Sleep: Three quotes

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It's a purposeful irony of life, I suppose, that we never get to see ourselves in that state. We can only pay witness to our waking reflection, which to one degree or another is always fretting or afraid. Maybe that's why young parents find it so beguiling to spy on their children when they're fast asleep.

— Amor Towles. Rules of Civility (2011). New York: Penguin Books, 2012.

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Spending evenings in front of a glowing computer, TV, or cellphone screen can put you at risk of depression, Science News reports. Nighttime exposure to light from gadgets has already been shown to contribute to insomnia, cancer, obesity, and diabetes. Now, a new study shows that screen glow can cause mood-related changes in the brain. For weeks, researchers exposed hamsters to eight hours a night of dim light — like that from a TV screen — instead of their usual eight hours of pitch darkness. They found that the rodents became lethargic and ignored their favorite sugary treats, suggesting that they weren't deriving "pleasure out of activities they once enjoyed" — a major indication of depression in humans, says study author Tracy Bedrosian. The rodents' brains also showed the same kinds of changes in the hippocampus that are common in depressed people. "The good news," Bedrosian says, is that the damage disappeared and the rodents' behavior returned to normal after researchers took the night lights away, meaning that simply powering down earlier may "undo some of the harmful effects" that late-night gadget users face. Over the past 50 years, depression rates in the U.S. have increased dramatically as artificial lighting at night has become more common.

— "Screen-viewing blues," The Week, August 10, 2012, p. 19.

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As historian Robert Ekirch writes, sleeping for one uninterrupted interval is simply a function of artificial light and the industrial revolution. Before electricity and factories, segmented sleep — sleeping in two intervals — was all the rage. Benjamin Franklin was a fan: Between “first sleep” and “second sleep” he would get naked, throw open the windows and take cold air baths. The French called the period between the two sleeps “dorveille,” while the English called it “the watch.” Both terms sound ancient and spooky in a cool way, which made me search for other people who embrace this period of sleeplessness. On Medium, Ron Geraci describes this state as “an odd, placid form of being awake — more aware but less alert…a ripe sentience that allowed clear but limited thought and wanted stillness.”

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...a shout out to the true sleep rebels, our beloved night owls. While they don’t necessarily have “two sleeps,” they do find themselves hyper-focused in the middle of the night. A self-described night owl, Stefanie Morejon, writes on Medium that her behavior is perhaps evolutionary, essential for human survival. “Somebody,” she writes, “had to stay awake to keep the fires burning, to protect the community and keep the night creatures at bay.”

— Adeline Dimond, "It’s not (always) insomnia, it’s segmented sleep," Medium Newsletter, December 19, 2024

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Is everything fair game for science? Even niceness itself?

Here's a new paper:

Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda
Authors: Cory J. Clark, Lee Jussim, Komi Frey, Sean T. Stevens, Musa al-Gharbi, Karl Aquino, J. Michael Bailey, Nicole Barbaro, Roy F. Baumeister, April Bleske-Rechek, David Buss, Stephen Ceci, Marco Del Giudice, Peter H. Ditto, Joseph P. Forgas, David C. Geary, Glenn Geher, Sarah Haider, Nathan Honeycutt, Hrishikesh Joshi, Anna I. Krylov, Elizabeth Loftus, Glenn Loury, Louise Lu, Michael Macy, Chris C. Martin, John McWhorter, Geoffrey Miller, Pamela Paresky, Steven Pinker, Wilfred Reilly, Catherine Salmon, Steve Stewart-Williams, Philip E. Tetlock, Wendy M. Williams, Anne E. Wilson, Bo M. Winegard, George Yancey, and William von Hippel.
November 20, 2023
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
120 (48) e2301642120

I became aware of it because Megan McArdle wrote an opinion column for the Washington Post, "The world could use more jerks." December 12, 2023.

Yes, the paper seems to be saying that there are facts, and there is niceness, and niceness is often just covering up the facts, and if we were more tolerant of jerks then the jerks would show us the truth.

The paper's abstract defines "scientific censorship" as "actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific quality." Any actions? Yes. Having a personal filter is self-censorship. Being deliberately nice is self-censorship. That's the definition.

A key problem here, for me, is that "low scientific quality" isn't defined. One scientist might say that an entire research idea is untenable for ethical reasons, which also means it's untenable for scientific reasons, and the research would be of low scientific quality if it were to proceed. The other scientist might say, no, ethics has nothing to do with scientific quality, and thus they deem the first scientist to have self-censored.

The paper's conclusion isn't really a conclusion. It says that the many co-authors disagree on "whether and where scholars should “draw the line” on inquiry." Nonetheless, they claim they "all agree" that science "would be better situated to resolve these debates, if—instead of arguing in circles based on conflicting intuitions—we spent our time collecting relevant data." I don't believe they mean relevant data on the myriad unique topics of scientific interest, but rather on the meta-topic; that is, they want "better science on scientific censorship" so they can better answer their own question. Anyway, see previous paragraph for the meta-problem here.

McArdle, for her part, in the Washington Post column, wants to expand the message to all writers. She says:

"These professions [journalism and academia] used to be sheltered workshops for those kinds of 'jerks': naturally distrustful folks who like asking uncomfortable questions and experiencing an uncontrollable urge to say whatever they’ve been told not to. These character traits don’t make people popular at parties, but they might well help them ferret out untruths, deconstruct popular pieties and dismantle conventional wisdom."

As she puts it: "Unfortunately, the universe isn’t here to please us, which means niceness and truth will sometimes be at odds."

Crucially, she adds: "Jerks were never the majority, which would be chaos. But they were a teaspoon of leavening..." In other words, some people have permission to be jerks. Not all people. Who will be in the elect few who receive social permission to be rudely contrarian and are perceived as experts simply because of their attitude, and who will be in the majority of sad amateurs who are tone-policed and shut down for expressing a difference of opinion? Ay, there's the rub. Plainly, she reserves the right to be a contrarian. It's her newspaper column, after all. She's the leavening that will transform the critics on whom her voice is overlaid. The transformation will be non-chaotic, we are to feel assured of that.

She quotes Musa al-Gharbi who, readers may discover, has a forthcoming book: We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality and the Rise of a New Elite.

She also plugs the new book The Canceling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott.

On which note, take a look at this Amazon review for The Canceling of the American Mind. This is what McArdle is asking for, right? Truth-telling while kind of being a jerk? The world is vastly improved now?

Related, on this blog: 2020 "Open Letter on Justice and Open Debate" in Harper's

Metacognition and faith

I stumbled across an old note to myself. It was Stanley Fish's 2009 review of Terry Eagleton's book, in which examples of "theological questions" are proposed, such as: “Why is there anything in the first place?” “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?” Eagleton's position (as Fish portrays it) is that these questions are valuable as a sort of art form. They are not intended to address matters factually and attain an instrumental goal; we have science for that. Religion is not after facts. It is trying "to tackle what is at stake” (in Eagleton's words); it has something to do with humility and hope that properly ought to come prior to the search for facts.

It occurs to me that a question like "Where do our notions of explanation...come from?" is difficult to answer by any method — never mind the science-vs.-religion debate — because it is an attempt to use consciousness, reason, and language to interrogate and defend itself. A living being can't pick itself apart to learn more about how it thinks and moves. It has to take certain basic parts of itself for granted.

I wonder if what is being said here is that religion pursues a type of metacognition? and that "faith" is a type of humility that exposes the metacognition we do or don't have and can or can't develop? Here is "metacognition" explained by Tom Nichols:

Students who study for a test, older people trying to maintain their independence, and medical students looking forward to their careers would rather be optimistic than underestimate themselves. Other than in fields like athletic competition, where incompetence is manifest and undeniable, it’s normal for people to avoid saying they’re bad at something. As it turns out, however, the more specific reason that unskilled or incompetent people overestimate their abilities far more than others is because they lack a key skill called “metacognition.” This is the ability to know when you’re not good at something by stepping back, looking at what you’re doing, and then realizing that you’re doing it wrong. * * * The lack of metacognition sets up a vicious loop, in which people who don’t know much about a subject do not know when they’re in over their head talking with an expert on that subject. An argument ensues, but people who have no idea how to make a logical argument cannot realize when they’re failing to make a logical argument. In short order, the expert is frustrated and the layperson is insulted. Everyone walks away angry. — Tom Nichols. The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Oxford University Press, 2017.

(Overestimating one's own ability has been called the "Dunning-Kruger effect," but independently of the psychologists who studied it, it might simply be called a lack of metacognition.)

But often these primary assumptions cannot be questioned very thoroughly or for very long, and what we end up with as the product of "faith" is not humility but arrogance. Partly because: We begin with certain identities, and as a result we see what we want to see in the world. Even when we say we're trying to interrogate our beliefs, sometimes all we're doing is massaging data to reaffirm them, and we are deluding others and perhaps even ourselves.

Another passage from Nichols' book:

...a 2014 study of public attitudes about gay marriage went terribly wrong. A graduate student claimed he’d found statistically unassailable proof that if opponents of gay marriage talked about the issue with someone who was actually gay, they were likelier to change their minds. ... It was a remarkable finding that basically amounted to proof that reasonable people can actually be talked out of homophobia. The only problem was that the ambitious young researcher had falsified the data. ... As Konnikova put it in her examination of the fraudulent gay-marriage study, confirmation bias is more likely to produce “persistently false beliefs” when it stems “from issues closely tied to our conception of self.” These are the views that brook no opposition and that we will often defend beyond all reason, as Dunning noted: Some of our most stubborn misbeliefs arise not from primitive childlike intuitions or careless category errors, but from the very values and philosophies that define who we are as individuals. Each of us possesses certain foundational beliefs — narratives about the self, ideas about the social order — that essentially cannot be violated: To contradict them would call into question our very self-worth. As such, these views demand fealty from other opinions. Put another way, what we believe says something important about how we see ourselves as people.

The "foundational beliefs" might be some identity, intrinsic or cultural. They might be tied to an organized religion. But, I imagine, they might also be a set of assumptions that are harder to pin down to any one "thing." We sometimes try to prove a point for the sake of proving a point, and the way it forms and buttresses our identity is a downstream effect.

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The Bible may be worth studying, but it doesn't contribute to science

Why can't the Bible be used as part of scientific literature?

The Bible is full of poetry and philosophy, story and song. It is not full of science. This can be demonstrated by examining the Bible as a work of literature, where its literary strengths are also its scientific shortcomings.

Natural phenomena in the Bible are usually assigned metaphoric meanings. The sun represents God's radiance, and plant and animal agriculture implies health, happiness, and prosperity. Lightning, earthquakes, floods, plague and disease were generally construed as punishments from God — for example, Miriam was said to have been stricken with skin problems in return for her racist taunts (Numbers 12:9-11)

Locations were not mapped, and when ancient villages and natural formations cannot be precisely identified, it is difficult to prove that they ever existed at all. They may have been inventions or embellishments, and the writers may have considered their roles in the story to be more important than their material reality.

Nor does Biblical writing always quantify precisely and in a literal manner. The recurring number 40 — as in the number of days it rained in the Great Flood, and the number of years that the Hebrew people were lost in the desert after leaving Egypt — appears to simply mean "a lot."

Famously, a numerical description of a "circular" cauldron in the Temple of Solomon must either be a rough estimate or else the cauldron was not a perfect circle.

Noah could not have single-handedly collected a male-female breeding pair of all species on the planet (there are as many as 7.7 million animal species, most of them as yet undiscovered, according to a recent scientific estimate), and the boat that he built could not have reasonably been large enough to hold them all (even excluding the ones that could swim, as Biblical literalists insist upon, as if that makes the proposition more reasonable).

Sometimes there are outright logical contradictions. In the first chapter of Genesis, plants are created before the first humans are created. In the second chapter, a male human is created before the first plants.

One New Testament scripture says that Judas hanged himself (Matthew 27:5), and another says that he suffered spontaneous disembowelment (Acts 1:18). These contradictions arise in part because the scriptures are narrated by different people, and there is no obvious scientific method by which to judge which narrator is most reliable. It is just a question of "he said, she said."

The best way to understand these references is as rough approximation or metaphor. Natural objects and events were considered important, but exactly recording their quantity, weight, dimensions, temperature, or other scientifically measurable properties was not considered important, at least not within the context of the story. Natural objects and events were considered important primarily because of their meaning in human life. Could the original authors, oral historians, and redactors hear this discussion today, they would likely be bewildered by the modern-day assumption that their artistic, spiritual storytelling was a mere literal recording of their observations about the desert. They might even be offended by that assumption, since the scientific method was probably not something that they understood, believed in, or used. They likely believed in magic and miracles, and they may have considered empirical knowledge less valuable than religious mastery.

Scientific literature documents the process of answering questions through observation, experimentation, and logic. The Bible does not even attempt to do this. It is a collection of stories focusing on human relationships and philosophies, and it makes relatively few references to the natural world Therefore, while the Bible provides valuable insight into life thousands of years ago — as well as addressing philosophical and religious questions about the meaning of life that are still relevant today — it is not scientific literature.

This article was originally published to Helium Network on July 27, 2006.

Image above of golden bowerbirds in Australia. Photographed circa 1900. © No known copyright restrictions. Powerhouse Museum Collection. Flickr.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write on Medium.