Alexey Guzey

These are my two favorite blogs of Q4`19: Pat Collison [1] (Co-founder, CEO Stripe) doesn't blog often, but is one of the most interesting and insightful people I have ever read I don't know much about Alexey Guzey [2] yet, but he also has some very good posts (he writes more often and more long form, and is more similar to Gwern and SSC, in part because I think those two blogs have influenced him heavily) [1] https://patrickcollison.com/ [2] https://guzey.com/

agree. This "8 hours of sleep" is just a made up number. Most adults (with responsibilities) don't sleep for 8 hours daily. They sleep far less. And sleeping less than that is enough to live a very healthy life. If you feel your body/mind didn't rest well because you didn't get your 8 hour sleep, it's likely because you've been exposed to, and came to believe all these articles saying you do need 8 hrs min sleep. It's simply not the case. You can function very well on 6.5/7 hrs of sleep. I'm nearing 40 and I do. 2 worthy links: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ - debunks the popular "why we sleep" book https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqlzQMB1fN8 - this guy is a S&C coach who's 30 and strong. He too believes sleep is overstated.

Also worth checking out his retrospective a couple of years later: https://guzey.com/2022-lessons/#get-minimum-possible-sustainable-amoun… I'm not sure whether he's gone back on any of the specific criticisms he made, but his overall attitude towards sleep certainly seems different to before.

While I agree that getting good sleep is necessary, I think the book does tend to over exaggerate the negatives. Alexey Guzey's article on this[1] is excellent and I recommend everyone to give it a read. [1] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

I have a lightweight way to use the pomodoro technique: I just start a pomodoro at x:00 or x:30 on the clock, and take a break at x:25 or x:55. This lets me work through a pomodoro when I'm super concentrated and doesn't introduce a distracting app or alarm. It's based on this blog post[^0], which I can highly recommend in general. [^0]: https://guzey.com/productivity/#how-i-work-and-rest-how-my-system-is-d…

I haven't read "why we sleep" but this is an interesting article: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ which claims the book isn't all that great.

As a bit of a caution on the book, it's probably worth a look at this article: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

I'll just quote relevant points from here: It's a long article. I recommend reading it, https://guzey.com/personal/why-have-a-blog/ 2. “But nobody will read my blog” It doesn’t matter! Your blog may have the median of 0 visitors per day (as my blog had for the first two years). Your blog may be ungoogleable. Your blog may have no subscribers. But if you’re not embarrassed to tell people “oh, btw I wrote about this / collected some things on the topic on my blog”, the purpose of the blog is fulfilled, since this is the best indicator of your writing actually being helpful.

I really wanted to love this book, and I was if anything biased heavily towards believing it. I read it cover to cover in less than a week. Sadly, I found that book made my sleep worse. (A quick Google will show I'm not alone). Also there is a lot of debate around the quality of the research underpinning the book, this is the most prominent article: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ Also I really do not love his subsequent rebranding as "The Sleep Diplomat" https://www.sleepdiplomat.com/ I'm glad if it made your life better, but I cannot recommend it, and won't see it recommended without comment.

I agree! The best websites are those maintained by individuals without a profit motive. Here's a short list that I've started collecting: - Kevin Kelly: kk.org - Patrick Collison: patrickcollison.com - Patrick McKenzie: kalzumeus.com - David Perell: perell.com - Berthub.eu - Alexey Guzey: https://guzey.com/ - https://www.gwern.net/index - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ - https://dcgross.com/ - Paul Graham: paulgraham.com - https://nintil.com/ - Laura Deming: https://www.ldeming.com/ - Sam Altman: https://blog.samaltman.com/ - Casey Handmer: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/

My favourite ones (mainly tech or bio related): - https://www.gwern.net/index - https://guzey.com/ - https://nintil.com/ - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ - https://waitbutwhy.com/

Tangential: Guzey's "Best of Twitter" (https://guzey.com/best-of-twitter/) is the best Twitter curation list, bar none. He explores a lot of of interesting contrarian ideas and runs a lot of interesting self-experiments in productivity.

You are in for a treat: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/ https://guzey.com/favorite/slate-star-codex/ https://danwahl.net/blog/slate-star-codex

>the best advice-givers will tell white-lies privately, even to people they love and respect, if the advice-seekers don't send ultra-clear ultra-proactive signals that they will not be hurt by the advice they seek I think I tried to communicate this when suggesting asking for outrageous advice, but I think you're making this point better. Anyway, I added you comment to https://guzey.com/advice/#best-comments :)

Love these posts, here's a couple more that are similar: Patrick Collinson- https://patrickcollison.com/questions Gwern- https://www.gwern.net/Questions Alexey Guzey- https://guzey.com/personal/research-ideas/ Anybody have more?

Hi. Don’t understand your work on Grassman.jl (hopefully only yet, I plan to study differential algebra), but admire it a lot! Thanks for this and other packages and your contributions to Julia community. Here I have found nice list of micro grants and fellowships (not at traditional university). Maybe you’ll find something worth applying for. https://guzey.com/personal/what-should-you-do-with-your-life/#where-to…

Alexey Guzey's post is probably worth reading first: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

> Unfortunately the books are still sold. I've considered printing stickers that warns about the nonsense and sneak it on to copies in book stores. Great idea! We should do that for Why We Sleep, too: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

Re: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, this critique of the book is worth a read: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

Here is the blog post regarding factual errors in "Why we sleep" in case anyone is interested: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ I was about to read the book based on a colleague's recommendation, but the blog post and a separate article in my local newspaper debunking few of the claims made me decide against it.

That book is perhaps not the best example: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

I find many people in my life seem very precious about their sleep, in a way that I am not. I also can sometimes endure a day that I detect fatigue in myself. I don't necessarily love it, but I'll note it easy to go to sleep early the second day if I am tired the day before, and if something happens that causes my sleep to feel shorter than i'd like, I don't really worry about it at all. Same reason I don't really concern myself if I detect notes of hunger in my system. Meh. Sometimes I've fasted a long time, usually I don't fast at all, but I really don't concern myself with "oh my gosh i have not eaten in {recent hours} I am STARVING" energy. Anyway, I suggest this article to most people I find myself discussing sleep with, and enough people have said it was worth their time to read it, so I continue to share it: [1] Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors [1] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ The animal-ish part of a human existence is always interesting to me. Elsewhere in the comments I've seen sorta uncomfortable references to pressuring someone for sexual intimacy before bedtime based on this paper. Meh. Something that IS really nice before sleep is emotionally connected sexual intimacy, and I hope no one would want emotionally _dis_connected sexual intimacy from/for a partner, and I, personally, would make some big steps back if I thought a partner wanted something like... disattuned sex out of me. This last paragraph…

This book has serious issues. https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ The only mention of daylight savings time in Why We Sleep is: > In the Northern Hemisphere, the switch to daylight savings time in March results in most people losing an hour of sleep opportunity. Should you tabulate millions of daily hospital records, as researchers have done, you discover that this seemingly trivial sleep reduction comes with a frightening spike in heart attacks the following day. Impressively, it works both ways. In the autumn within the Northern Hemisphere, when the clocks move forward and we gain an hour of sleep opportunity time, rates of heart attacks plummet the day after. I don't see a specific study cited, but my ebook copy doesn't seem to have all the footnotes. I pulled up the article you linked on sci-hub: https://sci-hub.se/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18971502/ The only use of the number "24" refers to hours in the day, and its summary doesn't seem to match your claim: > The incidence of acute myocardial infarction was significantly increased for the first 3 week-days after the transition to daylight saving time in the spring (Fig. 1A). The incidence ratio for the first week after the spring shift, calculated as the incidence for all 7 days divided by the mean of the weekly incidences 2 weeks before and 2 weeks after, was 1.051 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.032 to 1.071). In contrast, after the transition out of daylight saving time in the autumn, only the first…

+1 to this. Huberman has the bad habit of constructing grand narratives that match his beliefs about health and reality, and packaging them as podcast episodes based on science. The only problem is that "based on science" might mean a single low-powered study, which Huberman cites and over-generalizes as if it was rock-solid fact. See this[0] discussion on Huberman's subreddit for more context. Another example is his episode with Matthew Walker (author of Why We Sleep), and his other episodes where he gives sleep advice citing Walker as an authority. The problem is that Walker's work is not good[1][2] (riddled with errors at best, fraudulent at worst). To be clear: I'm sure a lot (if not the majority) of what Huberman says is correct, or at least matches our current scientific understanding. The problem is that some things are incorrect, and the layman has no way of knowing which is which (especially since all the content is presented with the same high-certainty "science-based tools" tone) [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/andrewhuberman/comments/smnnb0/criticism_of_a… [1] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850

A major technique mentioned by the author is omitted from the article’s headline: co-working. She writes about benefitting greatly from logging on to a muted Zoom room with hundreds of other people to work at a set time. It’s interesting how this is effective for some people; for another anecdote, blogger Alexey Guzey wrote about a similar system [0] with a smaller group. Psychiatrist Dr. David Burns writes at length about more techniques on addressing procrastination (called “do-nothingism”). He has a chapter on the subject in his book “Feeling Good,” and he wrote a similar passage online in an article for his podcast [1]. The methods he writes about that work best for me have been breaking down tasks into sequence of simple steps. This helps greatly for straightforward tasks, though it is less effective for difficult tasks that involve uncertainty and learning. These harder tasks require persistence and preferably time. Separately, a personal technique I use is to really sell myself on the value of completing a task. The phrase, “discipline matters more than getting motivated” is thrown around a lot on the web, and though it has merit, I find motivation crucial to sustaining projects in the long-term (and also figuring out when it’s worthwhile to exit from a method or approach). [0] https://guzey.com/co-working/ [1] https://feelinggood.com/2017/09/18/053-ask-david-i-dont-feel-like-doin…

I think this book is mostly bullshit - the same author that wrote the linked HN post dug into that book and there was a ton of manipulative data and just straight up false claims. [0] I get a pretty strong pseudoscience vibe from it. From a previous post: I got a strong motivated reasoning/bullshit vibe from Walker in this interview: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/20/630792401/sleep-scientist-warns-against… Particularly this section: > “Sleep is not like the bank. So you can't accumulate debt and then try and pay it off at a later point in time. And the reason is this - we know that if I were to deprive you of sleep for an entire night - take away eight hours - and then in the subsequent nights, I give you all of the sleep that you want - however much you wish to consume - you never get back all that you lost. You will sleep longer, but you will never achieve that full eight-hour repayment as it were. So the brain has no capacity to get back that lost sleep...” I don’t think this follows - seems likely to me that sleep is not some linear time thing and that there’s a standard overhead that doesn’t need to be repeated to extend and make up the time. This feels like a symptom of not understanding the mechanism and making a bad assumption. I also found the “I won’t mention the cognitive failures I can detect” irritating. If there’s some actual thing to mention, say it - this kind of thing sets off alarms for me. It doesn’t…

> "Why we sleep" is, according to independent research, almost complete bullshit: > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850 > https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families... > https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ Complete? I wouldn't say so - as others have noted, there's a few issues that the author of that blog post has with some small assertions made by Matthew Walker. Whether that throws everything in the book into question is an interesting question, but if the whole book was 'complete bullshit' then I'd expect a more comprehensive debunking than that blog post. As to the links you've cited there -- 1 and 3 are the same link (well, HN comments in (1) point to the actual story at (3). The second link seems to agree with -- and be full of exactly the same myth debunking & recommendations that -- Matthew Walker makes. As it happens I'm about 80% the way through the book now.

The citation is "Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors": https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

That's a very bad book "Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors" https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

That book is full of scientific errors and probably one of the most misleading pop-science books in recent history https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/