81–90 of 139 posts
>the Hadza uniformly reported high satisfaction with their sleep. And why wouldn't they? This is (presumably) the only kind of sleep they know.
Do you really need to know other kinds of sleep in order to know if you feel like shit after waking up or if you feel fine?
Even in your example, you propose an individual could know multiple kinds of after-sleep feelings.
> Some emerging research suggests Earth’s magnetism matters, as well. Being barefoot on the ground versus 30 stories high in a downtown skyscraper puts you in a completely different magnetic environment. Really? My instinctive reaction to this statement is that it's quackery. Would be very interested to see headlines appear about this if it's true.
I would not jump to such conclusions, I would assume is not fully known and needs to be further understood. on the other side, do you know we have polarized and non-polarized cells? do you know they can be affected by electromagnetism? this two things already establish the existence of a relationship and effects between them. If we then consider that cells mechanism work based on differential of electrical or chemica…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49360307
even mechanical of course :)
I think people in HN (and in general) have to remember the central axes of evolution before digesting this kind of article. I've already seen comments like it's "odd that no species has ended up evolving a continuous maintenance system" and "sleep has a higher opportunity cost in humans" in this comments section. This is a common, but poor framing of evolution. Remember: the only real rule with evolution is "did this…
You're just renaming the terms. More/less is a fitness gradient, and the thing that lives there is called an optimizer.
Evolution is a tunable-scale optimizer. It's not perfectly local, because it shotguns to avoid local optima on a (bumpy/noisy) fitness landscape. If you tune the 'shot pattern' really wide (infinite copies with infinite variation), you'd genuinely get a one-shot global optimizer at the limit. But that's not efficient nor realistic, so typically it's somewhere in between.
Uh, compare maze solvers: you've got your greedy direct route (gets stuck in the first corner) , Dijkstra (finds all the answers but takes ages), and then stuff like A*, which is a happy medium. Evolutionary algos can be used to solve mazes just the same. I think it's a bit heavier on resources than A*, but well suited to embarrassingly parallel optimization.
edit: Heh, I actually had claude build a comparative simulation. Turns out evolution is actually very slow on a single optimization axis, and gets stumped in mazes where the detour length is greater than the "temperature"/"spread"/"noise". The actual performance metrics are fascinating. But once tuned, it is able to solve mazes. Thus an optimizer. QED :-P
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a contentious theory with little actual historical backing. Most likely people have been sleeping in one block since forever.
> Most likely people have been sleeping in one block since forever. Does that have stronger historical backing?
Roger Ekirch’s theory, meanwhile, is based on what one could call a biased interpretation of a hand-picked selection of ambiguous sources.
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> It maybe can be, but what is the maxima that is being solved for exactly? Survival rate/reproduction rate/rate of genes being spread?
I think you're correct, but only if you add "for a given environment". It's good to develop the ability to store super efficiently fat when you're a Pacific Islander and food is scarce, but this advantageous trait becomes a liability with modern and plentiful (junk) food . see thrify gene hypothesis; I know it's not a good explanatory theory but it's a good illustration of my point
>the Hadza uniformly reported high satisfaction with their sleep. And why wouldn't they? This is (presumably) the only kind of sleep they know.
Do you really need to know other kinds of sleep in order to know if you feel like shit after waking up or if you feel fine?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most likely people have been sleeping in one block since forever. Does that have stronger historical backing?
There is a lack of historical writings clearly describing segmented sleep as a normal practice over monophasic sleep. If it had been the standard sleep pattern, one would expect abundant evidence for it. Roger Ekirch’s theory, meanwhile, is based on what one could call a biased interpretation of a hand-picked selection of ambiguous sources.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a lack of historical writings clearly describing segmented sleep as a normal practice over monophasic sleep. If it had been the standard sleep pattern, one would expect abundant evidence for it. Roger Ekirch’s theory, meanwhile, is based on what one could call a biased interpretation of a hand-picked selection of ambiguous sources.
I asked if there's abundant evidence for monophasic sleep in historical writings. Or do we just assume it was monophasic, because there's not much written about sleep either way?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really need to know other kinds of sleep in order to know if you feel like shit after waking up or if you feel fine?
I believe that how you feel after a night's sleep is mostly due to nutrition (long term, not just the day before).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a contentious theory with little actual historical backing. Most likely people have been sleeping in one block since forever.
But the article discussed here also points in that direction when it mentions the importance of people on the lookout at night. The article also mentions primitive tribes partying all night, so that is yet another direction.
I found this reassuring and slightly amazing, that he is wired to do his part as a nighttime lookout.