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Comment by bryondowd | Hacker News Reader

There's an interesting concept. I wonder what the trade-off would be. How much efficiency would it cost to clean the brain continually rather than in a dedicated sleep cycle? Would it even be possible to process these toxins while maintaining consciousness? I'm sure there could be huge benefits for many modern lifestyles to trade heavily on reaction speed and/or lightly on IQ for 50% more waking hours. Or even 25% more waking hours, if you just cut the need for sleep in half, over the long term.

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I think nature's solution to this kind of inefficiency arises by adopting a new social behavior rather than evolving a new DNA-based physical ability. It's easier and faster for a group of animals to appoint a guard to protect others during sleep than for the species to evolve a superior brain.

some birds (and dolphins?) sleep one hemisphere at a time, so that they can keep flying

Why force things? I don't want 50% more waking hours. I enjoy my sleep tremendously.

I suspect (but do not know) that you enjoy your sleep because of its restorative effect. If you could obviate the need for the restorative effect, and instead just always feel newly restored, would you still enjoy going to sleep for no reason?

Personally, I dislike the need for sleep. I put it off for as long as I can manage, and try to get as little of it as I can get away with. For me, I have a hard time functioning well with less than 4 hours a night, but anything more then 5.5 hours and I feel like I've thrown the day away. The idea of voluntarily checking out from the world isn't as relaxing to me as picking up a book to read, or learning something new, or doing something productive that isn't work/startup-related.

Either way, I assume that nobody would force you to take a drug that you didn't want to take.

Oh my god, think of what this would do to commerce, in terms of a capitalist society.

Suddenly, you can take a drug that decreases your need for sleep by 50%. People only need 4h of sleep per night now, for a full nights' sleep - 3h, if you're willing to skimp a little, 2h isn't unheard of (in the way that only getting 4h of sleep a night, now, isn't unheard of either).

Suddenly, there's a significant advantage in the hands of everyone willing to take this drug. Students are expected to study more and harder, because they don't need 8h of sleep every night. Entrance exams to schools get more difficult. Software developers are now enticed to work longer hours - longer hours than they already are. Labor / shift workers (hospitality / food industry) are expected to work longer shifts, and they have to, because businesses have to be open longer because more people are awake for more of the day.

Now, also, you have to consider: this is just sleep, in terms of brain repair. Your body has to put itself back together every night, too - repairing microscopic muscle tears, fixing bruises, etc etc etc. Your body would probably start slowly falling apart on 2-3h of sleep per night, even if your mind was fully rested.

I really, really hope this doesn't happen.

It is entirely possible that it would evolve differently, perhaps given that not everyone would be available during the 'dark' hours you might see a society evolve into dual function, where 8 hours were for 'working' and 8 hours were for 'community/family' with 8 hours split into two 4 hour segments as 'transition times'.

I was thinking this as well. I suspect that it's impossible to predict, but I wouldn't think it unfathomable to imagine a world in which, with all the additional free time, society might evolve towards a more Italian ethos, in which we take longer lunches, and don't mind spending as much overall time 'at the office', though not necessarily working any more while there.

As an American, living in late capitalism, I do not see this as anything but extremely wishful thinking for 99% of the working population here.

But if this sort of thing ever does happen, then I absolutely hope that it goes down as you've described.

Yes, your anti-capitalist intentions were pretty clear from your earlier post. Put simply, I do not share your views on the subject.

That's fair. Sorry, I hope I didn't get too carried away. Thanks for the dialogue. :)

No need to apologize, I just don't agree.

In the time I've been alive, I've seen more and more employers gravitating towards fewer hours, more lenient work schedules, etc. My first job was basically a minimum of 10 hours a day, and 6, sometimes 7 days a week. Nowadays, companies (especially in tech, mind you) are realizing the difficulty in recruiting / training / keeping personnel and are competing on benefits to the extent that 'unlimited' vacation days, telework, longer maternity and paternity leaves, etc. And before the obvious counterargument is made, this isn't limited just to technology (though it does seem to be blazing the trail.) Tech, agriculture, finance, business, and any industry in which recruiting and keeping talent are tricky are basically trading dollars for perks, and often, the result of that is that employees get to keep more of their personal time for themselves.

Sure, this hasn't affected every industry, and for industries where labor is a commodity, it may never occur, but just as sure as you believe your scenario is the result of capitalism, I believe that the increase in perks / time / accommodation is the same.

That's a really interesting perspective, especially since you've brought up a lot of illustrations that I cannot disagree with. I think you really nailed it with the phrase,

> trading dollars for perks

And I suppose it also has to do a lot with how much leverage employees have against their employers. Those of us in tech have more leverage on average than, say, a hospitality worker.

It's a lot more nuanced than I had initially thought, for sure.

"It's a lot more nuanced than I had initially thought"

Most things are a LOT more nuanced than most people give credence to, and there's zero dishonor in acknowledging that. With almost every issue I've delved into (especially political ones), there are arguments for and against any given issue that I can't hand-wave away. I might prioritize some factors ahead of others, but just about every political issue in the world is a matter of tradeoffs, and there are very few obvious wins.

I agree with your assertion here that much of the strengths to be found in capitalism revolve around the notion of resolving power imbalances. For every good story I've read, somewhere, there's a terrifying story -- I'm reminded of the old Hazard county mine worker strikes, for example.

But while unions are ostensibly the surest fix in mitigating those power imbalances (in fostering leverage to the people), the more I look at them the more I realize that they need to be truly cooperative. Union power is real enough that there are places like Sweden which have no minimum wage, and yet still have high effective wages. But in America at least, unions with political power often exploit that political power towards complacency, corruption, and often trend towards being less effective stewards of their member interests. In essence, too much cooperation between unions and policy makers may yield counter-intuitive results that manifest in ineffective unions, which yields declining memberships, which yields power imbalances in favor of corporations.

The point, if I have one, is that while so many people get wrapped up in the idea of "unions bad" or "unions good", we lose the ability to objectively evaluate whether a given union is good or bad because we ideologically insist that they be a certain way. Similarly, evaluations of government, corporations, regulations, trade, capitalism, socialism, et al all falter as soon as we begin to put too much faith in the institution that we stop performing scientifically objective and individual evaluations upon them.

Thanks for the conversation, and in particular, for the open mind. It's always a pleasure to engage with someone who I know to be willing to adjust their opinions to facts, and while capitalism surely isn't always good, it definitely isn't always bad either.

There's a Doctor Who episode that sort of goes there a little, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_No_More_(Doctor_Who) . It isn't one of the better episodes and the main plot is rather ridiculous but it does touchy upon your argument tangentially.

There's a (good, rather surreal at times) webcomic along these lines, PowerNap. Cyberpunk-ish future, just about everybody takes a drug to eliminate the need for sleep, protagonist is someone who's allergic to the stuff and is navigating life in a world where sleep itself is a disorder. (Plus strange dreamscape things) http://www.powernapcomic.com/d/20110617.html

Are you into Science Fiction? You may enjoy Nancy Kress' "Beggars in Spain." It's a story with a similar central thesis.

I would guess that the brain also does some reorganization functions while you sleep, where redundant info is compressed, and resources are freed up so that you can reuse them. Being conscious a larger percentage of the time may inhibit this.

"Either way, I assume that nobody would force you to take a drug that you didn't want to take."

Like hell they won't. It will become a social and economic imperative before you know it.

> anything more then 5.5 hours and I feel like I've thrown the day away.

Statistically you are unlikely to be one of those people for whom 5-6 hours sleep daily is sufficient, so all you are doing to yourself is contributing to increased aggression, dulling of empathy and reduced impulse control that comes with insufficient sleep.

I worked for 6 years in a 100% remote position, 3 timezones away from my employer, so as such, I kept a loose schedule. Eventually, I adopted the practice of just going to bed when I was tired, and waking up whenever I woke up. Sure, sometimes I was woken up by noises outside or what have you, but when I'd wake up on my own, usually it was between 4.5 to 5 hours from when I went to bed.

I wasn't going to bed at regular hours, and I wasn't waking up to an alarm, so I guess I am in that group (also, I don't have increased aggression or impulse control, but I don't know how I'd measure empathy). That said, I did not realize that I was statistically rare, so thanks for pointing out that maybe my 5 hours a night advice isn't applicable to others. Regardless of the amount of time involved in sleeping, I still would prefer not to have to take it, if that were an option.

If you genuinely are one of those people that can deal with that much sleep and still function normally then fair enough, kudos to you (and I'm a little jealous).

I think from the evolutionary perspective, being active during a time of low fitness gets punished. So if there was an adaption that tended to paralyze something when it was dark out, that gets selected for even though obviously given optimal decisions not being paralyzed is better. Which, if you think about it, is kind of what is happening with sleep.

So I imagine the trade-off isn't as severe as someone might guess; it's definitely theoretically possible to run entirely without sleep with the right hardware. For example, lets say sleep was fundamental to cognition. If you were willing to have redundant hardware, you could run two brains and just take turns sleeping them [1]. So that probably gives something of an upper-bound to efficiency.

The problem is that a lot of stuff is getting built on top of these things. Scheduled downtime is getting used by other adaptions. Things like handling 'garbage collection' or 'waste collection' inline get shunted away to the downtime to improve response times. This keeps happening. Over short periods there are going to be plenty of cases where being paralyzed isn't optimal. What if something shows in the night? Long term though if the creature is continually staying active when its at disadvantage that's really bad. So additional penalties accrue to force the issue.

Then the original 'purpose/benefit' starts getting lost. Things get messed up. Enough adaptions end up taking advantage of the fact that the downtime existed that now there is so much benefit to it for reasons unrelated to its initial creation that it starts becoming worth doing even at times where light levels aren't an issue.

So now when you try to mess with sleep, you're not just messing with one little thing. You're messing with a whole bunch of different entangled processes. One to reduce activity during periods where the sensors suck. Another to prevent continued activity when the sensors suck. Another that handles waste. Another that starts up ML algorithms during the downtime to take advantage of the freed-up processing. Another that does data backup. The muscles use the downtime to start construction. Basically all over the body everyone is starting to get to work.

It's like that tradeoff problem that gwern talks about with using notropics, where each one improves one thing but causes problems in other areas. So basically, it isn't a question of whether or not you need sleep from a theoretical process perspective. You don't, if you had a different design. But now sleep isn't just the reduce activity time because its night adaption. It's all tied up in everything else.

You shorten the amount you sleep? You die younger, because you cancelled the bodies maintenance period.

[1]: Which dolphins are kind of doing.

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