How one person "cheated sleep"

[dewimorgan]

Well, by all means, CALL IT BUNK! Please, do! I like being wrong far less than I like being corrected But, in doing so, please back up the extraordinary claims with evidence.

I can find the extraordinary claim itself really quite often. But - and this is entirely possibly because I’m not using the right terms, or not asking the right questions - I cannot find the claim that there was a socially agreed upon two-hour period in the middle of the night when people would go off and dine with friends who’d be awake at the same time purely by biological happenstance because that’s how we’re “meant” to sleep, anywhere outside of people who’ve skim-read Roger Ekirch’s book.

To his credit he cites hundreds of sources, but that I’ve been able to see, they aren’t really a rock-solid case for this just-so story. He has found 70-odd instances of the term “second sleep”. He’s found plenty of instances of interrupted sleep, whether from the cries of watchmen or the bites of fleas. And then there are experiments which show that if you put people in the dark for long periods, they tend to sleep intermittently.

There are any number of other things that cry out as clear bunk, like urban legends and folk etymologies: they’re too just-so-story pat. Takethe “pear of anguish”, an alleged torture tool… undocumented before the 1980s, maybe even 1990s. The coriolis-in-a-bathtub thing. And infinitely more. Some actually turn out true and amazing, but many are bunk, and historical revisionism typically falls into that second category.

[anon68952647]

@dewimorgan

I cannot find the claim that there was a socially agreed upon two-hour period in the middle of the night when people would go off and dine with friends who’d be awake at the same time purely by biological happenstance because that’s how we’re “meant” to sleep, anywhere outside of people who’ve skim-read Roger Ekirch’s book.

To his credit he cites hundreds of sources, but that I’ve been able to see…

Some people can’t see red and green. They just can’t. I’d consider that sort of thing as a potential cause of your misunderstanding and look at a work around for the lack of empathy/ incapacity to consider what you admit looking directly at.

[dewimorgan]

Dude - seriously, what is your problem? You’ve been trolling me every time I’ve posted today, ad-homming and snarking everything I’ve said, and re-attacking in the face of my best efforts to clarify my points and fix your misinterpretations… which I’m decently convinced are now deliberate. There seems no actual value in responding to you, since you’re completely uninterested in good-faith discussion: just trolling and pretending I said things which are inconsistent with your beliefs.

Am I wrong? Is there something you actually do want from me? Did I piss in your cornflakes somewhere and you want new cornflakes? Did you genuinely misunderstand me so badly, in two separate threads? Or are you just the /b/-tard your meme-pics seem to indicate?

[anon68952647]

I’m sorry you feel that way. I disagreed with you in another thread, yes. Nothing personal.

What I am saying is that you have an exeperience which I respect. But you also seem to dismiss other peoples experiences because you didn’t have them or can’t imagine them. That’s sort of a lack of empathy.

Also, you made one very broad argument up there, which I did challenge. At which time you “clarified” by adding several additional points of context as though it were ME not getting your entire context the first time around, when you didn’t offer it.

So no, nothing personal. But maybe don’t expect anyone else to mindread, including yourself. That’s just fighty. Thanks!

[dewimorgan]

[Edit: Meanta post this to PM: feel free to skip/ignore. Won’t delete again as that messes up threads where there are responses, but mods are quite welcome to, as this is kinda offtopic.]

I’m sorry you feel that way. I disagreed with you in another thread, yes. Nothing personal.

Fair enough, sorry I took it that way, then, and thanks for not getting personal

What I am saying is that you have an exeperience which I respect.
But you also seem to dismiss other peoples experiences because
you didn’t have them or can’t imagine them. That’s sort of a lack of empathy.

Ah, I see where you came from with that empathy thing now, then: I thought you were referring to the flags thread!

Though, that’s another good argument for the importance of improving my empathy: Posting one-liners gives me less chance to think about how people will interpret and respond, but I should take that time anyway, before posting them.

Hindsight says, mentioning TPP in the flags thread was raining-on-parade, so couldn’t get agreement even from people who feel TPP is important. When posting, for some reason I expected agreement from others who had a fiddling-while-Rome-burns sense of impending doom about TPP. Foolish, unempathic, and positively tone-deaf!

And then I made it worse by digging in my heels and doubling down, rather than apologizing for tone-deafness. Tchah.

Also, you made one very broad argument up there, which I did challenge.
At which time you “clarified” by adding several additional points of context
as though it were ME not getting your entire context the first time around,
when you didn’t offer it.

So no, nothing personal. But maybe don’t expect anyone else to mindread,
including yourself. That’s just fighty. Thanks!

Put that way, and not as an attack on me… eh, you make some damn good points. Well, bugger

Part of that is, yeah, I was assuming that if you were responding on it, you probably knew MORE than me on the topic, and what you knew conflicted with my feeble Googlings and reading: so I laid out in more detail what I knew and why I feel it’s bunk, expecting you to then respond “Well, you’re a dribbling idiot who can’t even google ‘second sleep’ [or somesuch term], because there’s some evidence that shows you’re wrong in the FIRST HIT! [link to jfgi.com]”

But then I’d probably just have shown the other behavior you’ve told me off for: I’d have moved the goalposts.

Not deliberately, but as I learn more (or just think more about something) my opinion develops, and I usually don’t think to say, though I really ought to, “Eh, you’re right on that, so I’ve changed my mind on Y, I still don’t agree with you, but think it’s probably more such-n-such than so-n-so, now.”

Instead, I expect people to mindread (again!) and I just say “Yeah, but Y is such-n-such.” …which leaves me WIDE open to a pasted quote where I say Y is so-n-so, and a (legitimate!) accusation of inconsistency and goalpost-moving.

So, yeah, you’re right. I need to:

1. not assume that people have more knowledge than I do about stuff, and
2. not assume that others are following where my mind went, when I read their response.

OK, I’ll try. No promises I’ll be instantly perfect. I’ll continue to suck, I’m sure you’ll continue to call me on it, and hopefully I’ll get better at it over time!

Meantime, I’ll go back and check my posts, see if they can be salvaged with some edits. Not sure I should touch my flags posts though, I don’t think I can fix them without just pissing more people off. Not sure even an apology can fix that one, now…

[Edit: previous posts aren’t editable. Well, balls. Undeleted my previous deleted post, for thread consistency.]

[dewimorgan]

I cannot find the claim that there was a socially agreed upon two-hour

[Moving-goalposts.jpg]

Eh, fair cop there!

So, unmoving the goalposts - polyphasic “sleep-4-wake-2-sleep-4” seems to me, with my limited knowledge, vanishingly unlikely to have happened in the majority of people in the past.

That I can find, the main source for the polyphasic sleep hypothesis seems to be one book, “At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past”, by AR Ekirk, of which I have read only excerpts, which bases the idea around historical mostly-English writings. I’ve been unable to find any discussion of whether non-electric tribes, the Amish, etc have been tested for this form of sleep, though since this seems like an obvious place to start, I’m sure someone has addressed this, possibly in the book.

Those parts I’ve read focused on the historical evidence, though, which makes sense as the author’s a historian, not an anthropologist. He makes the point that the underclasses (that is, the vast majority) were chronically lacking in sleep, then spins a romantic image of them as people who own the night through their drunken revels, sneakiness and violence. But they are chronically lacking in sleep. Lacking in sleep is posited as the reason we sleep in a chunk now. Why’d they wake up when they’re lacking sleep?

Siestas and afternoon naps and other sleeps during the day to digest food are a common thing to this day. But the two-hour break in the middle of the night in pre-electric times seems like a waste of light.

And I don’t think that’s what he was really trying to claim in his book anyway. Instead, this 2-hour break to socialize seems like an internet myth built from headline-readings of his book. Though, it’s so often quoted, almost verbatim, that I’m wondering if it’s copied from the dustcover or something.

So I may be wrong, often am, and until I can get the whole damn book to read, and reread the stuff I read too long ago, I’m leaving myself wide open to get pasted with real facts Which is cool and fun and learny anyway, so have at!

To his credit he cites hundreds of sources, but that I’ve been able to see…

I’d consider [my own blindness] as a potential cause of your misunderstanding

If it is a misunderstanding, I’m certainly very interested in having that understanding repaired.

[MacD]

“But the two-hour break in the middle of the night in pre-electric times seems like a waste of light.”

Uhmm … you mean candle light?

Anyway, so this guy has studied the phenomenon, has this in his favour: “To his credit he cites hundreds of sources” and you yourself put forwards: “Siestas and afternoon naps and other sleeps during the day to digest food are a common thing to this day”.

And then you say that you think anything else but one solid block of 8 hours of sleep is bunk.

Al the while, that period of wakefullness is not just refered to in english literature, but also (afaik) asian writings. So we have documented evidence, written, in multiple cultures, we have cultures which to this day have a different rythm … and you start crying ‘ad hominem!’ and ‘extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence!’ for things which where respectively only quite lightly adversarial and, considering many culture’s different rythms of wakefullness, rest, times of eating and bedtimes, not very extraordinary claims.

Seems to me, the burden of proof is on you, seeing as someone HAS done research and you admittedly have not.