As someone when a poor sleep schedule, the inability it stick to a routine in this area tends to show up in every area… exercise, diet, etc.
I would imagine that someone with a very regimented life tends to stick to a lot of healthy habits. They aren’t going out to the bar every night, then waking up at 6am for their morning routine.
I my younger self had a terrible sleep schedule. I suffered pre-occupied thoughts of either what did or was about to happen.
I have a very consistent sleep schedule now and it is a real pleasure. I my sleep schedule has 2 or 3 3-4 hour stretches of solid sleep. I make my own schedule now so sleep is usually available when I'm ready.
The article never says anything about causation. It says sleep regularity is a predictor of mortality. That means if you find someone who already has poor sleep regularity they're more likely to die sooner, not that if you force someone into a bad sleep schedule they will become more likely to die sooner.
>Couldn’t this effect be classic cause vs correlation?
Sometimes changing the correlated item, also affects the cause, through a link of causual changes.
E.g.: "Night visits to the fridge linked to high cholesterol".
Now, that's just correlation: it's not the visiting of the fridge, it's the snacking.
But if you read that and stop visiting the fridge, you likely reduce your snacking too as a side effect, and thus lower your cholesterol, without consciously trying to address the primary cause.
I feel like your example is flawed, I just can't put my finger on it.
Maybe it's because I don't see how sleep regularity is a factor you can change as willingly as visits to the fridge, or maybe its because I don't see why people wouldn't just eat more before heading to bed.
It could also just be that I find a treatment of symptoms to be less desirable than causes.
>I don't see how sleep regularity is a factor you can change as willingly as visits to the fridge
In some cases it might be hard (e.g. insomnia), in others it might be as easy as e.g. changing your schedule, or stopping binge-watching/gaming/doomscrolling late, or some such change.
>It could also just be that I find a treatment of symptoms to be less desirable than causes.
It is more opaque.
But the point is not that it's necessarily easy. It's rather than even if X -> Y is mere correlation, by forcing yourself to fix X (even if hard), the resulting changes might also help with Y.
And technically "bad sleep" here isn't necessarily a symptom either. It can be a co-effect of the same symptom.
Sometimes it is a cause vs causation. Sometimes the scientist didn’t adjust for a variable that clearly would impact both fields they were measuring. To make such a claim, I think it’s appropriate to name that hypothetical third variable. Otherwise the comment is so general it applies to all statistical studies.
Considering the importance of the subject, it still seems important to bring this out, especially if there's conclusions that if you have irregular sleep you are significantly increasing your odds of dying earlier. I think intuitively we can know how important sleep is and I desperately want to sleep better.
It's fine to speak of it being predictor etc, and all that, then they end the abstract with "Sleep regularity may be a simple, effective target for improving general health and survival.", which is technically fine since they use "may", although later articles based on the study will likely make the statement more confident.
But I guess what might be slightly triggering is claiming that it's a "simple" target. Don't I wish I could sleep on command and better?
So a clear question is - why do people choose to sleep or why do they naturally sleep irregularly?
Because for that there must be a logical cause in the first place. They say they control for mental health and all that, but is it then that ultimately it comes down to preference in their mind? I'd think most people want to sleep in healthy way.
Basically - if they were able to control for all possible confounding variables, what exactly was the cause of irregular sleep?
Anecdotally I can say that I sleep more irregularly the more stress there is, and stress could easily affect health, but if they controlled for stress, what then?
I guess ultimately they are saying it's a desirable target to measure, so it's fine in that sense. They are not really saying that choosing to sleep irregularly is what is causing the issues.
But you can just apply this to anything. I feel unlike unless you're an insider with skin in the game, your criticism doesn't land other than a generic surface one.
To be clear, I apply an equal deep skepticism to most fields that aren't math (in the sense of a priority) or physics (in the sense that you aren't trying to study the entire world, but a specific set of phenomena that you can reliably control enough + repeat to run intervention on), whether the results agree with me or not. Maybe a bit of intellectual closed-mindedness. But then that means that me, personally, I can't in good faith use the criticism as a proper 'debunk' argument - at best it's a heuristic to avoid spending cycles to evaluate it (which is 'rational' behavior, as much as I hate that word, IMO).
People love nitpicking about scientific articles, it kind of exploded with the pandemic. Especially when the conclusions of the paper don't align with the expectations of the reader.
The way I see these is "these persons invested a lot of time putting this together and all I have to counter it are personal vibes", so unless my LLM of choice can find plenty of conflicting papers, I tend to assume it's reasonably valid work.
Would love to see a causal model [0] to help better understand all of the mediators considered as well as confounders. I'm close to finishing up an interesting read from Judea Pearl/Dana Mackenzie - The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect [1]. Talks alot about Causal Models, Causal Inference, the 3 ladders of causation, etc. I liked the graphical approach to help outline exactly how one thinks about direct and indirect effects and how it facilitates counterfactual analysis and causal mediation analysis.
Do you even bother to click on links before asking a question?
There is a whole paragraph on "Statistical analysis" that even provides five supplementary methods (S1.5, S2.2 and S2.4-6) if you want detailed information.
What I wonder is even if they did the perfect adjustments, what would have been driver for different sleep regularity.
E.g. considering some common causes like work stress - if they did the causation and compared people who did the same type of work, and they controlled for stress levels then why did one group of people have sleeping regularity issues more than compared to others?
Like there has to be some other driver then that they didn't control for, as in personality, environmental or physical difference?
Most people do want to have healthy sleep, the ones who don't usually have something causing those issues.
Most things have second order effects, having a consistent sleep schedule may allow more healthier second order effects based on a more regular sleep pattern than duration. Duration also doesn't mean quality either.
Agreed. There’s also something about “time under consideration.” The relatively slow pace of reading the book opens the door to personal insight that a summary hides. The words themselves might be important, but I’ve found the additional minutes of a book is critical for me to fully apply the concepts to my life.
I know agencies get paid to manage other business's instagram accounts, and want ways to post/comment/engage/etc with multiple business's accounts at once. You'd still have a human driving/scheduling/approving the activity, but you wouldn't have to jump between so many hoops to do so.
Agreed! OpenAI even bought TBPN [1], who many have equated to ESPN for business. I think that even if Karpathy didn't add any new ideas to Anthropic (unlikely), adding him to the team is an interesting message to give to the market
Maybe he adds some semblance of stability? Anthropic probably is trying to sell it itself as the sane alternative to OpenAI with their IPO coming up choose us we are responsible.
Call me cynical, but pretty much 100% if the time when there is an article about "teen accomplishes almost impossible scientific feat" or "group of teens design world-saving product costing pennies", it turns out to be a disingenuous narrative pushed by some adult with an ulterior motive and often deep pockets.
The complete lack of details in the article does not do anything for its credibility.
We're so sorry - the article was independently composed. We wanted to release it later after we finished our documentation but it seems that it was posted without our knowledge. FYI we are led by a Dr. David Pulford who is currently also helping us in the project, so I wouldn't be worried about our "credibility". We are also sponsored by the InterACT ACT and the IBO, if that helps. Anyhow we are planning to publish to Phy. Ed (IOP - same journal on which CHART is composed) so I hope you will come back later after we finish!
Looks like the top downloaded book yesterday[0] was Concrete Construction: Methods and Costs by Gillette and Hill.[1] Beat out Moby Dick, Count of Monte Cristo, Frankenstien, Romeo and Juliet, and others.
> 23644 downloads in the last 30 days.
I wonder if this is bot behavior? 23k downloads feels like a lot?
For context, here is the first paragraph of the book's preface:
How best to perform construction work and what it will cost for materials, labor, plant and general expenses are matters of vital interest to engineers and contractors. This book is a treatise on the methods and cost of concrete construction. No attempt has been made to present the subject of cement testing which is already covered by Mr. W. Purves Taylor's excellent book, nor to discuss the physical properties of cements and concrete, as they are discussed by Falk and by Sabin, nor to consider reinforced concrete design as do Turneaure and Maurer or Buel and Hill, nor to present a general treatise on cements, mortars and concrete construction like that of Reid or of Taylor and Thompson. On the contrary, the authors have handled the subject of concrete construction solely from the viewpoint of the builder of concrete structures. By doing this they have been able to crowd a great amount of detailed information on methods and costs of concrete construction into a volume of moderate size.
Hey OP, would love to know more about your thoughts on Garmin you reference at the bottom? Why would they be any better/worse than Coros?
> *= I do not like Garmin, I think they're a fraudulent company systematically breaching consumer rights and I'm looking for alternatives. Already converted multiple people to Coros.
Came to see if someone commented on that. I have generally seen Garmin as one of the good ones on several criteria:
- when hit by ransomware, disclosed publicly, bit on the data loss and told them to fsck off
- devices can very much operate without any account, app, or cloud connection (of course you don't get the more advanced "Connect" features)
- plug it in and you have rw access to .FIT files over MTP
- same mechanism to build and sideload apps made with Monkey C
- ANT+ is a fairly open ecosystem (progressively replaced by BLE, often in much less open ways)
I hear that some people are annoyed that devices stop receiving major feature updates after a year or two, and see that as predatory "you must upgrade every year", which is like, ridiculous?
Also in a sense I like that I buy the device and it's mostly "done". Like a mechanical watch it's a utility item I can rely on and it won't ever have a Liquid Ass pulled up on me.
Yeah I totally agree with this list. In contrast, Coros had a pretty nonchalant response to their security issues last year. Attackers could:
> Hijacking the vicitim’s COROS account and accessing all data
> – Eavesdropping sensitive data, e.g. notifications
> – Manipulating the device configuration
> – Factory resetting the device
> – Crashing the device
> – Interrupting a running activity and forcing the recorded data to be lost [0]
The security firm disclosed the vulnerability to Coros in Mar 2025. They planned to fix it by the end of 2025, and didn’t address it until the security firm publicly released the finding.
Perhaps someone who has a consistent schedule is hypothetically more likely to make healthier choices on average?
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