经济学人2019.5.18/Sleepless in Silicon Valley

Schumpeter| Sleepless in Silicon Valley

熊彼特|硅谷难眠

Why the techie obsession with sleep technology makes perfect sense

为什么对睡眠技术的痴迷是完全有道理的呢

First, close the blackout blinds in your bedroom. Eat dinner at 4pm, and do not eat or drink anything after 6pm. Put on your blue-light blocking glasses at 8pm. Set your bedroom temperature to 67oF (19.4oC) and your electric blanket to 69.8oF (21oC). At 8.45pm, meditate for five to ten minutes. Switch on your deep-wave sound machine. Put on your Oura sleep-tracking ring. You are now, finally, ready for slumber. This may all sound a bit over the top. But this is the “sleep hygiene” routine described in a recent blog post by Bryan Johnson, who sold his previous company to eBay for $800m and is now chief executive of Kernel, a startup developing braincomputer interfaces. He admits that his sleep routine has “decimated my social life”, and that his partner sleeps in a different room, but says all this trouble is worth it, because it has boosted his level of “deep sleep” by as much as 157%. He has bought Oura rings for all his employees.

首先，关上卧室里的遮光窗帘。下午4点吃晚饭，6点以后不要吃或喝任何东西。晚上8点戴上你的蓝光遮光眼镜。把卧室温度调到67度(19.4摄氏度)，把电热毯调到69.8度(21摄氏度)。晚上8点45分，冥想5到10分钟。打开你的深波录音机。戴上你的Oura睡眠追踪戒指。你终于可以睡觉了。这听起来可能有点夸张。但这是布赖恩•约翰逊(Bryan Johnson)最近在一篇博客文章中描述的“睡眠卫生”例行程序。约翰逊曾以8亿美元的价格将自己的前一家公司出售给eBay，目前是开发人脑计算机界面的初创企业Kernel的首席执行官。他承认他的睡眠习惯“毁掉了我的社交生活”，他的伴侣睡在另一个房间，但他说所有这些麻烦都是值得的，因为这让他的“深度睡眠”水平提高了157%。他给所有的员工都买了Oura戒指。

词汇

Blackout/灯火管制；灯火熄灭；

Slumber/睡眠；麻木状态；静止状态

Decimate/大大削弱，使……严重失效；

Mr Johnson does not expect other people to copy his routine, but made it public to encourage the sharing of sleep habits and tips. Like many other techies, he regards sleep hygiene as an effective way to maintain mental health, boost cognition and enhance productivity. In its most recent funding round, backers of Oura, the Finnish maker of the high-tech ring, included the co-founders of YouTube and Twitch, along with alumni of Facebook, Skype and Box.com. The ring’s most famous user is Jack Dorsey, the boss of Twitter, whose unusual wellness regime—which also incorporates near-infrared saunas, radiation-blocking Faraday tents, fasting and cryotherapy—prompted the New York Times this month to dub him “Gwyneth Paltrow for Silicon Valley”. For tech tycoons, it seems, sleep is the new fitness.

约翰逊并不指望其他人会效仿他的作息习惯，但他将其公之于众是为了鼓励大家分享睡眠习惯和小贴士。和许多其他技术人员一样，他认为睡眠卫生是保持心理健康、提高认知能力和提高工作效率的有效方法。在最近一轮融资中，高科技戒指的芬兰制造商Oura的支持者包括YouTube和Twitch的联合创始人，以及Facebook、Skype和Box.com的校友。这款戒指最著名的用户是推特的老板杰克·多尔西，他的不寻常的健康制度——包括近红外桑拿、辐射屏蔽法拉第帐篷、禁食和冷冻疗法——促使《纽约时报》本月将他称为“硅谷的格温妮丝·帕特洛”。对于科技巨头来说，睡眠似乎是一种新的健身方式。

词汇

Alumni/校友，毕业生

Tycoon/ 企业界大亨，巨头；巨富

Those who want to monitor and improve their sleep have no shortage of gadgets to choose from. As well as electric blankets and mattress-chillers, sound machines and smart rings, there are also smart pillows, sleep-tracking watches and bracelets, intelligent sleep masks, brain-stimulating headbands, bedside sleep sensors and countless sleep-monitoring apps. The market for sleep technology was worth $58bn in 2014 and is expected to grow to $81bn by 2020, according to Persistence, a market-research firm. Big companies in the field include household names such as Apple, Bose, Nokia and Philips. After Mr Dorsey’s enthusiastic endorsement, the Oura rings are back-ordered by four to six weeks.

那些想要监测和改善睡眠的人有很多选择。除了电热毯和床垫——冰箱、音响设备和智能戒指，还有智能枕头、睡眠追踪手表和手镯、智能睡眠面罩、刺激大脑的发带、床边睡眠传感器和无数的睡眠监测应用程序。市场研究公司Persistence表示，2014年睡眠技术市场价值580亿美元，预计到2020年将增长至810亿美元。该领域的大公司包括苹果(Apple)、博斯(Bose)、诺基亚(Nokia)和飞利浦(Philips)等家喻户晓的公司。在多尔西的热情支持下，Oura戒指的订单将在4至6周后延迟交付。

词汇

Gadget/小玩意；小器具；小配件；

Bracelet/手镯

Endorsement/认可，支持；

back-ordered/延迟交付

The mania for sleep technology makes perfect sense for the tech industry, combining as it does several existing trends. For a start, it fits with the industry’s metrics-driven worldview. Techies obsess about okrs (objectives and key results), kpis (key performance indicators) and digital-analytics dashboards showing the performance of specific products and features. Applying similar techniques to sleep and other aspects of their personal lives—an approach known as the “quantified self”—seems a logical step. As those in the startup world like to say, channelling Peter Drucker, a management guru, “what’s measured improves.”

对睡眠科技的狂热对科技行业来说意义重大，因为它结合了几个现有的趋势。首先，它符合行业标准驱动的世界观。技术人员痴迷于okrs(目标和关键结果)、kpi(关键绩效指标)和数字分析仪表板(显示特定产品和功能的性能)。将类似的技术应用于睡眠和个人生活的其他方面——一种被称为“量化自我”的方法——似乎是一个合乎逻辑的步骤。正如创业界的人喜欢说的，借用管理学大师彼得•德鲁克(Peter Drucker)的话说，“经过衡量的事物会有所改善。”

词汇

Metrics/度量

Sleep-tracking also aligns neatly with Silicon Valley’s cult of productivity, and the constant search for “life hacks” that will make entrepreneurs more effective, efficient and successful. This ranges from wearing the same clothes every day, Steve Jobs-style (thus avoiding wasting time deciding what to put on), to fastidious fitness routines and complicated diets. Elaborate sleep regimes slot right in, because they promise clarity of thought and improved cognitive performance. They also let people extend their quantified-self and life-hacking efforts into the one part of the day that was previously untouched: shut-eye. Relentlessly pursuing productivity only while you are awake is for wimps. Sleep-tracking means you can do it round the clock. Oura describes its sensorpacked ring as a “secret weapon for personal improvement”—another way to get ahead.

睡眠追踪也与硅谷对生产力的推崇以及对“生活小窍门”的不断探索保持着一致，这些小窍门会让创业者更有效率、更高效、更成功。从每天穿同样的衣服，史蒂夫·乔布斯式的(从而避免浪费时间决定穿什么)，到挑剔的健身计划和复杂的饮食。精心设计的睡眠机制正好发挥了作用，因为它们承诺思维清晰，提高认知能力。他们还让人们把他们量化的自我和生活窍门的努力延伸到一天中以前没有接触过的那一部分:睡觉。只有在你醒着的时候，才会孜孜不倦地追求效率。睡眠跟踪意味着你可以24小时不间断地跟踪。Oura将其传感器戒指描述为“提高个人能力的秘密武器”——另一种获得成功的方式。

词汇

Align/排列；排成一行

Cult/狂热；异教团体；宗教信仰

Fastidious/  挑剔的；苛求的，难取悦的；

Elaborate/精心制作的；详尽的；煞费苦心的

Wimp/懦弱的人，无能的人；瘦弱的男人

Never mind that a study published in 2015, by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, found that sleep-tracking devices could not accurately measure sleep, and that claims made about them were long on hype and short on solid evidence. Ignore the fact that another study, published in 2017 by researchers at two medical schools in Chicago, warned of the dangers of “orthosomnia”, defined as a “perfectionistic quest for the ideal sleep in order to optimise daytime function”, as obsessive users of sleep-tech devices self-diagnose sleep disturbances based on dodgy data, or stay awake all night worrying that they are falling behind by not sleeping as efficiently as rivals.

尽管麻省总医院(Massachusetts General Hospital)和哈佛医学院(Harvard Medical School)的研究人员在2015年发表的一项研究发现，睡眠追踪设备无法准确测量睡眠，有关它们的说法也只是夸大其词，缺乏确凿证据。忽视了一个事实,另一项研究中,两个医学院的研究人员在2017年出版在芝加哥,警告的危险“orthosomnia”,定义为“为了优化白昼工作效率而追求完美且理想主义的睡眠”,这就尤指那些执迷于依靠睡眠监测设备的用户，因为这些不可靠的睡眠反映数据而睡眠受扰，或者说，由于发自内心的焦虑，担心由于自身睡眠质量比不上其他竞争对手而导致自己彻夜难眠。

词汇

Disturbance/干扰；骚乱；忧虑

Dodgy/狡猾的，逃避的；善于骗人的；躲闪的

It is hardly surprising that techies are not getting enough sleep, given the industry’s culture of long hours, and the widespread notion that for a true entrepreneur, everything else in life is secondary to succeeding at work. The enthusiasm for sleep-tech also fits a larger pattern of using technology to fix problems that the industry itself has created. Is your smartphone too addictive? Here’s an app to help you monitor and track your usage. Are the streets of your city clogged with Ubers? Try an electric scooter instead. Seen this way, the embrace of sleep-tracking is an indictment of the whole culture: it tackles the symptoms of sleep deprivation, but not the disease.

考虑工业环境下长时间工作的大背景，以及人们普遍共识——对于一个真正的企业家来说，生活中的其他一切都是工作成功的次要因素，技术人员睡眠不足不足为奇。对睡眠科技的热情也符合一个更大的模式，即利用科技来解决行业自身造成的问题。你对智能手机上瘾了吗?这里有一个应用程序可以帮助你监控和跟踪你的使用情况。你所在城市的街道都被优步车弄得寸步难行吗?试试电动滑板车吧。从这个角度看，对睡眠追踪（来改善睡眠）的接受是对整个工业文化的控诉:它解决的是睡眠不足的症状，而不是疾病。

词汇

Clog/阻塞；妨碍

indictment/起诉书；控告

deprivation/ 剥夺；损失；匮乏；贫困

Sleepwalking into the future

梦游未来

But resist the temptation to dismiss all this as batty. Sleep-tracking is at exactly the stage that fitness-tracking technology was at a decade ago. Now fitness trackers (including the Apple Watch) are mainstream and nobody bats an eyelid when people share details of their morning runs on Facebook. The same could easily happen with sleep-tech. A series of previous examples—including the use of email, the embrace of online shopping, hailing a car with an app, or renting a room in an unfamiliar city from a complete stranger—are a reminder that the seemingly crazy things that Silicon Valley types do today, everyone else may end up doing in a decade’s time. In this case, in their sleep.

但要抵制住把这一切都斥为疯狂的诱惑（或许很难）。睡眠跟踪技术正处于十年前健康跟踪技术所处的阶段。如今，健身追踪器(包括Apple Watch)已成为主流，当人们在Facebook上分享晨跑细节时，没有人会对此大惊小怪。同样的情况也很容易发生在睡眠科技上。之前一系列的例子包括使用电子邮件,对网上购物的接受,让汽车与应用程序相结合,或者在一所陌生的城市里向一名完全的陌生人手中租房——这一些列事件（的普遍化）都提醒了人们这些如今在硅谷类似的看起来疯狂的事情，在未来的十年内可能慢慢变成所有人都接受的普通事件。就这样，在一次次睡眠中逐渐普及，为人所接受。

词汇

batty/古怪的；疯狂的

bats an eyelid/眨一下眼（表示惊讶）