> Not that part about how there are more driving accidents on the day we reset our clocks for DST?

This is kind-of a meme talking point these days, but the few studies on this haven’t shown that the cause is lack of sleep, they only show some correlations with the time change (i.e., there could be other factors such as putting commutes in the twilight hours.) There aren’t that many crashes supposedly attributed to DST either (e.g. it’s claimed to be like 30 fatal crashes out of more than 35,000 annually), and the supposed temporary increase in crashes is dwarfed by crash rates in the summer anyway. If you care about car crashes at all, DST is a teensy blip. The big problems are 1:speeding and 2:drunk driving. Making even a modest change to reduce speeding would do many many times more good than eliminating DST.

One massive problem with the cadre of people claiming DST change is so harmful is that the majority of people experience social jet lag on a weekly basis. The one hour time change twice a year is dwarfed by the number of people staying up several hours late Friday and Saturday night all year long. (Full disclosure, I’m skeptical of many of the claims made about DST, and I’ve done deep dives into many references only to find very weak to non-existant evidence being used to support extremely strongly worded claims. The voodoo claims about circadian misalignment that permeate DST “research” are bogus.)

It’d be interesting to self-measure your sleep & next-day performance, that might be a lot more informative than someone else’s summary. It’d be interesting to discuss how to design some self-measure tests. What kinds of performance are you thinking about? Do you want to know the risks of activities like driving, or are you thinking about job/school performance?

if walker is mistaken about numerous small factual details, what makes you confident he's correct about anything meaningful?

Not exactly a knockdown argument, but: if he was wrong about "something meaningful", Guzey probably would have added it to his list.

More generally, if you make a claim and someone claims you're entirely wrong, it should be surprising if they don't attack the parts you consider meaningful. If they wanted to publicly demonstrate your incorrectness, why wouldn't they attack the important parts? Either they can't, or they chose not to, but the latter doesn't match the apparent motivations.

It’s often easier to rigorously disprove the small claims than big ones. Especially when the books author insinuates things rather than actually make bold claims.

Making a long list of everything they said that we don’t have evidence for isn’t really debunking anything. After all a broken clock may occasionally show the correct time. But showing some specific study was misinterpreted or wrong is far more direct.

With "something meaningful", I'm using the parent's terminology. If Guzey has written arguments against non-meaningful stuff, I don't think that's evidence for the meaningful stuff being wrong. That's about the end of my stance; I definitely don't have the info or background knowledge (or effort!) to evaluate either the book or the response on technical merits.

My mistake. When you said:

> if he was wrong about "something meaningful", Guzey probably would have added it to his list.

I thought you were agreeing with the root comment that the things Guzey pointed out aren't meaningful.

Here is the last paragraph of the introduction:

> Any book of Why We Sleep’s length is bound to contain some factual errors. Therefore, to avoid potential concerns about cherry-picking the few inaccuracies scattered throughout, in this essay, I’m going to highlight the five most egregious scientific and factual errors Walker makes in Chapter 1 of the book. This chapter contains 10 pages and constitutes less than 4% of the book by the total word count.

I know, I read it, and two possibilities suggest themselves:

1. There are many many more errors in the book, and the Guzey, not being very well organized, chose to highlight the fact that the author was wrong about cancer and lifespan (who isn't), and a couple facts not really related to the main point.

2. Despite claims to the contrary, Guzey is cherry-picking the few inaccuracies.

> I couldn't care less if Walker was wrong

That's not the main takeaway from Guzey, I think. The takeaway is that there appears to be deliberate misrepresentation of the facts in order to spin a narrative, which is poor form from an academic.

It's what you get when you read books.

In descending order of editorialization:

- other media

- other non-fiction books

- textbooks

- review papers

- research papers (reading these is discouraged for non-experts unless what you really want is not to see the forest, but to know every detail about the trees)

I don't see how "the author chopped off the part of the graph that contradicted his statement" is "not all that relevant"

First off, data manipulation is wrong, point blank. There's never a reason for it.

But the article we're discussing mentions this as a footnote, therefore I imagine that Guzey doesn't think it's very relevant either, or else he would have/should have led with it.

>interested in how sleep affects my day to day

This. That said, the amount of people I know who has successfully modified their sleep habits to increase everyday performance is magnitude lower than people who have successfully dieted, which is not much to begin with. I wonder what's harder.

> I'm interested in how sleep affects my day to day performance since that's what matters most.

the evidence suggesting links between inadequate sleep and long term development of dementia seems at least as important to me than day to day performance in the short term.