The ‘Military Sleep Method’ is fake
Have you heard of the ‘Military Sleep Method’? If you’ve ever been awake at 3 a.m. Googling “how to fall asleep fast” you’ve seen it. Apparently, there’s a five-step method soldiers use to fall asleep within minutes. Relax your limbs, practice deep breathing, visualize a flowing river… and voila. You are asleep now.
On Medium, U.S. Army and Air Force veteran Wes O'Donnell debunks the too-good-to-be-true technique and explains how journalists’ confirmation bias led to a popular falsehood. Most “tricks” are oversimplifications, and some are outright false. The truth, in O’Donnell’s experience, is that soldiers can fall asleep anywhere because “we were always so G*damned tired.” It reminds me of this essay about why most “cancer cure” articles are nonsense. In the words of epidemiologist Gideon M-K; Health Nerd, “No one clicks on a link online that says ‘New drug marginally benefits colon cancer patients, slow trudge towards better care continues,’” though that’s often true.
Media literacy — or the ability to discern facts vs. clickable half-truths — is arguably the most important skill of the 21st century. Most of our cognitive biases (errors in thinking that are built-into our psychology) stem from our desire to find one true thing to hold onto amongst a sea of ambiguity. Mike Caulfield, a researcher at the University of Washington who tracked misinformation during the 2020 U.S. election, breaks down how to verify dubious claims:
- Look for previous fact-checking work.
- Go upstream to the source.
- Read laterally, meaning read around what you’re trying to verify.
To add nuance, I recommend listening to social media expert danah boyd’s SxSW talk on how we can all be better consumers of information. Boyd’s philosophy is that being a good internet citizen means becoming aware of your own psychology. What makes you angry? What do you tend to overlook? It’s about “recognizing your own fault lines, not the fault lines of the media landscape around you.”
What else we’re reading
The future of charging your electronic vehicle is here, and it looks like… a coworking space? Google community manager Carter Gibson visited Electrify America, a new model for EV charging (it’s essentially a communal garage with couches, snacks, and WiFi), and spoke with a few employees. Why is a converted auto garage a good business model? Gibson writes: “It doesn’t try to hide that, yeah, sometimes you just gotta wait. Instead it recognizes the opportunity to make that unavoidable experience infinitely better.”
Your daily dose of practical wisdom
Never confuse simplicity with simplemindedness. It takes work to distill, to get at the essence of things. If you stop yourself from saying something in a meeting because you’ve just thought, “Well, that’s just too simple,” you might want to think again. It may be that it’s the very thing that needs to be said.
Written by Harris Sockel
Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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