Why is sleep a superstimulus but water isn't?
211 karma · joined October 11, 2019
> Modern sleep, in its infinite comfort, is an unnatural superstimulus that overwhelms our brains with pleasure and comfort (note: I’m not saying that it’s bad, simply that being in bed today is much more pleasurable than being in “bed” in the past.)
> Think about sleep 10,000 years ago. You sleep in a cave, in a hut, or under the sky, with predators and enemy tribes roaming around. You are on a wooden floor, on an animal’s skin, or on the ground. The temperature will probably drop 5-10°C overnight, meaning that if you were comfortable when you were falling asleep, you are going to be freezing when you wake up. Finally, there’s moon shining right at you and all kinds of sounds coming from the forest around you.
> In contrast, today: you sleep on your super-comfortable machine-crafted foam of the exact right firmness for you. You are completely safe in your home, protected by thick walls and doors. Your room’s temperature stays roughly constant, ensuring that you stay warm and comfy throughout the night. Finally, you are in a light and sound-insulated environment of your house. And if there’s any kind of disturbance you have eye masks and earplugs.
> Does this sound “natural”?
To your point - I probably would have tried to rely on research that supports your points (which you've got me interested in now). I probably wouldn't have included a handful of anecdotes in the the appendix (including your own and Elon Musk's!), as well as 8 replies from a reddit thread as a supporting section. I probably also wouldn't equate "a person with an ADRB1 mutation can sleep less" and "a single individual that underwent brain surgery can sleep less" with "Decreasing sleep by 1-2 hours a night in the long-term has no negative health effects". I wouldn't include any arguments that say modern sleep is "unnatural", which doesn't have any real meaning or basis in reality (is modern medicine natural? what about sanitation?). The analogy to hunger is a justification rather than any type of proof, and taking the analogy further, it would suggest I should go back to sleep in the morning since I usually wake up sleepy, just as I would eat more when I'm hungry. I would be careful about saying sleep duration is a cause of depression/mania rather than considering both might be driven by a confounding variable (stimulants will certainly cause both mania and wakefulness!). I also probably wouldn't make claims like:
> Convincing a million 20-year-olds to sleep an unnecessary hour a day is equivalent, in terms of their hours of wakefulness, to killing 62,500 of them.
Without considering that you might be wrong about lifespan (not to mention healthspan) since you might very well be convincing others to effect a behavior change with your post.
The social credit system is somewhat unique, and it is not a stretch to say drinking to excess may not be regarded as a favorable characteristic. This may disincentivize individuals from reporting the behavior. I am similarly curious, and fail to see how this is derogatory to either the Chinese government or its people.
With some of their big bets in custom SoCs, waymo, verily, and all of the research that comes out of it (especially in ML) are certainly interesting, I don't think any other companies are innovating at that level. Whether or not they will profit is another matter, of course.
I think you've actually given a great answer here. This is essentially what I did in grad school as well and found it really helpful. I never thought to continue doing this in fields that piqued my interest. Thanks for the suggestion!
While we're on the topic, here's the advanced distributed systems reading list from UIUC:
https://go.cs.illinois.edu/CS525SP21ReadingList
I took the class a number of years ago, but found it super interesting.
I've been wanting to cultivate a habit of reading a relevant paper (or abstract) at some cadence, such as once a week. Can anyone recommend a way to find the important and/or influential papers in a given field? Maybe something similar to The Morning Paper.
Edit: thanks everyone for the great suggestions!
But if the clusters are configured similarly, a flaw in one is likely present in the others. GPs point is that if you invest in hardening, you can easily apply it to multiple clusters.
> It’s not really clear what you’re trying to say here.
I assume they mean having more clusters present means there are more opportunities to be compromised (e.g. more credentials to leak, more API servers to target, possible version skew, etc.).
https://www.sciencealert.com/less-than-5-superagers-what-the...
Are you sure you didn't just assume the A was for Apple when you read it? I don't know how you could possibly know what people were referring to from the acronym.
This is so blatantly wrong. A ton of my peers went to Amazon after graduating, very few went to Google, and certainly nowhere near a third of the class. I can confirm this from my linkedin connections/groups, but I can't even believe you're making this claim. It's also ridiculous to state Bay Area startups wouldn't give interviews to Amazonians - in my experience they would kill for a solid engineer from Amazon. Do you have any evidence this is the case?
I don't think the person you've responded to is implying what you seem to think.
In the book, he suggested that many of the studies detailed people with preexisting disease, which was the hidden variable for both an increase in sleep length and an earlier mortality.