101–110 of 205 posts
I’ll admit I didn’t read TFA. Some combination of the title and the submission domain triggered my tick even more than usual around the use of “AI”. It’s extremely unlikely that I’ll regard any artifact as artificially intelligent if the broader context fails a pretty low bar for intelligence of any kind.
So a bit of a false positive for your mental model.
It's notable that almost every animal sleeps in some way, even organisms that are away from sunlight (ie. creatures that live underground). If you sleep 30% of the time, that's 30% of the time you aren't eating, mating, etc. Also, during sleep you are more vulnerable to predators. One would expect evolution to get rid of sleep in creatures who don't rely on sunlight cycles. So, there must be some really good evolutio…
> So, there must be some really good evolutionary reason for sleep. Is this how evolution works? Might it be that animals sleeping is good on the macro level but bad for the animal?
E.g. rabbit population being culled by predators may prevent the rabbits from eating their feed plants to extinction.
Are there any good sci fi stories or novels on reducing or eliminating sleep through better chemistry?
Given the impetus of the article is we're all chronically sleep deprived, I wonder what kind of (Swiftian?) political solution there might be to collectively improving sleep health.
Certainly the current commercial solution is drugs and lots of them.
Speak for yourself. I love sleep and wish I could sleep more. Sometimes I think the only purpose of being awake is to get food and shelter for more sleep.
A Gut Bacteria" is also a rather interesting approach to solving sleep problems. Does anyone have experience related to this? "The company ( FitBiomics ) has already commercialized two products. Their flagship offering, V•Nella, helps metabolize lactic acid and reduce fatigue, while Nella targets sleep health - a crucial market considering that 100 million Americans suffer from insomnia. "Within 10 to 14 days of dail…
The Taylorism (and eugenics) people would have a field day with this. Are there any good sci fi stories or novels on reducing or eliminating sleep through better chemistry? Given the impetus of the article is we're all chronically sleep deprived, I wonder what kind of (Swiftian?) political solution there might be to collectively improving sleep health. Certainly the current commercial solution is drugs and lots of th…
This paper totally ignores the human aspect of sleeping, there is a habit to it. If we were able to be awake 20 hours a day we may still be miserable because of factors like the sun being down for ane even longer time while we’re awake. I feel like this is one of those inane pursuits for productivity where that doesn’t fit at all, at least not for the thinking jobs. Maybe in a dystopia big companies like amazon would…
Hey, discussion of orexin receptor stuff! As someone with clinically-diagnosed insomnia, I've been lucky enough to/unfortunate enough to have to try the orexin receptor antagonist sleep aids for a while. As recent, on-patent drugs, they are very, very expensive ($360/month was the number marked on the receipt slip, not that that means much in the US; I certainly wasn't paying that)... and they work. They really, real…
> As recent, on-patent drugs, they are very, very expensive ($360/month... Expensive is always relative to one's income. But, to put that number into perspective relative to another medication given for a good night's sleep: I'm the parent of a narcoleptic. The meds to get a good night's sleep, Xyrem, are in the $15k / month range. The recently approved generics are 1/2 that.
Xyrem is basically GHB? A 500 ml bottle of GBL used to be what, 50 euros?
I know the medication is pharmeceutical grade, but are these people insane?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The night niche doesn't require artificial lighting though. Moonlight can be enough to have a decent understanding of one's surroundings, and then there's more than vision to navigate and be active. We wouldn't need a full species level evolution to be good at night life.
> Moonlight can be enough to have a decent understanding of one's surroundings, and then there's more than vision to navigate and be active Decent for us. Great for our predators and prey. > We wouldn't need a full species level evolution to be good at night life. The point of the article, which granted is a hypothesis, is that the adaptations it would take to be good at night would make us no more than good during t…
Reading the article I thought there should be more weight given to behaviors different from sleep to adapt to the other niche, and also that being perfectly adapted to a niche doesn't sound like a benefit in the first place. My understanding is that most species have an evolution process slow enough that they never completely fit a niche but also have enough versatility to move around.
I'm thinking dogs, bears, crows, racoons, migratory birds etc. where adaptation happens, but not to a degree they can't move out from their niche.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Moonlight can be enough to have a decent understanding of one's surroundings, and then there's more than vision to navigate and be active Decent for us. Great for our predators and prey. > We wouldn't need a full species level evolution to be good at night life. The point of the article, which granted is a hypothesis, is that the adaptations it would take to be good at night would make us no more than good during t…
On the day/night balance, I was looking at cats as an example of a species that sleeps in smaller chunks and splits activity all around night and day. Reading the article I thought there should be more weight given to behaviors different from sleep to adapt to the other niche, and also that being perfectly adapted to a niche doesn't sound like a benefit in the first place. My understanding is that most species have a…
Cats are crepuscular. The niche hypothesis predicts they'd sleep most of the day and night.
> not to a degree they can't move out from their niche
No animal I know of can't survive outside its time niche.