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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

#231

Post by mock-possum »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #141

I found the basic premise of this blog post to be incredibly flawed. The author seems very sure of himself that blue light filters don't work, but making arguments related to cell types and emissions spectra and circadian rhythms is not the way to make a conclusive argument in a topic like this. Science is littered with recommendations about things that "plausibly" made sense, but that turned out to be flawed or just…

Plus there’s a lot of protein eggs, so they’re filling, and have to eat less to feel full, resulting in less food consumed and therefore less opportunity to intake further sources of cholesterol

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

#232

Post by refulgentis »

wtetzner wrote: post #218
refulgentis wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scient…

> It is not something that helps anything at all physically. That's a pretty strong claim to make.

It's not a strong claim. It's a settled one. The literature on blue light filters and screen-emitted blue light at display intensities is clear and has been for years, even if approaching it from first principles isn't convincing, or the first principles aren't known.

The thing about color science is that everyone has eyes, so everyone assumes they already have the full picture. One can experience warm light feeling "nicer," and the jump to "this is physically helping me" feels so self-evident that anyone saying otherwise must be the one making a strong claim. But "I prefer the aesthetic" and "this is physiologically beneficial" are two completely different statements, and only one of them survives controlled study.

I don't care if people use night shift. I'm not trying to take anyone's warm tint away. But we are now in an era where consumer displays are pushing luminance levels that are physically, measurably significant - not "I feel like it's bright" significant, but "this is a fundamentally different amount of light entering your eye" significant. Getting the basics right matters now in a way it didn't when we were all staring into dim LCDs and the worst case was people shifting white balance so the color temperature was incandescent, not D65.

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

#233

Post by moodyScarf »

refulgentis wrote: post #232
wtetzner wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not something that helps anything at all physically. That's a pretty strong claim to make.

It's not a strong claim. It's a settled one. The literature on blue light filters and screen-emitted blue light at display intensities is clear and has been for years, even if approaching it from first principles isn't convincing, or the first principles aren't known. The thing about color science is that everyone has eyes, so everyone assumes they already have the full picture. One can experience warm light feeling…

so whats the takeaway? just turn down the brightness off your monitors? the blue light option of my benq monitor doesnt help?

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

#234

Post by refulgentis »

moodyScarf wrote: post #233
refulgentis wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a strong claim. It's a settled one. The literature on blue light filters and screen-emitted blue light at display intensities is clear and has been for years, even if approaching it from first principles isn't convincing, or the first principles aren't known. The thing about color science is that everyone has eyes, so everyone assumes they already have the full picture. One can experience warm light feeling…

so whats the takeaway? just turn down the brightness off your monitors? the blue light option of my benq monitor doesnt help?

Correct - more or less, I love BenQs but haven't had one in a few years. Dunno what exactly their blue light filter does. A software-based nightlight is usually going to turn whites offwhite, i.e. the yellowing you see is effectively darkening / lowering brightness. Its just, its accidentally fixing it and the fix is much less than it would be by directly lowering brightness.

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

#235

Post by DoctorOetker »

bawolff wrote: post #221
accidentallfact wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the premise of the idea is wrong, as evenings are either blue from the blue sky, or white from the clouds. It takes exceptional circumstances to have a reddish evening, and even then it's just around the sunset. I guess that it may help people with undercorrected myopia due to the chromatic aberration, but, I don't know.

When the sun goes down the amount of blue light goes down. Are you disputing that? Respectfully this feels like a crazy claim.

Well technically during the twilight right after the sun has disappeared below the horizon, or just before the sun appears from under the horizon (when there is no direct line of sight to the sun), the sky is strictly blue-er: the reason the sun and the neighboring angles in the sky appears "yellow/orange" is because green and especially red scattered less through the atmosphere, while a good portion of blue light scatters much more easily on our atmosphere, allowing non-line-of-sight blue illumination on land where the sun has not yet risen or where the sun has already set.

All of humanity has been a witness to these observations and yet we blindly assume blue light filters must have such and such an effect.

But even if it did: suppose a modern concrete-cave-dweller has an out of phase shifted day/night pattern with respect to solar rhythm, having blue light as the last form of light actually seems more natural!

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

#236

Post by nandomrumber »

InMice wrote: post #223
nandomrumber wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t f.lux be controlled from the command line? I seem to recall it can. If so, you should be able to cron it to do whatever you want. I was using redshift on Linux for a while and had some aliases set to trigger various settings.

Ive never been aware of that and when I look it's just forum posts of people asking more than once with no reply.

I can’t quite reach a Mac from where I’m sitting at the minute, maybe someone can try invoking f.lux from the command line.

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

#237

Post by nandomrumber »

Perizors wrote: post #226
nandomrumber wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Bear in mind that chronotypes, as stated in the wiki, only varies about 2-3 hours from each other. This is just to say that there is no nocturnal person in terms of biology, we are all diurnal mammals after all.

Yeah, like anything, proponents like the guy in the podcast I referenced probably overhype the importance / impact.

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

#238

Post by bawolff »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #235
bawolff wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the sun goes down the amount of blue light goes down. Are you disputing that? Respectfully this feels like a crazy claim.

Well technically during the twilight right after the sun has disappeared below the horizon, or just before the sun appears from under the horizon (when there is no direct line of sight to the sun), the sky is strictly blue-er: the reason the sun and the neighboring angles in the sky appears "yellow/orange" is because green and especially red scattered less through the atmosphere, while a good portion of blue light sc…

Regardless, the intensity of blue (for that matter, all) light is going to be much lower after the sun sets.

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

#239

Post by avadodin »

zargon wrote: post #202
avadodin wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Main factor is genetics. I was gaming on a blurry CRT and reading on a dim light while hardly ever going outside during my teens and I only have light myopia on one eye. I don't know if it has ever been studied, but I suspect eye socket morphology from my own family anecdata. large eyes + small socket = squashed eyes. It could be different genetic factors for different populations too.

I agree that genetics can protect you from developing myopia. For people who are genetically susceptible, outdoor exposure is critically important. Most people won't know which group their children are in.

Let's just say I knew soon enough for the ones that were in the myopic group.

It's not that I don't believe these studies or that I don't recommend children and even adults going outdoors and trying to watch something far away without glasses whatever their supposed genetics may be but I think it is nowhere close to a silver bullet.

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

#240

Post by accidentallfact »

bawolff wrote: post #221
accidentallfact wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the premise of the idea is wrong, as evenings are either blue from the blue sky, or white from the clouds. It takes exceptional circumstances to have a reddish evening, and even then it's just around the sunset. I guess that it may help people with undercorrected myopia due to the chromatic aberration, but, I don't know.

When the sun goes down the amount of blue light goes down. Are you disputing that? Respectfully this feels like a crazy claim.

The amount of red light goes down, (and you can use a camera with white set to sunlight to check how much blue it gets on a clear day, it isn't an illusion at all) so if anything, we should be using red light filters, not blue.
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