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Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

neuroai.science

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Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#111

Post by jrm4 »

It's funny, I'm so comfortable calling this guy an idiot purely based on the fact that I've taken up Bob Ross style painting in like the last 2 years.

Teaches you to pay attention to "objective" colors. And at night, guess what, the colors get more red and less blue. I don't have to pull out as much blue paint for the night scenes.

It would be utterly naive to not thing that there's -- perhaps purely "psychological" (not sure if that's the exact concept but hey) effect by making the "white" on your screen, look like like the "white" you will definitely see in real life, which is going to be orange-r.

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#112

Post by [deleted] »

IAmBroom wrote: post #103
Groxx wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that'd give you 2.5mg, which is still almost 10x more than what I linked. it's possible to split and separate them enough of course, but beyond "roughly half" it gets rather difficult. I've considered getting the liquid ones and a micro-dropper for smaller doses (if they'd even be small enough, many combinations are not), but 0.3mg pills are rather convenient and worth the small amount of money for me.

Some research indicates people over 50 (includes me) achieve best results at 0.3 microgram dosage, which is 1,000 lower(!). Higher dosages reduce the effect. You might take a quick sec to look into the data. You can buy 5mcg on Amazon, although 5 mg is more common (and 10mg, and ...).

[deleted]

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#113

Post by pseudalopex »

denkmoon wrote: post #85
cellularmitosis wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on “no way back”?

Not OP, but when I got glasses as an adult and while they really improved the sharpness of my vision I could feel my unassisted vision getting worse, so I stopped using them and get by with slightly unfocused but unassisted vision. I assume if I wore them full time my unassisted vision would degrade to the point where I then need the glasses full time.

Your assumption was false.[1]

[1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/do-glasses-make-your-eyes...

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#114

Post by metalliqaz »

aethrum wrote: post #9

They absolutely help my eyes not be so strained. If its placebo, its a working placebo. >Are people actually using Night Shift? >Aggravatingly, yes. What is the authors problem lol? It feels a lot better on eyeballs to use warm light things. Why does he care?

My Windows 10 PC glitches out most days where the 3rd monitor doesn't properly apply the Night Light setting. So I turn it off and on to fix it. The full blue brightness is awful and definitely harsh on my nighttime eyes. I'm not sure I could believe it's placebo

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#115

Post by nandomrumber »

jack_pp wrote: post #56
thenewnewguy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, actually, if someone has direct scientific evidence contrary to the claim (I doubt such evidence exists for your first example as to the best of my knowledge the relationship between beans and gastrointestinal changes is well understood). Your eyes could hurt for a variety of reasons - brightness, too long screen time, being dry for external reasons, etc. Most humans are poor at identifying the cause of one-off…

It's pretty clear, even on monitor, night and day difference at a push of a button. I'm not arguing if this helps you sleep better but it is pretty arrogant of you to tell me I can't figure out from my own experience if something is comfortable or not.

It’s about the equivalent of someone claiming my saying I find woollen clothing directly touching my skin to be irritating / itchy requires double blind randomised controlled studies to determine whether this is true at the population level.

There are eight billion of us, we can’t all be different, there must be at least some categories we can’t be sorted in to, maybe those who find woollen clothing itchy and those who don’t, and those who find blue-light reduction more comfortable and those who don’t.

One of my pet theories is that this hyper fixation on The Ultimate Truth via The Scientific Method is what happens when a society mints PhDs at an absurd rate. We went up with a lot of people who learn more and more about less and less, and a set of people who idolise those people and their output.

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#116

Post by crazygringo »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #106
crazygringo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have not actually understood what I wrote, because of this part: >> My point is, nothing in this article does establish that it is "actually bullshit". > Why not? I've already said it multiple times. Allow me to repeat myself: > make the elemental mistake that showing one biological mechanism doesn't have an effect, means no other mechanisms can either. You've written a lot, but you haven't understood tha…

Certainly you can claim that because not all mechanisms have been disproven yet, then there could still be an effect. That is why I quote Russell's teapot. Your claims are technically not disproven, and may not even be possible to disprove, but that doesn't mean that the existence of the teapot is (most definitely) bullshit. This is what the example of Russell's teapot is trying to show. I also keep continuously putt…

I'm sorry, but using the idea of Russell's teapot to claim anything without rock-solid proof is "bullshit" is a deep misunderstanding of the idea. It's wrong, it's offensive, and it's not helpful to genuine understanding.

Amber light is not Russell's teapot. There's widespread anecdotal reporting that it helps with sleep. It's not something nonsensical like a teapot between Earth and Mars. And for you to suggest that they're the equivalent is, frankly, arguing in bad faith.

The world of knowledge is not divided, black-and-white, between things that are scientifically proven and "bullshit". Probably the vast majority of practical facts we rely on daily are not "proven" with empirical studies. That doesn't make them "bullshit". I hope you can understand that.

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#117

Post by Groxx »

IAmBroom wrote: post #103
Groxx wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that'd give you 2.5mg, which is still almost 10x more than what I linked. it's possible to split and separate them enough of course, but beyond "roughly half" it gets rather difficult. I've considered getting the liquid ones and a micro-dropper for smaller doses (if they'd even be small enough, many combinations are not), but 0.3mg pills are rather convenient and worth the small amount of money for me.

Some research indicates people over 50 (includes me) achieve best results at 0.3 microgram dosage, which is 1,000 lower(!). Higher dosages reduce the effect. You might take a quick sec to look into the data. You can buy 5mcg on Amazon, although 5 mg is more common (and 10mg, and ...).

after an initial "... is that a misquote too? sounds super low" I decided to hunt around. I haven't seen anything on that low of a dose... but doing the math, it does seem to make some sense I suppose. a rough check of the total amount of melatonin in your blood at night implies something like 0.5mcg at peak (peak concentration at ~100pg/ml times 5L of blood). lots more is produced in a night because it has a short half-life, but yea, blood concentration is lower than I remembered.

what I also haven't seen though is anything covering how well it's absorbed through your digestive system. 0.3mcg intravenously I can certainly see being effective, but orally? sublingually? not sure. but you've definitely got me interested in looking more :)

(initial results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin_as_a_medication_and_... implies it varies quite a lot, but I'm seeing it centering around 15%-ish many places. so you might want like 3mcg to hit normal levels? and https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5405617/ is implying 1-5mg -> 10x-100x normal concentration peak, so that does hit the right ballpark reasonably well... I guess I'm going to start experimenting with even smaller doses!)

I'm not finding any 5mcg on amazon tbh. Likely in no small part because its search is trash nowadays. Mind sharing a link?

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#118

Post by NedF »

aethrum wrote: post #9

They absolutely help my eyes not be so strained. If its placebo, its a working placebo. >Are people actually using Night Shift? >Aggravatingly, yes. What is the authors problem lol? It feels a lot better on eyeballs to use warm light things. Why does he care?

[dead]

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#119

Post by AshamedCaptain »

crazygringo wrote: post #116
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly you can claim that because not all mechanisms have been disproven yet, then there could still be an effect. That is why I quote Russell's teapot. Your claims are technically not disproven, and may not even be possible to disprove, but that doesn't mean that the existence of the teapot is (most definitely) bullshit. This is what the example of Russell's teapot is trying to show. I also keep continuously putt…

I'm sorry, but using the idea of Russell's teapot to claim anything without rock-solid proof is "bullshit" is a deep misunderstanding of the idea. It's wrong, it's offensive, and it's not helpful to genuine understanding. Amber light is not Russell's teapot. There's widespread anecdotal reporting that it helps with sleep. It's not something nonsensical like a teapot between Earth and Mars. And for you to suggest that…

No, I do not understand why I cannot call homeopathy bullshit. There's plenty of widespread positive anecdote for it, too!

Why would you think calling one bullshit is "offensive" and not the other? You realize that this "gray" scale that you claim is as unscientific as it gets, right? After all, it worked for me! And I hear that it works for my friends! How can homeopathy/blue light filters/whatever-ritual-you-like-today not work? How can there not be a teapot on the sky?

If the problem is with the word "bullshit", call it pseudo-scientific, but it is almost the same thing.

Tomorrow there could be some evidence of an effect shown in the opposite direction (e.g. blue light filters _harming_ sleep quality*, or performance the day after, or whatever) and you would be as skeptical as with claims of no effect, if not more. See the recent article of white noise in HN and how it was met in the comments.

* Because of people (or worse, software) turning their screens' brightness up to compensate, which I already read an article about long time ago...

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#120

Post by kpw94 »

taeric wrote: post #105
aethrum wrote: post #9

They absolutely help my eyes not be so strained. If its placebo, its a working placebo. >Are people actually using Night Shift? >Aggravatingly, yes. What is the authors problem lol? It feels a lot better on eyeballs to use warm light things. Why does he care?

I find it somewhat pleasant, but by far the best thing I did to help my eye strain was greatly lower the brightness. Basically, I was told to make it so that my phone's camera could see something on the screen and my desk at the same time without washing out. After doing that, I have found that the "temperature" of the screen doesn't really matter to me that heavily.

> Basically, I was told to make it so that my phone's camera could see something on the screen and my desk at the same time without washing out

+1. The low-tech version of this I've heard and I've been doing is:

Hold a printed white paper sheet right next to your monitor, and adjust the amount of brightness in monitor so the monitor matches that sheet.

This of course requires good overall room lightning where the printed paper would be pleasant to read in first place, whether it's daytime or evening/night

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