About the Amount of Sleep you are Getting
About your sleep. Post by Aakash Gupta:
This is one of the most important studies in sleep science. Van Dongen et al. ran the experiment that changed how we understand chronic sleep restriction. They had subjects sleep 4h, 6h, or 8h nightly for 14 days, testing cognitive performance every 2 hours. The 6h group’s reaction time deficits by day 14 matched subjects who had been awake for 24 hours straight. The 4h group? They performed like someone awake 48 hours. But here’s what makes this study terrifying.
The Stanford Sleepiness Scale ratings in Panel B plateau after day 3-4. Subjects stopped feeling more tired even as their cognitive performance continued deteriorating through day 14. Your subjective experience of fatigue is a lagging indicator that eventually just… stops updating.
This explains why chronic undersleeping feels sustainable. You’ve adapted to feeling tired. Your prefrontal cortex hasn’t adapted to being impaired.
The PVT (Psychomotor Vigilance Task) in Panel A measures lapses in attention. These are the moments where you’re staring at a screen and your brain simply checks out for 500ms. Every additional day of 6h sleep adds more lapses. The curve never flattens. Panel C and D show working memory and processing speed. Same pattern: continuous degradation with no subjective awareness.
The practical implications: If you’re sleeping 6h and think you’re functioning fine, you’ve lost the internal calibration to know you’re not. The subjects in this study would have told you they felt “okay” while performing like they’d pulled an all-nighter. For anyone doing cognitively demanding work, this means you cannot trust how you feel. You need to track objective markers: error rates, decision latency, problem-solving throughput.
Sleep need is biological, not negotiable. Most adults require 7-9 hours, and the research shows no population-level adaptation to chronic restriction. “I only need 6 hours” is almost always “I’ve forgotten what baseline cognition feels like.“
The World Changed, Not Me
My experience is similar. I was considered liberal for decades. I voted for Obama twice, then for Hillary and Joe Biden. I canvassed for Bernie and Hillary. Then unknown people/entities pummeled all of us with propaganda/censorship causing most "liberal" people I knew to flip without any explanation and often without any concern for the contradictions based on their former recent positions. Such a bizarre thing to witness. For the most part, I'm not the one who changed.
Colin Wright illustrated it well with this simple cartoon:
[Supp Feb 4, 2026]
Coordinated Messaging Propaganda has Steered the US to the far Left
I think Wes Yang is correct. Persons unknown decided that they would perform a 180° turn on this issue and many others, including immigration.
We all witnessed this happen in real time. It was not a slow drip or a boiling of the frog. It was sudden, abrupt, consciously coordinated across every organ of what coalesced into a single integrated messaging apparatus. All those who deny or obfuscate this central fact of American public life are engaged in conscious deceit.
This post leads to an opinion piece in the NYT, "‘I Wouldn’t Say the Democrats Are in Good Shape’". Here's an excerpt:
In October, the group behind the centrist Democratic WelcomePAC issued “Deciding to Win,” an analysis of “election results, hundreds of public polls and academic papers, dozens of case studies, and surveys of more than 500,000 voters” that found that “since 2012, highly educated staffers, donors, advocacy groups, pundits and elected officials have reshaped the Democratic Party’s agenda, decreasing our party’s focus on the economic issues that are the top concerns of the American people.”The authors tracked key word usage in Democratic platforms from 2012 to 2024 and found the frequency of the word “hate” increasing by 1,323 percent; “white/Black/Latino/Latina” by 1,137 percent; “L.G.B.T./L.G.B.T.Q.I.+” by 1,044 percent; and “equity” by 766 percent.
Over the same period, usage of “father/fathers” fell 100 percent; “crime/criminal” by 30 percent; “responsibility” by 83 percent; “middle class” by 79 percent; and “veteran” by 31 percent.
Finally, in November, Politico’s Elena Schneider reported the findings of a 21-state research project funded by Democracy Matters involving polling, dozens of focus groups and message testing.
“Working-class voters see Democrats as ‘woke, weak and out of touch’ and six in 10 have a negative view of the party,” she wrote . . .
Jimmy Carr’s Short Funny Wise Lecture on Communism
Jimmy Carr: Communism make perfect sense in our own families, but it doesn't scale up:
Jimmy: "I don't know, you might object to capitalism. And Ticketmaster a very good example of the capitalist market. And capitalism is a terrible system, apart from all the fucking others. A bunch of young people seem to have fallen in love with communism. the fuck is going-. Communism is a great idea. Wrong species! Think about capitalism. It kind of leans into what we are. We're quite self interested. It works."
"What's your name? [Audience member]: "Sam... Define communism for me. Define communism."
Jimmy: "From each according to their abilities to each according to their needs. Yeah, It just doesn't scale. Everyone is a communist. All of you are communists. With your family. If you've got kids, you're a fucking communist at home, each according to their needs. You take care of them. Of course you do. And as things get wide in your local community, you might be a socialist, try and help everyone out. And then you get up to nation state level, and you go, "Yeah, fuck those guys."
There's always going to be an in-group preference. I'm sorry, but you're human beings. Unlucky. The problem with American communism, which is, you know, woke, is better described as American Marxism. And what it is is, instead of trying to redistribute wealth, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do, they want to redistribute status, and that is a recipe for fucking madness."
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