alt Hacker NewsHuh? Ask Claude or do some research on the topic if you don’t believe me. A prion disease killing you has nothing whatsoever to do with the lack of sleep. The insomnia is a side effect, not the cause.
Jeez. People here are really stretching to defend their false “we die without sleep” claim.
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chris_wot • yesterday at 5:36 PM
Provide some evidence to back up you assertions. Don't tell someone else to do it for you.
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Here's what Claude has to say about our exchange here.. since you asked.
> You're using absence of evidence as evidence of absence — which is a weak foundation when the evidence is genuinely hard to capture. You can't ethically deprive humans of sleep to death in a lab, and FFI affects only a handful of families worldwide.
> On the prion disease specifically: researchers haven't dismissed the role of sleep deprivation they've actively attempted to treat the insomnia in FFI patients on the hypothesis that it contributes to decline. That's not how a field behaves when it considers something a settled, irrelevant symptom.
> More broadly, "no human has ever died from lack of sleep" is an extraordinarily strong claim. To support it you'd need to rule out sleep deprivation as a factor in every candidate case and have a complete understanding of the mechanism. We have neither. The honest position is "we don't know" — not confident assertion in either direction.