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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

#71

Post by mikkupikku »

Barbing wrote: post #50
snet0 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? If I could take a sugar pill that guaranteed I feel comfier looking at my screen, nobody can tell me it "doesn't work". I'm not trying to optimise my life, I'm trying to have my eyes feel better.

Placebo and “manifesting”—the latter sounds mockable but pretty much the same thing, harmless if helpful so hey!

If somebody is "manifesting" themselves a sleep aid, I think they'd just call it meditation and everybody would more or less accept that it probably works for that individual. Maybe you'd have a few people with severe autism who start arguing on online forums about the scientific evidence behind meditation, but that's just them being them.

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

#72

Post by gowld »

Groxx wrote: post #27

So the main claim presented here is that reducing blue reduces total "light" (lumens? watts?) by 50% (totally believable), and that reduction in light is all that matters for sleep? That seems reasonable. The pseudoscience wankery that the fad has brought bothers me a lot too. ... but I'm not sure that's much of an argument against blue light filters, aside from color complaints. That seems to support that it's Usefu…

No, in the OP (after an unclear intro that confuseed many readers), there is a graph that shows blue wavelength intensity is important, but software light filters don't filter a lot of it, and the effect is cancelled by increasing overall brightness.

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

#73

Post by AshamedCaptain »

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…

> These are the kinds of articles that give science a bad name, and that make people anti-science.

No, it is attitude like yours that brings humanity a bad name.

"Blue light effects" have always had highly questionable evidence behind it, what has been sold and marketed under the guise of it has had _zero_ evidence behind it. But now that you are reminded that it is actually bullshit, you react with skepticism.

"Feels good to me" is hardly evidence to begin with. It's something that is even more flimsy than sociology. I have my doubts it should even be called medicine.

You have to remember that a shitton of people day after day "show" "evidence" that homeopathy works. Even though it has no plausible mechanism of action. So clear mechanism of action is about as important as the evidence itself. (see Science-based medicine)

I could understand (not justify) skepticism in many cases (such as "common wisdom" from 1000 years ago) but this particular topic should have raised your skepticism 20 years ago back when the craze/marketing stunt was starting, and not now.

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

#74

Post by harrall »

lowdest wrote: post #31
harrall wrote: post #18

I firmly believe this varies between people significantly. Blue light filters do not work for me because I fall asleep on command everyday all the time regardless if WW3 is outside. BUT it also seems the effect of poor sleep seems to be MUCH worse for me than other people. I go from extreme motor coordination to dropping cups in a span of 3 days of poor sleep. There’s a chemical called adenosine which accumulates ove…

>the effect of poor sleep seems to be MUCH worse for me than other people. I go from extreme motor coordination to dropping cups in a span of 3 days of poor sleep. Are you sleeping enough? When I was getting too little sleep, averaging 5.5 hours per night, this described me well. A single sleep interruption could make me lose most of a day of work. I'm sleeping better and longer now, and it seems I'm more able to tol…

Yeah I’ve gotten 8 hours of sleep almost everyday for 15 years, ever since I put 2+2 together. In my early 20s, I didn’t like being bad at sports and I found sleep was my single most important factor.

Similar to you, I also noticed that if I miss good sleep for several days, it stacks. I treat sleep like a battery. A day uses up 20% and good sleep fills it back up, but only like 30%. One missed night isn’t that bad but I also can’t recover several nights’ worth.

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

#75

Post by yathern »

> 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 creature.

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

#76

Post by EA-3167 »

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…

Absolutely, although dark orange seems to work well enough. If you can put them on and still tell the difference between most colors, they aren't working. I use my pair for one purpose: reading in bed with a backlit e-reader. I can't imagine trying to do much else with them on, they have plastic wings to block light from the side and they're not light.

But they work.

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

#77

Post by chuckadams »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #73
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…

> These are the kinds of articles that give science a bad name, and that make people anti-science. No, it is attitude like yours that brings humanity a bad name. "Blue light effects" have always had highly questionable evidence behind it, what has been sold and marketed under the guise of it has had _zero_ evidence behind it. But now that you are reminded that it is actually bullshit, you react with skepticism. "Feel…

Someone says that other psychological factors (which have physical effects) help them sleep and they "bring humanity a bad name"?

Maybe think on that a little bit.

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

#78

Post by Groxx »

gowld wrote: post #72
Groxx wrote: post #27

So the main claim presented here is that reducing blue reduces total "light" (lumens? watts?) by 50% (totally believable), and that reduction in light is all that matters for sleep? That seems reasonable. The pseudoscience wankery that the fad has brought bothers me a lot too. ... but I'm not sure that's much of an argument against blue light filters, aside from color complaints. That seems to support that it's Usefu…

No, in the OP (after an unclear intro that confuseed many readers), there is a graph that shows blue wavelength intensity is important, but software light filters don't filter a lot of it, and the effect is cancelled by increasing overall brightness.

If software filters are reducing total light by 50% while only affecting blue-ish tones, and that's a total light level comparable to multiple brightness steps on a Mac... tbh I think it's reducing it quite a lot. Many I see using them (myself included) don't tweak brightness when enabling it, and many (all?) systems don't adjust their brightness to match the perceived change from a software filter (on my Linux machines in particular I have never seen this happen, don't know about Macs though).

Half is not a lot, sure, but their ultimate suggestion is to do the same ~half change:

>You can decrease the amount of light coming from your screen by more than half simply by dimming the screen by several notches.

which is definitely significantly more than I see people doing voluntarily in the hundreds of millions.

Do they have any evidence that people are raising system brightness to match the 50% loss from the filter? If not, it still seems like a rather significant mark in their favor. Perhaps not sufficient to meet the goals (they seem to be recommending a larger change, but aren't specific), but I see no claim that a lesser decrease in light is worse.

---

Late edit: on second thought... let's go through this more rigorously. For both myself and any other readers, because I want to make sure I'm following it accurately too.

The main explicit points in this article are, in order:

- night shift does not help with sleep (the main claim)

- blue light is not special, in particular because the "[most] sensitive to blue" research is mis-quoted to mean "blue is bad", but it's actually sensitive to blue and green (seems very well supported)

- night shift reduces blue and green by about half (tested themselves)

- half of absolute is not a lot because vision and a lot of the related biology is logarithmic (100% agreed)

- halving light affects 25%-50% of melatonin levels (linked research)

- many people use Night Shift (100% agreed, and they have decent data to back it up)

- dark mode is better than night shift (>90% vs ~50%, implied leaning on the linked research earlier. agreed, seems straightforward)

- dimming your screen by several steps is the same or better than night shift (as it decreases brightness more, same reasoning as dark mode. agreed.)

That still sounds rather in favor of Night Shift. It's targeting the correct color range (NOT the pseudoscience blathering of just blue blue blue), it has a moderate affect on melatonin levels at the light level changes it creates, and it's used by a huge amount of the population.

Nowhere in there that I can see is anything to back up "Night Shift does not work". Only "it seems to be doing things right, it just isn't quite enough on its own" and "ARGH it's not just blue light STOP PROMOTING FAD PSEUDOSCIENCE". That seems... fine? Most things are not silver bullets.

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

#79

Post by AshamedCaptain »

chuckadams wrote: post #77
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are the kinds of articles that give science a bad name, and that make people anti-science. No, it is attitude like yours that brings humanity a bad name. "Blue light effects" have always had highly questionable evidence behind it, what has been sold and marketed under the guise of it has had _zero_ evidence behind it. But now that you are reminded that it is actually bullshit, you react with skepticism. "Feel…

Someone says that other psychological factors (which have physical effects) help them sleep and they "bring humanity a bad name"? Maybe think on that a little bit.

No, he said "this gives science a bad name"/"makes people anti-science" because some article published something that contradicts his anecdote of how well he thinks he sleeps. That gives humanity a bad name. And your direct insults do, too (which fortunately have been edited out).

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

#80

Post by BobaFloutist »

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.

Nobody really cares if it's comfortable or not for you, the debate at hand is whether it's measurably more comfortable for the population at large.
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