Personally, I put very little stock in NYT health reporting articles. I am a public health researcher, and I have seen numerous NYT articles that just get fundamentals wrong. Though my field is not sleep studies, I can tell the conclusion of this article is essentially animal models[0] and longitudinal surveys[1] provide enough evidence to support hypothesis-driven studies in the future. But that's about it.
Now, that's not to say that chronic sleep debt isn't harmful. It probably is. But these kind of alarmist articles serve nothing more than to make waves in an already tumultuous field of popular science communication.
I know this comment boils down to "trust me", but I'm acutely tired and overall exhausted of media outlets that should know better churning out articles that are unsubstantial. I don't see these pieces as value neutral; they strain the relationship between scientists who study the nuance-filled physical world, statisticians who painstakingly analyze the counterintuitive world of numbers, and the general public who aren't equipped to (and shouldn't be expected to) understand the synthesis of entire fields of scientific literature.
[0]: broadly unreliable, especially for something as complex as human sleep mechanics
[1]: which suffer from different biases, like recall bias (https://catalogofbias.org/biases/recall-bias/)
Now, that's not to say that chronic sleep debt isn't harmful. It probably is. But these kind of alarmist articles serve nothing more than to make waves in an already tumultuous field of popular science communication.
I know this comment boils down to "trust me", but I'm acutely tired and overall exhausted of media outlets that should know better churning out articles that are unsubstantial. I don't see these pieces as value neutral; they strain the relationship between scientists who study the nuance-filled physical world, statisticians who painstakingly analyze the counterintuitive world of numbers, and the general public who aren't equipped to (and shouldn't be expected to) understand the synthesis of entire fields of scientific literature.
[0]: broadly unreliable, especially for something as complex as human sleep mechanics
[1]: which suffer from different biases, like recall bias (https://catalogofbias.org/biases/recall-bias/)