific inaccuracies. depressing.
Self help books sell because they give they buyer a sense of having accomplished “something”. It’s similar to the person who wants to start running to get healthier. They go out, buy a nice pair of running shoes, grab some expensive name brand clothing and perhaps buy themselves a fitness tracker too and then call it a day feeling great. They have convinced themselves they have begun their journey to a life where they run marathons weekly but have in actual fact achieved nothing.
Calling his book a self help title is a stretch - the author is one of the top researchers in his field. He simply wrote a book making the research out there a lot more accessible to the layman. He isn't selling you anything past that.
As for the field of "sleep science", you're drastically oversimplifying it. Your sleeping habits have tons of second order affects that aren't remotely intuitive. For example, you know alcohol wrecks your sleep quality? Over time that lack of quality sleep is associated to weight gain. Doesn't it make sense to have a solid understanding of something you spend a third of your life doing?
Finally the author of the blog post has no background in this past reading articles on PubMed. I've read some genuine criticisms of the book, most of which Walker addressed, but these are incredibly weak. If you're attempting to synthesize entire fields of research, you should probably have a background in them.
I don't read a lot of self-help books, but the ones I have have been extremely helpful. Some people don't respond to them and 95% of what's on the market are bullshit platitudes, but it feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to write them off entirely.
I'd argue that the "emerging health industrial complex" you mention has been with humans since the dawn of civilization. One wonders how we were able to envision tools that help us move away from our opportunistic instincts.
> contrary, there’s strong evidence of no reduction in average sleeping time and perhaps even an increase in sleeping time over this approximate time period
Followed by a source snippet looking at not average sleep time but prevalence of very short and very long sleep durations - outliers. Ie doesn't necessarily, or even likely, have anything to say on the subject.
For such a meticulous takedown repeating exactly the kind of mistake you're criticizing seems really sloppy.
And the alarm bells over "harm" seem overkill and somewhat shrill.
That said, the book definitely has issues and it's good someone tries to point them out. I just feel this overshoots.
They say "don't read the comments," but taking that advice would have led me to miss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUw3s4evhTE . That is a 7 minute video of science comedy that had me laughing out loud at several points, and its punchline is directly relevant to the question at hand here.
The page linked by wpietri [0] [1] is worth reading. Guzey engages in a conversation with someone named Phil who did a "PhD in a circadian rhythms/sleep lab". No firm conclusions, but topics include how applicable animal models are to humans, and the difficulty of producing conclusive evidence about sleep in humans. Plenty of references, and little argument that aspects of Walker's book seem sensationalist.
I have a feeling that the author might have had a strong opinion on the value of sleep deprivation therapy for depression and might have benefited from it, and that might be an important reason why he felt an obligation to rebut the book. However, those two things do not need to be contradictory after all. Acknowledging the validity of sleep deprivation therapy in some cases (maybe it does help your brain produce euphoric chemicals) does not negate the idea that in general good sleep hygiene is conducive in the long run for most people. It could well be that while your level of depression is reduced, your cognition suffers, especially if you have short sleep for a long duration of time, which is not sustainable and will lead to a rebound.
I am in general also not a fan of bestselling science books going overboard with their claims (e.g. the book Grit). Though in this case I have a feeling that Guzey’s stance could be an overkill in the opposite direction. I think the general idea of the book might well still be valid despite the inevitable imperfections/exaggerations in it.
That isn’t the general idea of the book. The general idea is to provide a breath of knowledge regarding the state of current sleep research.
If you are speaking literally, the book references short sleeping of < 4, < 5, < 6 hours and describes various levels of disease and impairment. All of these diseases and impairments are reduced at > 7 and there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of benefit at > 9. That is how the book presents the facts.
You misrepresent this, and pick inconsequential “errors” that don’t change either the overall point or the validity of science, and claim false conclusions from your own opinion.
It’s pretty clear how much we need (on average) > 7 <= 9. But he even points out these are averages, much like calorie recommendations. So yes some people are fine in 6ish and some need 10ish... that’s how standard deviations work.
I just read this book last month on a friend's recommendation. I don't want to pile on whatever anyone else said, but I had noticed a contradiction in Chapter 6 that I found to be very distracting, and I'd love to hear from anyone else who knows the facts behind the subject.
First, in Chapter 3, he introduces "light NREM sleep" as stage-2 NREM, while "deep NREM sleep" is stage 3-4 NREM.
Then, throughout most of Chapter 6, he says that you get a huge "memory restoration" benefit from light stage-2 NREM, due to sleep spindles:
* "The memory refreshment was related to lighter, stage 2 NREM sleep, and specifically the [...] sleep spindles."
* "The more sleep spindles obtained during sleep, the greater the restoration of learning."
* "The concentration of NREM sleep spindles" happen in stage-2 NREM, and you get the most of this type of sleep after 6 hrs of sleeping.
* In the first 6 hrs, you've gotten all your deep NREM sleep: "we obtain most of our deep NREM sleep early in the night, and much of our REM sleep (and lighter NREM sleep) late in the night."
* "Sleep six hours or less and you are shortchanging the brain of a learning restoration benefit that is normally performed by sleep spindles."
* Furthermore, stage 2 NREM is important for other kinds of restorational benefit: "The increases in speed and accuracy, underpinned by efficient automaticity, were directly related to the amount of stage 2 NREM, especially in the last two hours of an eight-hour night of sleep [...]. Indeed, it was the number of those wonderful sleep spindles in the last two hours of the late morning—the time of night with the richest spindle bursts of brainwave activity—that were linked with the offline memory boost."
So he firmly establishes this point about light NREM sleep throughout Chapter 6.
However, but there's a section ("SLEEP-THE-NIGHT-AFTER LEARNING") where he makes a big deal about the distinction between deep NREM and light NREM sleep, calling it a "battle royal":
> You will recall from chapter 3 that we obtain most of our deep NREM sleep early in the night, and much of our REM sleep (and lighter NREM sleep) late in the night.
> After having learned lists of facts, researchers allowed participants the opportunity to sleep only for the first half of the night or only for the second half of the night. In this way, both experimental groups obtained the same total amount of sleep (albeit short), yet the former group’s sleep was rich in deep NREM, and the latter was dominated instead by REM.
> The stage was set for a battle royal between the two types of sleep. The question: Which sleep period would confer a greater memory savings benefit—that filled with deep NREM, or that packed with abundant REM sleep?
> For fact-based, textbook-like memory, the result was clear. It was early-night sleep, rich in deep NREM, that won out in terms of providing superior memory retention savings relative to late-night, REM-rich sleep.
This doesn't necessarily contradict the idea that the spindles during light NREM sleep are restorative, but it says light NREM is less effective than deep NREM, and then he doesn't cite any more research on deep NREM's memory benefits. In chapter 7 he focuses on how deep NREM sleep has other benefits. The author does mention "deep NREM sleep" as important for cognitive benefits later in the book when it seems he meant to say "light NREM sleep".
Also, to say they allowed participants to sleep "only for the second half of the night" is strange, and I don't know what that means. Looking at the original study
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1414040 it looks like there were ONLY TWO subjects, and it's not clear to me that this study was described accurately by Walker.
If this point was already discussed elsewhere, I'm not aware of it, and would appreciate a link.
I saw a guy get a ticket for sleeping in a public park the other day. I don’t know if he was homeless.
I started thinking where could I could legally take a nap if tired. I live in one of the wealthiest liberal enclave (Marin County). Home of Gavin Neusome, and important stuff like taking a nap is against the law for all practical purposes.
Yea—technically I could hike to BLM land? For myself I would be a 60 mile hike. And even then there’s a fee to get into the park, and there is no camping?
Personally, I’ve given up on a good nights rest. I can go to sleep, but wake up 3-4 hours later. This has been going on for 20 plus years. I do take naps during the day though. If I had a do over I might have moved to a country that encourages siestas?
(I know I’m not adding anything to this study. I’m just angry over the way we have made everything essentially against some law. And I’m venting?)
Marin, Atherton, etc. are the archetypical rich neoliberal enclaves... listen to NPR, slap a Biden sticker on your BMW, and vehemently oppose any policy that might result in you having to interact with or perceive a poor person
My first instinct when hearing of accusations of academic misconduct is to ask
who is making those accusations: is it someone whose opinions I can trust?
The author of the blog above has an About page where they introduce themselves
as "a researcher with a background in Economics, Mathematics, and Cognitive
Science". Instead of a list of academic achievements: publications, grants,
chairs, awards, etc, as we would expect to see in a researcher's "about" page, the
author continues their introduction with a few words on what they're "thinking
about" at the moment and what their long-term goals are, then makes a peculiar
plea:
If you’re reading this and you do anything biology-related at all, I would
love to talk to you and would especially appreciate you getting in touch.
Then the author lists their favourite TV shows, personal essays, interviews etc.
All this does not make the author of the article sound like a trustworthy
source, but rather as someone desperate for attention.
The next thing I usually look for in cases like this is whether the person
accusing someone else of academic fraud has given an opportunity to the party
they accuse to defend themselves. The author of this blog has not only not done
that but is engaging in misleading tactics. The following text is in TFA:
Also see UC Berkeley’s official response regarding this essay – all problems
with the book I discovered are “minor”.
The sentence "UC Berkeley’s official response" links to the following URL:
However, the linked resource is not "UC Berkeley's official response" at all,
but rather a blog by a different blogger, Yngve Hoiseth, who claims they
contacted someone -who is never named- at UC Berkeley about Alexey Guzey's post
we are reading above. Yngve Hoiseth's blog itself claims to have uploaded
"the entire exchange here", linking to the following URL:
Which is dead and has not been archived by archive.org.
All this makes the article above sound very difficult to take seriously. In all
honesty, it sounds entirely like an attempt to kick shit up for the author's
personal gratification. Or perhaps there is some strange ???-PROFIT scheme
hidden somewhere in there, but even that is not particularlly interesting.
Posting under a throwaway because the article's author sounds desperate enough
to engage in all sorts of internet attacks to deter critics.
The email exchange in question is contained in the post I link itself directly following the broken link: https://yngve.hoiseth.net/articles/why-we-sleep-institutiona... - kinda incredible to not have noticed it. The person from UC Berkeley is never named because, as Yngve notes right there as well: "Because this failure is UC Berkeley's more than any individual's, I have edited the exchange slightly by removing the names of their representatives."
What is listed in the post you link are exerpts of the email conversation,
selected by Yngve Hoiseth. The link I mention is broken should lead to the
entire, unredacted, unexcerpted email conversation, but fails to do so. This
makes it impossible to determine to what extent Yngve Hoiseth edited the email
exchange to force his interpretation of the exchange on a reader.
Your post and Yngve Hoiseth's post claim that the email exchange presented in
Yngve Hoiseth's post is an "official response" from UC Berkeley. To determine
the veracity of this claim it is necessary to know who was contacted, in UC Berkeley.
The name of the person (as in first name and family name/s) is not necessary
for this, but it is necessary to name their office. For example "dean of
such-and-such" or "director of so-and-so". That this information is not provided
makes the claim of an "official response" impossible to verify. For example,
nobody can contact the person Yngve Hoiseth claims they have contacted, or the
person currently holding the same office, and ask them to verify that they or
their office have, indeed, been contacted by Yngve Hoiseth.
That, together with the absence of the entire conversation makes it impossible
to know whether Yngve Hoiseth really did have this email exchange, to what
extent they presented it fairly and to what extent what was said by the other
person was edited.
The person Yngve Hoiseth claims to have contacted allegedly said the following:
My understanding is that my university email communication is a matter of
public record, and I try always to communicate with that standard in mind.
There is no prohibition that I know of against publication of my emails with
you, in other words. I would just ask that you contextualize my communications
in a transparent and accurate way.
This is absolutely not what was done in Yngve Hoiseth's post and your linking to
it claiming it is an "official response" to your post.
Assuming the exchange was real, it seems that the person at the other end
didn't ask for their identity to be withheld for any reason. It sounds as if
they fully expected for their identity to be made public instead. There seems to
be no reason why Yngve Hoiseth's post ommits this detail.
Given all the above your post and Yngve Hoiseth's post are misleading and suggest an
effort to misrepresent at the very least UC Berkeley's position.
"suggest an effort to misrepresent at the very least UC Berkeley's position."
This is a non-sequitur.
The decision to keep the identity of the contact anonymous and the presence of a dead link (when a slightly redacted version of the full conversation is still available) doesn't automatically suggest that they're trying to misrepresent UC Berkeley. What an unjustified stretch.
You don't see any problem with someone selectively quoting from what they claim is "UC Berkeley's official position", while not pointing to an actual source of that "official position" in UC Berkeley itself, or the entire conversation?
How are we to know that Yngve Hoiseth did not make up the entire conversation, or that they didn't simply choose the passages of the email exchange that support their view, only?
If this is an "official" exchange, why the lack of transparency?
The lack of transparency "suggests an effort to misrpresent".
I could perhaps see a charitable interpretation if the author of the blog post (Guzey) did not accuse the author of the book (Walker) of "deliberate data manipulation", gave the opportunity to the target of the accusation to explain himself, did not misrepresent himself as a "researcher" (pointing to his blog posts as examples of his "research"), did not link to a friend's blog post for "UC Berkeley’s official response", etc, etc.
The author of the blog post is not leaving a lot of room for charitable interpretations.
But in any case, what charitable interpretation do you propose?
What you link to is not "research" but "opinion" published in your blog. It identifies you as a "blogger", but not as a "researcher".
At most I could see what you have written as "study" of others' research but presenting yourself as a "researcher" and what you do as "research" is misrepresenting yourself and comes across as an attempt to claim for yourself greater expertise than you seem to have.
You should make clear your level of experitse and your knowledge about different matters that you like to discuss in your blog.
I do not care about splitting hairs. A person legitimately calling themselves a researcher would also not need to do so. They would simply point to their research, not to blog posts. Anyone can write a blog post and publish it on their blog.
If you are the only person calling yourself a "researcher" (or it's only you and your dear friends and blog readers) then you are misrepresenting yourself.
> My first instinct when hearing of accusations of academic misconduct is to ask who is making those accusations: is it someone whose opinions I can trust?
What does it matter who is making the accusations if they are verifiable?
It matters because I don't have the knowledge to verify the accusations and the fact that the person that makes accusations of academic fraud is misrepresenting himself as a "researcher" means that they are not a trustworthy source of academic criticism.
But you do have the knowledge to verify some of the accusations, because much of them don't require any knowledge to verify.
He's often just pointing out logical internal contradictions in the text (point 2) or lies/mistakes about what the author claimed a source said when in fact the source said no such thing (point 4 about WHO and point 5 about NSF).
Also, I don't agree that he's misrepresenting himself. He didn't claim that he had an academic appointment. He claimed that he's a researcher, of which professional academics are a strict subset. After reading his excellent article, I'm in agreement with him that this is a suitable label.
Your other criticisms of his About page are just odd. So what if he puts his hobbies on there, or is reaching out to biology people? That's normal for an About page.
Unfortunately, I have no way to tell what is a "logical internal contradiction in the text", because I am not knowledgeable in the subject matter of the text and so cannot follow its internal logic.
I disagree that a "researcher" is a loose label that anyone can assign to themselves without qualifications. For example, a reiki healer could claim themselves to be a "researcher" but this would be misleading.
Writing an article arguing that an author of a book has perpetrated academic fraud is evidence against any claim of careful research. Claming academic fraud is really the nuclear option. The first thing to do when one finds fault with someone else's work is to contact the other person and ask for clarification. If things get to the point where one feels the only way forward is to "go public" with an exposition of the other person's work faults, then one should include the other person's explanations or reactions, if any were given, or details of the attempts made to contact that other person.
As I say above, this was not done to any reasonable degree and the only attempt at anything like it is misleading and links to an email conversation claimed to be an "official response" by UC Berkeley (rather than the book's author) but that is impossible to verify.
The overall impression is of a one-sided argument, lack of transparency, attempts at deception and misrepresentation and overall disreputable and underhanded tactics. Such actions by the article author do not suggest they are a "researcher" of any repute, except maybe in their imagination.
"Researcher" isn't synonymous with "academic", but it's not synonymous with "blogger" either.
Part of my point is that an actual researcher, i.e. a professional, would have followed due procedure, contacting the author of the book privately and asking for clarifications, and generally giving the other person an opportunity to examine and respond to criticism.
Academics criticise each other's work constantly but this is acceptable because the purpose is to improve one another's work, not to tarnish each other's reputation and drag their name through the mud.
As things are, it is clear to me the blog post above is meant to kick up an internet storm with accusations of "deliberate data manipulation" and the misleading statements about an "official response" from Berkeley etc. These are the actions of a scandal-monger, not a researcher.
He worked as a research assistant for a professor for three years and is now engaged in amateur research which he shares on his blog, some of which has received positive feedback from some highly credible people.
Also, "researcher" doesn't imply "professional", since amateur researchers exist.
The self-appointed title of "Researcher" is appropriate, in my opinion. There are people in industry who receive that designation ("Real Estate Researcher") that are less deserving.
"Academics criticise each other's work constantly but this is acceptable because the purpose is to improve one another's work, not to tarnish each other's reputation and drag their name through the mud."
But this is not an example of regular academic work that's being criticized.
This is a book that contains health advice being consumed and actioned upon right now by thousands or millions of laypeople. Guzey is therefore trying to warn regular people who might believe and follow bunk advice and suffer health consequences. He makes this intention clear.
James Randi's service to the public as a skeptic was proportional to the amount of noise he made when he would come across and debunk frauds like Uri Geller. (I'm not saying Walker is a fraud, but the public danger of bunk health wisdom is similar to that posed by conmen like Geller.)
I do still agree with you, however, that it would've been better to discuss the allegations with Walker in private before publishing them. Having read Walker's response now, though, I don't believe it would've made much of a difference. He's still misrepresenting official adequate sleep guidelines, willfully or otherwise, by saying that anyone who gets under 8 hours has "unmet sleep needs", contradicting the NSF.
"kick up an internet storm with accusations of "deliberate data manipulation""
You're right - the accusation of "deliberate" is definitely a big mistake, and he should remove that since it assumes intent when that hasn't been established.
On the whole, though, aside from sparse mistakes like this (along with the mistake that you noticed of not making it clear that the Berkeley communication was unverified), I feel that the article is rather constrained.
Gelman also noticed this measured tone and explicitly complimented the author on it.
I don't know if you've listened to any of Wagner's music? Most of it is long stretches of impossibly delicate melodies, almost lullaby-like, but these are occasionally interrupted by sudden spasms of noise, great blaring horns, thumping drums and men an women vocalising at the top end of the human volume range. I remember a caricature of Wagner drilling into a human ear with a hand-cranked drill.
What I mean to say by this is that when you hear Wagner's music, the impression is of powerful, loud music. Accordingly, when you read an artcile that spends most of its time in a low-key "measured" register but starts off with a big, splashy accusation of deliberate data manipulation, the impression is one of an article written to provoke.
Regarding "researcher", the author could have identified himself as an "ex graduate research assistant", but he identifies himself as a "resarcher", which sounds more important and experienced. This is the tactic of people who want to embiggen the impression of themselves and claim more expertise from themselves. Even if such embiggenment is not necessarily the purpose of calling oneself a "researcher" when one is not a professional researcher, anyone who really really wanted to avoid giving the impression that they are trying to make themselves sound more knowledgeable than what they are, would have shied away from calling themselves a "reseacher".
Finally, "researcher" on its own means absolutely nothing at all. "Biology researcher", "computer science researcher", "neuroscience researcher", "geology researcher" etc, give precise information. The author of the article calls himself an unqualified "researcher" and he is, indeed, unqualified to do so. That is a typical tactic of charlatans the world over and it should give you and everyone else who thinks the author has any expertise to discuss what he's discussing, pause. That goes for the economist blogger also, I don't think he has payed as much attention to the article and its author as I think you assume.
As I've argued at the start of this thread, it is important to understand who is writing the article we are reading. In Ideal Science World it doesn't make a difference who says something, only what they say. In the real world it's not that simple. Because academic integrity is valued extremely highly, accusing someone of academic fraud immediately places the accuser opposite the accused in moral standing. For an academic, his or her reputation (of being a good scientist) is everything. Therefore, when making such accusations, the character of the person making them is important to scrutinise carefully, because simply making an accusation of academic fraud can destroy an academic's career and an accuser may have no other goal than to destroy the accused person's reputation.
When the accusations come from a professional critic (another academic) with a good standing in academia, the chance that accusations of fraud are only made to destroy the other persons' career are harder to accept. But when it's some guy on the internet with a blog, that changes the maths very much indeed. Anyone can throw mud on the internet. Because it's the internet, you need to understand who it is who's speaking, before you look at what they are saying.
The thing to remember is that popsci books are not peer-reviewed academic literature. They are the, generally unchecked, thoughts of the author. If you listen to them, you do so at your peril as you are effectively performing alterations to your life based purely on the thoughts of one person. Much like with medicine, you should seek multiple qualified opinions.
