Christian Smith

Hey Alexey, I liked your post but I'm sympathetic to some of what @sleepJunkie says. The implicit, high-level conclusion that most readers will take away from your post matters even if it's not stated completely explicitly.

I appreciate you calling out BS and poorly backed claims--I expect you're right that the book isn't as helpful or rigorous as it purports to be, but I find your arguments about the potential harm of the book largely unconvincing

"[imagine a young person that] naturally needs to sleep for 7 hours a night, reads Why We Sleep, gets scared, and decides to spend the full 8 hours in bed every day...they will waste more than 20,000 hours or more than 2 years of their life, with uncertain long-term side-effects"

I find it hard to imagine many people who naturally feel great with low amounts of sleep will act on the book's advice. I expect it's largely people who already think they don't sleep enough that'd be affected by the books message.

While it's not impossible, I'm not convinced that this book will stop many people from trying sleep deprivation therapy

"When people don’t restrict their food-eating, many...start eating more than they need and become obese...allowing ourselves to get as much food as we want, likely isn’t the healthiest choice. My guess is that same is likely true for sleep."

I'm not convinced by this analogy. I don't think hunter-gatherers regularly struggled with overeating even when food was abundant. Something changed recently about the environments humans live in and the types of food they can access. These changes made over-consumption a problem

I don't know that there's any comparable change that makes humans' natural drives towards sleep maladaptive in the modern environment