Wait. So. "Multiple studies show that light mode is better" trumps my actual experience, with my eyeballs, in my office environment? No. No it doesn't. 1. I don't have that much faith in scientists. Someone trying to p-hack their way to a publishable result that's sensational enough to advance their career is not going to produce good advice for me. 2. Even if they were perfect scientists, they're not using my eyebal…
Not having faith in science isn't a bit incompatible with working with computers?
I think you have multiple misunderstandings about how science provides valuable results. The first thing I want to say is that I don't devalue your personal experience. I am unaware of any fighter jet seat problem. If you use the average, you're actually pretty likely (depending on the shape of the distribution, which in the case of phenotypes like body size, are normally distributed when broken down by gender) to fi…
I don't think he is misunderstanding anything. Using the average sometimes works, some times doesn't. Number of arms an average person has is less than 2. Definitely check out the fighter jet seat problem.
The fighter-jet seat problem is pretty famous. https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
The article you cited is an interesting just-so explanation but it's mostly narrative, not really correct. It's based on this book https://www.harpercollins.ca/9780062358363/the-end-of-averag... which espouses some rather non-quantitative concepts (it seems like the author had a hobbyhorse and they rode it as far as they could). I don't know that it's "pretty famous", as I find only a few references to it (the book I…
> I don't know that it's "pretty famous"
I'm sorry you haven't heard of it but it's fairly well known.
Wait. So. "Multiple studies show that light mode is better" trumps my actual experience, with my eyeballs, in my office environment? No. No it doesn't. 1. I don't have that much faith in scientists. Someone trying to p-hack their way to a publishable result that's sensational enough to advance their career is not going to produce good advice for me. 2. Even if they were perfect scientists, they're not using my eyebal…
Humans as a rule tend to do multiple things thinking that what they’re doing is the best for them and then turns out it’s not.
Although for me it’s a ridiculous thing to even bother trying to measure. The problem isn’t whether it’s slightly better to look at a dark or light background but rather that we spend so much time staring at screens that it becomes a problem.
I don't think he is misunderstanding anything. Using the average sometimes works, some times doesn't. Number of arms an average person has is less than 2. Definitely check out the fighter jet seat problem.
I did. Not impressed.
If 60% people perform better with light theme and 40% dark theme, average is going to be that light theme is superior. This doesn't make dark mode a bad idea.
> I don't have that much faith in scientists Suppose your mechanic mess up your car. Suppose this happen again with a second mechanic, and maybe even a third. Is that enough to justify the conclusion that “mechanics are bad”? I don’t think so. Science is the same.
> Is that enough to justify the conclusion that “mechanics are bad”? Maybe not, but it's certainly enough to justify the conclusion that "mechanics should not be blindly trusted". Same with scientists. Doing good science is hard , and it wouldn't surprise me at all if most studies are flawed. Also, there's a reason the concept of independent verification is so important in science. Even if the scientists doing a stud…
You shouldn’t blindly believe anything, but science, faulty as it is, does entail a higher degree of credibility than, say, anecdotal evidence.
So when you first said "this is really good", was it? Or did you just let your wife bully you into not liking something that you, personally, actually liked?
That's a little harsh. Entertaining new information is not really 'bullying', not when I recognized the truth in what she said. Sure I was enjoying myself. This is kind of the point of this thread. Your enjoyment is not a real measure of what's good or bad.
Not saying you didn't change your assessment after new sensory input (which is fine), but did you truly, honestly, change how much you were enjoying the /exact same physical sensations/ based on how much your partner thought you should be enjoying them?
These are good points but miss an essential part of the story: reflected light almost by definition matches the brightness of the surrounding environment, meaning that the periphery is roughly the same brightness and white balance as the reading medium. If I look at my laptop on full brightness in a nearly pitch black room, it is far less comfortable to read than if I turned on a lamp. So there are two solutions to t…
A simple method that I use to demonstrate that: point a phone's camera at the screen+surroundings. Then it's easy to adjust the screen's brightness/turn on lights until the screen is not overexposed/the environment is not underexposed.
As a photographer, as well as a Technical PM who spends all their time on a computer, and a non-zero amount of time optimizing my setup, and someone who has taken photos of computers and done exactly this to get the exposure correct: I don't know why I didn't think of doing this on a daily basis!
> Is that enough to justify the conclusion that “mechanics are bad”? Maybe not, but it's certainly enough to justify the conclusion that "mechanics should not be blindly trusted". Same with scientists. Doing good science is hard , and it wouldn't surprise me at all if most studies are flawed. Also, there's a reason the concept of independent verification is so important in science. Even if the scientists doing a stud…
You shouldn’t blindly believe anything, but science, faulty as it is, does entail a higher degree of credibility than, say, anecdotal evidence.
Perhaps, but that's not a very high bar. If you personally experience something that disagrees with what a research paper says, I don't think it's reasonable to just assume you must have been mistaken.
That doesn't mean I think you should believe your senses either. It means it's worth looking into it further (if you care, at least).