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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

#131

Post by orbital-decay »

crazygringo wrote: post #47

These are the kinds of articles that give science a bad name, and that make people anti-science. You might as well try to claim hot tea doesn't help you get to sleep, or reading before bed doesn't, or whatever else you do to wind down. I personally don't care if some narrow hypothesis about blue light and melanopsin is false. I know that low, warm, amber-tinted light in the evening slows me down in a way that low, co…

What if these filters also cure cancer by some mechanism that isn't known yet? Who knows, it might be true! After long experimentation with warmer lighting my cancer is gone, so it definitely worked for me.

What you're saying is not science either. The entire medical usage of blue light filters hinges on just a few papers. If you really can prove those studies inapplicable you can prove that there's no objective reason to use them (I'm not necessarily saying the author did that).

Whether these filters feel nice is entirely unrelated question, nobody stops you from decorating your living space as you see fit.

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

#132

Post by hinkley »

yathern wrote: post #75

> Unless your strategy is to create a photo-lab-like screen in pure black and red, or wear deep-red-tinted glasses, it’s unlikely that a pure colorshift strategy will cut out that big of a chunk of the spectrum. I absolutely think this is the right approach. The glasses which do 'blue light filtering' which barely change your perception are clearly placebo, but a very strong redshift I think is obviously a different…

I have a red flashlight I use at night to read books. It’s weird after an hour I don’t really see it as red anymore, just dim off white.

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

#133

Post by taeric »

kpw94 wrote: post #120
taeric wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pri…

I think this was what I was told the first time. The advantage of taking a picture with my phone's camera is it kind of made it obvious just how much brighter the screen was then the paper.

Which, fair that it may be obvious to others to just scan their eyes from screen to paper. I've been surprised with how much people will just accept the time their eyes have to adjust to a super bright screen. Almost like it doesn't register with them.

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

#134

Post by refulgentis »

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?

It is a placebo, it is an aesthetic thing. It is not something that helps anything at all physically.

This was always well known. It didn't matter 5 years ago, 10 years ago, when OS added it. Easier to let it go than argue.

But with HDR, it matters enormously people are well educated on this. Monitors are approximately light bulbs, and we've gone from staring into a 25W light bulb to a 200W one. (source: color scientist, built Google's color space)

> What is the authors problem lol? It feels a lot better on eyeballs to use warm light things. Why does he care?

I think it's better to avoid stuff like this. Been here 16 years and a flippant "whats his problem" "lol" and "why does he care" is 99th percentile disrespectful. It's not about what you're arguing, its just such a fundamental violation of what I perceive as the core tenant of HN, "come with curiosity." You are clearly curious, just, expressing it poorly.

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

#135

Post by root_axis »

pclowes wrote: post #32

You can just do things. Not everything needs a study, you don’t have to justify yourself to anyone! Try things, if you like them, do them! Try not living a neurotic “study” based life, I am trying it and its pretty great!

Neurotic is bad by definition, but using studies to inform your habits seems like a wise thing to do.

Obviously you shouldn't follow studies blindly, especially because many studies are poorly conducted and do not replicate, but in general, we know that just following your gut is suboptimal and sometimes dangerous in cases when studies give us clear information.

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

#136

Post by schiffern »

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?

Aggravatingly, you can't set Night Shift to actually be on 24/7. It always has a "seam" where it fades off and then turns back on.

One trick is to schedule this as a bedtime reminder to put down the phone for the night (phone fasting).

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

#137

Post by refulgentis »

amelius wrote: post #89
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?

Are you sure you are not also changing total luminance?

They are, just, don't realize it. Anything off white will be need it need to be turning their monitor brightness down.

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

#138

Post by cgriswald »

IAmBroom wrote: post #94
tartoran wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely and this is something that can be tested rather easily. If blue filters aren't immediately helpful to eye strain then they probably don't work for you but if they are they probably do work for you.

You can test the negative easily, but the positive is harder. Thus: placebos.

On the level of the individual a working placebo is a success.

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

#139

Post by nandomrumber »

IAmBroom wrote: post #88
thatcat wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about how it looks aesthetically, you can feel your eye muscles release tension when you go from light to dark mode.

As someone more trained in science than software, the phrase "you can feel..." is suspicious, even if it's my own feelings. Not invalid; suspicious.

As a complete psychopath:

If I put your hand in a vice and do the vice up to the point where you start saying you can feel the pressure…

Yes, of course I’m going to be suspicious.

Gaslighting doesn’t exist, you made that up because you’re fucking crazy.

/s

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

#140

Post by nandomrumber »

lisper wrote: post #35

Night shift seems to have a very strong causal effect on my sleep cycles. Up until about ten years ago I was a night owl, rarely falling asleep before midnight and rarely waking up before 8. Then I started getting serious about light hygiene and using night shift and now I'm a serious day person, rarely staying awake after 11 and rarely waking up after 7. But the real clincher is that when I travel I don't change the…

> light hygiene

Awesome, hadn’t come across this term before.

You might appreciate the concept of chronotypes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype

The DOAC podcast recently hosted Dr. Michael Breus on same.

Apple Podcast link, or conjure your own:

https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-diary-of-a-ceo-wit...

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