>It totally blows my mind people still fall for this bullshit split sleep meme made up by an historian. So we take medical advice from historians now?

Historians can help point to practices that fit the human animal better before modern technology abruptly changed everyday life.

>I do know in the world of science that shift workers get a lot of cancer. Which is not split sleep exactly but close enough for me to not be forcing myself against nature to split sleep.

I can't fathom how an argument in favor of more accurate medical advice and turned into "shift workers are close enough to split sleep for me", ...

>Some creative people work all hours and some bodies are weird but don't buy into this is 'common and natural thing' meme.

Well, there are ways to sleep that are not natural, even if they are common. And there are ways to sleep that fit a person better.

How is shift working similar to split sleep? One is working arbitrary schedules, the other could be seen as "I go to bed at 8pm with the sun, and happen to wake up every night at like midnight to work for a few hours and then pass out again". They're entirely different shapes.

Yes, it's reasonable to say we shouldn't take medical advice from historians; but, finding your most creative times of the day isn't really a medical thing, it's a "what works for me" or "what I've noticed about myself" sort of perspective.

How do we measure creativity anyway?

Shift work is not necessarily about differing sleep cycles there evidence it's about working at night and lighting.

But other than that I don't disagree. My beef is about broken sleep existing.

1.5 billion people currently live without electricity and so did their parents and their parents parents.

But broken sleeps evidence is a historian basically cold reading 200 year old fiction books. And even people like gwern are not saying, this is BS where is the evidence broken sleep is a thing?

It might be great for creativity, so is LSD, go for it, I definitely want a more creative world.

I'm just saying know where you stand and quit on the BS that everyone used to do it, unless you have real proof.

Correlation does not mean causation. Perhaps a lot of shift workers happen to be nurses and they work in an environment where it is more likely to contract cancer (from x-rays or whatever). I'm using this as an example.

Also, I don't think it's "made up by a historian", it's more like a "historian commented on common behavior of our ancestors".

I have a friend who works at the American Cancer Society. They constantly have to refute the "[insert something here] causes cancer" myths. They do some pretty insanely large and in-depth studies on these things. They've even investigated the "your couch gives you cancer" myth.

In the end, they say that smoking is by far the biggest risk factor for cancer. After that, there's a "three-legged stool" of obesity + sedentary lifestyle + poor diet, meaning those things compound one another. Genes also have a measurable influence on your likelihood of getting cancer.

After that, very few things significantly increase your risk of cancer. A lot of it is just random. Most of the studies you see linking cancer to something are bullshit. My friend says you should be skeptical of anything shorter than 10 years and with fewer than 100,000 participants, and even then there are many other factors that go into gold-standard research.