See how pointless this is?
To argue against a book, you really only need to argue against its central theme. To combat a dozen accusations, you need to reply to each and every one to avoid being wounded by them.
No, you don't get a pass just because your "central theme" is acceptable.
If someone writes a book about a scientific topic, with a "central theme" that is uncontroversial but uninteresting (e.g. "sleep is good"), but otherwise riddles the book with factual and scientific inaccuracies, then they need to fix the problems. If they don't, they're writing science-themed fiction, at best.
At worst, someone can do real harm by dressing up nonsense as science.
See also: the gish gallop: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop
> The Gish Gallop is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort.
Interesting all of the criticisms are individually weak arguments. Like you’re saying no argument is strong?
I don't find it to be egregious
This in particular: "it takes an inordinate amount of time to respond to the criticism"
Ain't it. If you are going to present yourself as an authority on a segment of human knowledge, then you should necessarily EXPECT to receive challenge when you haven't actually done your own homework. Nobody who writes a book while acting as an authority should be incapable of showing their work.
And since they're all aimed at the first chapter, it's not cherrypicking.
If the author doesn't respond to such an inquiry within ample but reasonable time, then you can go loading up the shotgun with accusatory birdshot and take it to the court of public opinion.
That's the last resort.
You're right that it's excatly like nutrition advice or politics in that there's a 80%+ chance whenever someone sells a hugely popular book in this field that most of it is just made the f*** up.
Other sleep experts have asserted that the book is so awful as to constitute research misconduct and what we should do is give posts correcting bad science the attention they deserve and hold shoddy scientists and public intellectuals accountable.
I think its similar to how people will completely write off a book/movie/person for _one_ thing. I get some things have more weight than others and its hard to trust a book if you find one error... but I've seen people say entire books (technical ones) are "trash" because they disagreed with one or two issues.
Seems like a modern phenomenon. Or maybe just rose tinted glasses... but it seemed people could disagree or even point out flaws while still being on the same "team."
Interesting. It looks like it’s making an argument but if you read closely it’s nothing but insinuation and an opinion about the correct way to have disagreements so as to avoid scandal in front of the plebeians.
I don't personally think the article was in any worse taste than the book. Just because someone cites studies doesn't mean they know how to relate data. There's two entire websites dedicated to this sort of fallacy, here (HN) and Reddit. Pop-sci is the most annoying part of the 21st century to me.
I'm not convinced anyone actually understands sleep. We know too little and we can die. Too much, and we can die too. "Just enough" is the answer but as far as I can tell no one can quantify what this even means. I sleep enough to be rested. This seems to be >= 6 hours a night. The book would insinuate that I'm going to die of all sorts of terrible diseases as a result. The book itself isn't good science and I don't think a criticism of such a broad-strokes painting of a complicated subject needs to be any more kind.
To address your greater point if there's any place where you can throw a rock and find bullshit it's nutrition and health "science". In fact, the industry is so rife with bullshit it's often difficult to tease out actual actionable data. More people need to directly criticize these people in such a fashion until they simply go away.
For any given book, you can construct a list of accusations like these, laden with quotes and references. Some of the accusations may be absolutely true (it's rare for a book to be 100% accurate), or superficially seem to be true but actually more nuanced than that in a way that is not trivial to explain, some may even be fabrications. It's hard to tell for an outsider.
Regardless of the accuracy of such a barrage of accusations, it takes an inordinate amount of time to respond to the criticism, as it will typically contain of several dozen points each of which require a lengthy response. And by that time it doesn't matter, the accusation will have already been accepted as true.
If you're going to publish something like this, you should at least notify the author well ahead of time and give them ample opportunity to explain what you've found and construct a response.