One of the best books on this topic is Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. While I know people on HN dislike the author, I think it’s a great book to read once in your life and get the benefits of knowing how important sleep is without being too alarmist. It helped me each day to get better at sleeping. I think we pride ourselves on our hustle and lack of sleep where these badges hurt us both in the short term and long term. Perhaps that is just a season of life everyone goes through though.
There's a pretty long (4-part) discussion on Andrew Gelman's blog[0] about Guzey's article and the book. In the end I was pretty convinced that many of the book's claims cannot be trusted.
Look at section 19 of the review. Matthew cut off a part of a graph from his sources that doesn't support his theses. How unscientific is that? Why shouldn't I be disappointed?
That in a "debate", you could value the proponents and rank the proposals accordingly, but it is a most difficult game for a number of reasons (that the proposals are complex; that the proponents are complex and encompassing strengths and weaknesses; that your judgement over them may be mislead; that circularly it is not clear how to (who will reliably) evaluate them etc.),
or that at some point you may want to shift the investment from the pieces of the debate to your ability to assess them critically and build the grounds for a more reliable judgement.
Just a general principle of distance from contents - heavyweights are hard to find so our ability to delegate judgement is restricted.
> ...it was read by hundreds of psychologists and neuroscientists who – I believe – also failed to find any serious issues [...] Some of the scientists wrote to me directly [including] a sleep scientist with >50 h-index who studied sleep for more than 40 years
This isn't some crackpot questioning the scientific consensus of an entire field of study. It's a critique of specific contents of a single piece of work.
Given that pop sci publications have a history of being slippery with the truth, and given the financial incentive to make millions off a pop sci book, and given that the claims made in the blog post are easily confirmed and checked, this appeal to authority that you've made is misplaced.
