Bullshit arguments can lead to true conclusions. They are still bullshit and it bears pointing out, lest other conclusions are drawn from the same pool.

Exactly. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

The example there is:

Tom: All cats are animals. Ginger is an animal. Therefore, Ginger is a cat.

Bill: You have just fallaciously affirmed the consequent. You are incorrect. Therefore, Ginger is not a cat.

Perfectly good time to quote Rhinoceros

> Logician: Here is an example of a syllogism. The cat has four paws. Isidore and Fricot both have four paws. Therefore Isidore and Fricot are cats.

> Old Gentleman: My dog has got four paws.

> Logician: Then it is a cat.

> ...

> Logician: Another syllogism. All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.

> Old Gentleman: And he's got four paws. That's true. I've got a cat named Socrates.

> Logician: There you are, you see...

> Old Gentleman: So Socrates was a cat, was he?

> Logician: Logic has just revealed the fact to us.

Substitute "data" for logic in this context I guess

You can even use the actual data in the article. Leave only a chart with 2 bars:

- 5h sleep - 60% injury likelihood

- 6h sleep - 75% injury likelihood

Now maintain the conclusion that the graph supports the idea of the likelihood of injury being higher the fewer the hours slept per night. Of course such manipulation will not make your book a bestseller.

Studies [0] show that the likelihood of your science being bunk increases with your desire to turn them into bestsellers and make more money from them.

[0] Too lazy to manipulate a bar chart to show whatever I want it to show because I don't actually aim to turn this comment into a bestseller.

These were exactly my thoughts when I first saw the critics of this book some time ago (btw I don't see much added value in this publication relative to what Alexey Guzey wrote initially).

Like I agree that removing the bar is bad, but Walker's takeaway is pretty much the same as that of the original paper from which the graph is taken - the paper states that predictor for injury is sleeping less than 8 hours, which Walker points out as well.

From [0]:

> First, an enormous literature dedicated to the treatment of depression with sleep deprivation has found that people with depression frequently benefit by not getting a good night’s sleep.

> Second, Walker directly contradicts himself in Chapter 7 by acknowledging that there are cases when a good night’s sleep is not helpful after all...

> Finally, although Walker states that “sleep deprivation is not a realistic or comprehensive therapy option”, a review chapter of sleep deprivation in the book Sleep, Neuronal Plasticity and Brain Function published in 2014 reads: "[C]onsidering its safety, this technique [sleep deprivation] can now be considered among the first-line antidepressant treatment strategies for patients affected by mood disorders."

There is no one-size-fits-all advice for sleep, it would seem. For some folks, yes, too much sleep is harmful, and yes, sleep deprivation therapy benefits them.

Moreover, the point is that scientific literature should be peer-reviewed.

[0] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#no-a-good-night-s-slee...

Absolutely not. Not only do Guzey's nitpicks not refute the main point, they fail to refute even the subpoints and subsubpoints.

The example cited here, where people on 5 hours of sleep actually have slightly less chance of injury than 6, is by far the most egregious one, but even it doesn't change the conclusion of the sentence where it appears. At most, it would require a footnote: "also, something weird is going on in the tiny 5 hour group".

There is a section of the post addressing exactly this rebuttal. Search for "and now this is me" and read onward.

As the article says, we shouldn't have the norm, "the data matters unless we already agree with the conclusion."

Nobody is claiming the data doesn't matter. The data they showed supported the conclusion. The author seems mad that there is additional data that also supports the conclusion that they didn't show. My question is, "so what?".

If the additional data falsified the conclusion, that would be one thing. But it doesn't, so why keep harping about how it wasn't shown?

Did you need to spend money on a book to tell you that?

Is it okay for me to make money by distorting science? At what point does my behaviour cross from "finding the best presentation for the data" into "misleading the public"?

This isn't just one book either. It's a whole industry. People know that some magazines have comprehensive fact-checking, and they used to expect a level of fact-checking in pop sci print books. They didn't know that pop-sci books have almost no fact-checking.

https://slate.com/technology/2016/08/why-doesnt-anyone-fact-...

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/journalism-book-fact-checking-j...

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/09/wh...

http://www.danielbor.com/lehrerandsciencewriting/

Did you need a full book to tell you that though? The fundamental problem with pop sci books is that very often the most important facts (and probably the only generally communicable facts) about the topic should not need more than a few dense pages in a long-form article. But you can't sell an article for twenty bucks so the professors who would love a million or two (do they make that much?) Just expand it into drivel and cut corners to "simplify" the prose and take creative license.

Even the greatest popsci book of all time, a brief history of time, is famously a tome almost no one ever reads fully[1]. Every popsci book I've taken up I can never finish because half of it would be repetitive BS and I'll come out of it not taking anymore takeaway points than what was in the article in Forbes promoting the book. The motivations for publishing popular science books by professors are probably to blame here, on top of the fundamental research ethics problems that plague academia nowadays.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/03/1...

> Did you need a full book to tell you that though?

Yes, actually. The point of writing an entire book is to present enough evidence for the reader to come to the author’s conclusion on their own.

The important part of reading a book, the part that has a chance of altering your behavior in the future, is spending time considering the subject matter from various different angles. That’s what gives you the ability to recognize similarities between situations described in the book and situations that appear in your life. This ability to see the things that happen to you in a new light is the real value these books provide.

> The point of writing an entire book is to present enough evidence for the reader to come to the author’s conclusion on their own.

What a great quote. I'll be stealing that thanks.

This is no different that standard text books. There is a lot of filler. You can skim if the primary concept already makes sense, or you can read the extra details if you are confused.

It’s a popsci book, not big Rudin.

If that's the only factual information worth taking away from the book, then what is the point of the book? I have plenty of anecdotal experience to suggest that sleep impacts my health already. A book that uses questionable data to back up something I can observe directly seems to have absolutely no utility.

If you change your habits so that you sleep for eight hours a day instead of seven, after reading Why We Sleep, but in fact you didn't have to and you function just as well on seven, then you are literally wasting 4.1% of your life. That is a lot of life.

I’m pretty sure if you’ve read the book he says that you’re better off to “plan” for 8 hours sleep, even though you might not need it? The author clearly takes this into account.

He doesn’t say If you wake up early stay in bed, actually the advice given was once you’re up, get up, don’t snooze.

I clearly phrased this badly. I will be as precise as possible. Note that I've read about half of Why We Sleep, a year ago or so, before giving up because parts of it were such cult-like "I am going to write about how wonderful sleep is without actually paying any attention to the content of what I am writing"; I simply couldn't stand the nonsense evo-psych "explanations" every couple of pages. I'm aware that you don't get to be one of the top sleep scientists in the world without being capable of competent thought, but that book did not provide evidence of this fact. I also strongly believe that playing around with the amount of sleep you get each night is one of the highest-value experiments it's possible to do, because the cost of sleep is so enormously high and because its benefits are so high up to a point (and the graph of benefit against time varies from person to person).

The comment to which I replied, in part: "Do any of these errors reverse that information? Is sleep actually harmful?… If not, then what's the point [of arguing about whether Why We Sleep contains errors]?"

I interpret this comment as: "Why We Sleep may contain errors, but I don't care; sleep is obviously good for you. I know how much sleep is necessary for me, and am capable of ignoring whatever Why We Sleep says on the matter of how much is required."

My response is that we should care that Why We Sleep contains errors. People are going to read that book and use it to determine how much sleep they need, whether or not the parent commenter has done. The fact that Why We Sleep contains errors obviously doesn't mean we should get less sleep - the greatest idiot on Earth may say that it's raining, but that doesn't mean it's sunny outside - but it should make you at least a little sceptical of its arguments that you should get more sleep, because that sleep comes at a massive cost.

Suppose for the sake of argument it is the case that I require seven hours of sleep a night, and the additional eighth hour confers little additional benefit (or even confers harm - it doesn't matter to my argument). Suppose I habitually sleep seven hours, but then I read Why We Sleep and am terrified into sleeping eight hours a night. Now I am spending a full 1/24th of my life - about 4.1% of it - on extra sleep that is doing very little for me except robbing me of consciousness.

Perhaps it is the case that for you in particular, there is enough benefit from that eighth hour of sleep to outweigh the cost (and I assert that it's definitely worth everyone individually doing this little experiment on themselves, because people differ)! Perhaps it is the case that for most people, there is enough benefit - but we don't know, and we can't know simply from Why We Sleep, because it contains errors.

(The first part of the comment to which I replied was "The general message and key takeaway I got from the book was that sleep affects your health in various ways and getting a sufficient amount of higher quality sleep is better than not doing so." This is undoubtedly true: so obviously true, in fact, that there is no need for anyone to read a book to learn it.)

Your reaction makes me sad. Do you really believe that sleeping equals time wasted? :|

It's a natural process of healing and rest, like.. huh?

I explicitly predicated my answer on the assumption that the reader needs seven hours of sleep and not eight. Unless you mean "all else being equal, would you not rather spend another hour of your life per day unconscious?" - in which case no, I would not.