Not exactly a knockdown argument, but: if he was wrong about "something meaningful", Guzey probably would have added it to his list.
More generally, if you make a claim and someone claims you're entirely wrong, it should be surprising if they don't attack the parts you consider meaningful. If they wanted to publicly demonstrate your incorrectness, why wouldn't they attack the important parts? Either they can't, or they chose not to, but the latter doesn't match the apparent motivations.
It’s often easier to rigorously disprove the small claims than big ones. Especially when the books author insinuates things rather than actually make bold claims.
Making a long list of everything they said that we don’t have evidence for isn’t really debunking anything. After all a broken clock may occasionally show the correct time. But showing some specific study was misinterpreted or wrong is far more direct.
With "something meaningful", I'm using the parent's terminology. If Guzey has written arguments against non-meaningful stuff, I don't think that's evidence for the meaningful stuff being wrong. That's about the end of my stance; I definitely don't have the info or background knowledge (or effort!) to evaluate either the book or the response on technical merits.
Because it's insanely difficult to create a work of the size that he did without making a few mistakes here and there. The fact that you don't know this is evidence of the fact that you've never tried.
> Any book of Why We Sleep’s length is bound to contain some factual errors. Therefore, to avoid potential concerns about cherry-picking the few inaccuracies scattered throughout, in this essay, I’m going to highlight the five most egregious scientific and factual errors Walker makes in Chapter 1 of the book. This chapter contains 10 pages and constitutes less than 4% of the book by the total word count.
I know, I read it, and two possibilities suggest themselves:
1. There are many many more errors in the book, and the Guzey, not being very well organized, chose to highlight the fact that the author was wrong about cancer and lifespan (who isn't), and a couple facts not really related to the main point.
2. Despite claims to the contrary, Guzey is cherry-picking the few inaccuracies.
More generally, if you make a claim and someone claims you're entirely wrong, it should be surprising if they don't attack the parts you consider meaningful. If they wanted to publicly demonstrate your incorrectness, why wouldn't they attack the important parts? Either they can't, or they chose not to, but the latter doesn't match the apparent motivations.