Group rationality diary, 8/20/12

If I understand correctly, your argument is: (1) People in lots of fields believe employment in that field is in decline. (2) It seems improbable that these fields all just happen to be the ones with the worst prospects. (3) Therefore, many of these people are probably wrong.

But I don't see how you get to #3, unless you take these people to mean that their fields are in decline relative to other fields. Surely it's perfectly possible that all fields, or at least a large fraction, are in decline in absolute terms. Economic growth has been bobbling along somewhere between "negative" and "positive but very small" for the last few years, and arguably for more if you take the pessimistic view that much of the apparent growth has been from a series of bubbles, the fall from each being cushioned by the growth of the next, which can't be sustained.

Since you're trying to choose a career, then of course relative job prospects are what you mostly want to know about. Fair enough. But all those people complaining that their field is in decline might not have meant that.

I suggest asking people why they believe their field is in decline. What's their evidence and line of reasoning?

1. Actuaries: you may be right here, although my vague impression of actuarial science was that there should be a squeeze, and I would want to look carefully at the statistics to see how they might be misleading - eg. is there a Simpson's paradox going on? Are people being squeezed out later in their career? Is the data for a uselessly narrow - or uselessly broad - category of 'actuaries'? etc.
2. So you do agree some fields are in decline! When the Japanese and Korean ESLs complain that the field is getting worse for them (=becoming more competitive), you agree they are. I specifically mentioned Korea because of this potential for you to just say 'ah, but if you look somewhere else....' See comment #1 about definitions and sizes of categories.
3. The broader economic point is still true; Australia's mining rise is the defining characteristic of their economy for the past decade or more. Your regulation points are interesting, though, but point to other possibilities: maybe the complained about decline is precisely the growth or increases - how well do you understand what the existing backpackers value or are complaining about? (A personal parallel that comes to mind is the growth of anime in the late '90s and early '00s in the USA: old-time fans were more than a little bitter because the growth shattered the old fanzines and blew up convention sizes and introduced so many people that a kind of Eternal September set in.)

So I conclude that forums and personal blogs probably have little value to someone who wants to know if a job market is doing well.

An unduly harsh appraisal. I'd phrase it more as 'vague opinion not backed by specifics or statistics are of little value for assessing large-scale trends', which is not an appraisal I'd consider unjustified in very many areas!

Before polyphasic sleeping I didn't have enough time to do spaced repetition :)

Oh well.

Do you want an introduction to the organisers of that effort?

Nah; my advice would be simply to start spaced repetition in advance, and look into getting a Zeo for recording sleep data. Not complex, but also not advice they're likely to take.

There are moves afoot to organise the several July minicampers who plan to try a polyphasic schedule to gather before and after data. Do you want an introduction to the organisers of that effort?

I have emailed them to point them at this thread.

Going to mention my crackpot theory on why polyphasic sleeping might end up killing you again:

Polyphasic sleep drastically reduces the amount of deep sleep you get. Sleep helps the body heal. Human aging and mortality seem to be modeled well by a Gompertz curve, where the thing that kills you at old age is the body's diminished healing ability, which lets cancer precursors in the body stay unfixed long enough to grow into something that kills you.

So for all we know, throwing out 4 hours of deep sleep daily(*) for years on end might make you look a lot more like an 80-year-old, as far as the Gompertz curve modeled mortality is concerned.

ETA: (*) All non-REM sleep isn't deep (SWS) sleep, see below. According to online hypnograms of sleep stages, the deepest sleep stages mostly happen during the first three hours of sleep, so a sleep cycle that maintains a 3-hour core sleep should be significantly better than a sleep cycle like Uberman that runs solely on power naps. The 4 hours of deep sleep bit is probably an oversimplification.

ETA2: If the first three hours of sleep are the most important for making the body heal, would a sleep cycle where you have two core sleeps daily, for example 3 to 6 AM and 3 to 6 PM, keep you more healthy than a single 8-hour sleep?

Thanks for sharing all of the info. You mentioned the effects on cognitive performance, which is my main concern. There is an article here that is skeptical / critical of polyphasic sleep, claiming that it will have negative effects on cognition. I'm curious, do you have data for yourself? Just a subjective assessment? Either would be welcome, although of course the former would be more valuable.

The nap tracks are no longer available from Matt's dropbox, but fortunately I saved all except the 15min one and have made them available here:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BwP3_2aUw0uPczVqVHpKUFhMd1E

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/107056/Minicamp2012/PolyphasicSleep/index.html

This is now a 404.

(Came here to re-download the nap tracks, which still work fine :))

Another random fun thing I realized. I addition to being a lot like the first half of the reported archaic human bimodal sleep, an Everyman core sleep is also a lot like the first phase of the night's sleep done in the Wake-Back-To-Bed lucid dream induction technique.

Just tried a WBTB with 5 hours of initial sleep, and it led to a lucid dream (slept another 3 hours afterwards). 5 hours is pretty close to the Everyman-2 core sleep. I wonder if, in addition to being potentially nice for lucid dreams, adopting a bimodal schedule for a full night's sleep could be used as a stepping stone to adopting an Everyman sleep schedule, since you're training yourself to sleep no more than 4+ hours at a time.

I wish I had that schedule calculator earlier - I must have spent a couple of hours googling (#1 failure of my rationality skills) for one because I was sure someone had to have made it, given that all these polyphasic sleepers have oodles of free time.

Thank you for your answer! If I succeed to have a nap at work, then I have no reason for having awake periods outside of the 4-6 hours range. I would go with this schedule:

core 02:45 -- 06:00 (5:00 hours awake: breakfast, commute, work)
nap 11:00 -- 11:20 (4:40 hours awake: lunch, work, commute)
nap 16:00 -- 16:20 (5:40 hours free time)
nap 22:00 -- 22:20 (4:25 hours free time)