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Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

lincolnquirk.com

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Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know who any of these people are, but that is exactly what the article says, so why should we not believe that that's what the author believes?

Because it’s far more likely that the author chose slightly wrong words that ended up conflating a specific invention with being the first human “to invent the idea” that “hey, brighter lights would be closer to obviously brighter daylight” only 5 years ago. I’d wager that the author realizes that more than half of adults today had that insight sometime prior to 2017.

Some people read websites the way they would read a math proof. One tiny error and the whole thing comes down. A more charitable reading is often perfectly appropriate.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#162

In many cases (mine included), SAD is not so much about how much light we get, but about when : I manage my sleep/wake cycle by getting a good dose of light in the morning (I do my morning E-mails with a nice strong blueish LED-lamp next to my monitor) and dimming/reddening my screens in the evening. It is not even the level of darkness outside, but the direction of the level change: I need my lamp from October to Ja…

It's about timing and intensity. You should aim to get 100,000 lux into the eye within the first two hours of waking. Dr. Andrew Huberman has a comprehensive podcast episode on the science behind this: https://youtu.be/NAATB55oxeQ

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#163
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Ideas can be harmful” is gibberish?

The amount of self-importance on display is what makes it sound like gibberish. A: "I have the most ground-breaking idea ever!" B: "Okay, let's hear it?" A: "No, it's too dangerous, it may well destroy the world, but trust me it's brilliant and completely novel." It's a religion at that point.

[deleted]

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#164
I feel like I've gained a nice incremental improvement in lighting just by changing all my bulbs to high CRI LEDs with around 5000-5500K color temperature. The perceived brightness is higher than with typical "soft white" bulbs, and it even feels better being in the room. The biggest problem I have yet to solve is that my living room has no overhead lighting.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#165
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[removed by author as off-topic]

In hindsight, I should not have included the comment about Roko's Basilisk. It was really nothing more than a personal observation that had nothing to do with the topic at hand. As a result, this thread attracted a lot of people who have very strong opinions on an off-topic matter, and for that I'm sorry. It muddled an already tense discussion on whether any sane person should take the claim of inventing brightly lit…

Cool, I didn't even know comments could be deleted! I appreciate your reaction.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#166
post #157
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Light as a treatment for SAD has been looked at since 1984, all day exposure is hardly a new idea. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...

Right, but for some reason the SAD light boxes you could get produced much less light, so they weren't effective for her.

In 1984, to get the amount of light put out by ~250-300 watts of LEDs in 2022 would have required the incandescent light array to come perilously close to the limit of what it is safe to pull from a single outlet continuously in the US, which is 1500 watts. (You can transiently pull 1800 from a standard wall outlet, which is used by hair dryers, but you're not supposed to pull it continuously for hours at a time.) It also would have functioned as a full-on space heater (that was on continuously, not on a thermostat as needed), and very careful attention would need to be paid to cooling this massive array.

So, I'm gonna read between some lines here, but: I imagine earlier efforts would then by necessity have produced less light, because it's actually a lot easier to deal with ~400-500 watts of incandescent light than 1500 watts of incandescent light. 400-500 I think you could just about get away with putting a diffusion screen in front of them and making sure the enclosure has a lot of passive air flow. At 1500, if you're going to enclose this into a reasonably-sized product you're going to need active cooling with fans.

And there is a little noticed and rarely talked about weakness I've seen in several science fields where I've dug into a history of papers, which is that once one investigator picks the parameters of an investigation, it tends to "stick". If the first scientist investigating "Light therapy for SAD" and picked a 500 watt incandescent setup, it is extremely likely that many further papers will try to match their lumens setup, in the interests of trying to keep the papers informing each other. The entire therapy may live and die on the contingent conditions the first couple of researchers happened to pick, even after the entire lighting landscape has changed and it's practical to blast 5 times the light per watt and have time-varying light temperature now, which would have been even more difficult in 1984. (Conceivable, with some sort of rotating filter screen in front of it, but now you're cutting in to your light output even more, unlike modern LEDs which give you more options in dealing with this.)

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#168
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas. That's a good point on its own, but it's not a response. At no time did I or anyone here in this thread assert that "info hazards" do not exist. What is being discussed is whether it's worthwhile to be deferential to a person/community who is making claims of being in possession of an exceptionally catastrophic piece of information that by its nature would…

I don't think Yudkowsky is making that claim anywhere? >At no time did I or anyone here in this thread assert that "info hazards" do not exist. >What is being discussed is whether it's worthwhile to be deferential to a person who is making claims It's honestly really not that clear what you're trying to discuss, certainly you haven't been making a clear statement like that. I don't think anyone is making claims of be…

He doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, claim to have the idea equivalent of a nuke.

Well, he isn't willing to reveal how he convinced his opponents to let the AI out of the box.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#169
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but it would also be impossible to see what’s on your computer screen as this isn’t designed to outshine the sun.

if such a thing were possible, would it be healthy to use a monitor with a 10K lux backlight? I can't decide if this would help or just fry your eyes.

>would it be healthy to use a monitor with a 10K lux backlight?

The eyes adapt to brighter backlights but you end up not being able to see your desk.

One major annoyance is that eye floaters become a lot more prominent the smaller your pupils are.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#170
post #166
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but for some reason the SAD light boxes you could get produced much less light, so they weren't effective for her.

In 1984, to get the amount of light put out by ~250-300 watts of LEDs in 2022 would have required the incandescent light array to come perilously close to the limit of what it is safe to pull from a single outlet continuously in the US, which is 1500 watts. (You can transiently pull 1800 from a standard wall outlet, which is used by hair dryers, but you're not supposed to pull it continuously for hours at a time.) It…

By the 01980s you could have easily been using fluorescents, which went mainstream a quarter century earlier, so I think your stickiness hypothesis is the more likely problem. This had been puzzling me! Thank you for providing the likely solution!
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