All of orenmn's Comments + Replies
I found some pages in Why We Sleep that seem to answer your argument, and tried to quote the essence of it:
Early studies demonstrated that shorter sleep amounts predict lower work rate and slow completion speed of basic tasks. That is, sleepy employees are unproductive employees. Sleep-deprived individuals also generate fewer and less accurate solutions to work-relevant problems they are challenged with. [W. B. Webb and C. M. Levy, “Effects of spaced and repeated total sleep deprivation”]
We have since designed more work-relevant tasks to explore the effect...
No particularly strong reason. I guess it seems strange that given that it would be low cost for public health systems to issue advice about this, it's not already happening more. Maybe the fact that no one really opposes it and it might be cheap to improve means that it's ripe for more attention, but maybe the fact that it hasn't already been done means EAs who aren't already working in public health can't do a lot.
It's not totally neglected - there are a ton of results for "sleep deprivation epidemic," the CDC desc...
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 c...
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.
The problem of driving while sleep-deprived will likely be solved by robocars more than by any altruistic efforts.
I don't know how much time this would take, but of course when we evaluate the scale of the problem, we should put into our calculations robocars eliminating traffic collisions at some point.
The rest of the problem seems better tackled by focusing more on the stresses that cause sleep problems, and by relatively decentralized efforts to shift our cultures to be more sleep-friendly.
I might be overestimating the amount of people that are s...
I apologize for not being clear enough.
I assumed (please correct me if I was wrong) that sleep disorders aren't the main cause for sleep-deprivation, which means that we mainly have to deal with seemingly-easier-to-change causes (e.g., education, social norms).
(I edited the question to say this explicitly.)
I knew (generally) about the benefits of sleep before I read the book, but reading the book made this "knowing" extremely more vivid.
The thing that makes me so optimistic about getting people to sleep more is that sleep is something our body actively urges us to do.
Like our body actively urges us to eat a lot of sugar (e.g., and not vegetables), it actively urges us to sleep (unless we use caffeine, etc.).
getting people to sleep more puts "unconsciousness" up against "the most important and/or entertaining thing you believe you can do instead".
Have you read the book or some review of it or watched/listened to some long form interview with Matthew Walker (just search in YouTube)?
I ask because I would have probably said the same if I hadn't read it, but after reading the book, the equation for me is more like:
"unconsciousness + better memory + better processing of stuff I learned + better health + better mental health + being le...
I agree that Matthew Walker seems quite biased in favor of sleep.
Still, I don't think he omits your point. Instead, he argues that a person's performance (in various areas) is much worse when sleep deprived, and so a sleep deprived person that invests more time in doing stuff is still less productive than a person that gets enough sleep (and has less time to do stuff).
I highly recommend checking out the book (Why We Sleep) - it depicts many of the experiments that make Matthew so confident that he is right.
I think that's a good point, especially with regard to young children.
With regard to jobs, if sleep is well-known to make employees more productive, maybe employers would (someway) encourage employees to get more sleep. (On the other hand, it might make employers less willing to hire people that don't get enough sleep, but I am going deep into speculation-land here.)
I edited my phrasing from "quite solvable" to "at least partially easy to solve (relatively to other issues)".
Thanks!
Thank you :)