[HN Gopher] Blue light filters don't work - controlling total lu...
___________________________________________________________________
Blue light filters don't work - controlling total luminance is a
better bet
Author : pminimax
Score : 81 points
Date : 2026-02-20 18:14 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.neuroai.science)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.neuroai.science)
| snet0 wrote:
| But have you considered that it _feels_ better?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| so do placebos
| kurthr wrote:
| I agree for sleep. I prefer them because they focus better
| for me.
|
| Blue creates a halo around letters that is distracting with
| my declining vision.
|
| Also, Blue fluorescent OLED are ~50% less efficient than R/G
| phosphorescent OLED so you can reduce screen power
| consumption of a full white page by almost 30% using such a
| filter. That in turn might be 30% of active device power
| consumption (for a total of almost 10% in battery life during
| active operation). Ignoring that they also tend to burn out
| more quickly, since tandem blue has become fairly mainstream.
|
| Many more reasons for these "filters", if you don't mind the
| white balance shift and reduced color gamut.
| snet0 wrote:
| 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.
| Barbing wrote:
| Placebo and "manifesting"--the latter sounds mockable but
| pretty much the same thing, harmless if helpful so hey!
| nickthegreek wrote:
| The placebo effect is a real, measurable mind-body
| response where belief & expectation can change your
| symptoms or how you feel. However, it does not directly
| alter external reality. Manifesting claims your thoughts
| or intentions can cause _outside events_ to happen, which
| has zero evidence to support it.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| 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.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Not really. Most of the cultural notion about the remarkable
| effects of placebos came from flawed studies in the 1950s. As
| far as I can tell, the modern consensus is that there's no
| clinically significant placebo effect _except_ for conditions
| that can only be measured by a subject self-reporting their
| own perception (like pain and fatigue).
| allthetime wrote:
| and? placebo is often effective.
| debo_ wrote:
| > Everybody wants better sleep
|
| Bro, as someone who had brutal insomnia for a couple of years and
| now sleeps "normally" for whatever that means, I can tell you
| that I don't think about my sleep quality at all. I'm happy to be
| sleeping.
|
| If you too sleep "ok" for whatever that means, maybe stop
| worrying about optimizing it and go do something else less
| insane.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| What did you do to tackle your insomnia?
| smt88 wrote:
| Primary, idiopathic insomnia doesn't really exist. It's
| almost always anxiety, although a few other mental and
| physical conditions can also cause it. But more likely
| anxiety.
| debo_ wrote:
| That was my experience as well.
| m3047 wrote:
| Disturbed sleep / inability to settle / anxiety can have
| physical causes although these are poorly recognized /
| diagnosed by regular allopathic medicine where I live.
|
| Anecdata: 1) A good friend whose anxiety was largely
| alleviated (and sleep improved) by recognizing and treating
| their iron deficiency. 2) I have to (can't take the Western
| drug which was prescribed any more, and the Western doctors
| can't seem to bang the rocks together) take herbs for my
| hypertension but as opposed to the side effects I was
| experiencing from the drug I joke that all of the "side
| effects" from the herbs are good, they're targeting
| imbalances which were not recognized / treated previously and
| lo and behold I settle and sleep better... which helps reduce
| the blood pressure.
| debo_ wrote:
| Which herbs do you take?
| debo_ wrote:
| I spoke about it in this video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnNPRqLVtaM
| nine_k wrote:
| Waking up tired and with the brain full of fog is nearly as fun
| as not sleeping and ending up tired, with the brain full of
| fog. Truth be told, most cases of "poor sleep quality" are not
| as brutal though.
| kqr wrote:
| The charitable reading of "better sleep" is "sleep habits that
| allow for a healthy amount of sleep". A lot of people have
| habits that give them insufficient sleep.
| jerlam wrote:
| Yeah, "get better sleep" is usually followed with "by buying
| this thing". No one makes any money if you go to sleep
| earlier.
| debo_ wrote:
| My experience is being surrounded by people who sleep eight
| hours a night and then check their ring data or whatever
| nonsense to convince themselves that they could do better.
| koalacola wrote:
| Is this your article OP?
| aethrum wrote:
| 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?
| thenewnewguy wrote:
| I'm not an MD or expert in this field enough to know if OP is
| right or wrong, but I think it's fairly reasonable to be
| irritated people are claiming software has a health benefit
| based on vibes/feels.
|
| I thought we as a society had moved on from superstition to
| evidence-based medicine, but in this very post there are plenty
| of replies countering OP's scientific analysis and data with
| anecdotes (which is disappointing regardless of if TFA is
| correct or incorrect).
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >I think it's fairly reasonable to be irritated people are
| pushing software based on vibes/feels.
|
| You are going to HATE to find out about night-mode in the
| browser
| thenewnewguy wrote:
| To be fair, I should have said something like "claiming
| software has a health benefit based on vibes/feels". I
| personally prefer the look of night/dark mode (or whatever
| you call it) in apps and the browser, but I'm not going to
| claim it makes me healthier or improves my sleep or
| whatever.
|
| If you just like how something looks, that's fine, but
| there's a difference between "I like how X looks"
| (subjective opinion) than "X helps me sleep better"
| (difficult to prove but objectively true or false).
|
| Edit: Changed this in my original message as it seems
| multiple people got confused by my prior poor wording.
| thatcat wrote:
| It's not about how it looks aesthetically, you can feel
| your eye muscles release tension when you go from light
| to dark mode.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| 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.
| 0x1ch wrote:
| End of the day, dark mode would've been totally ignored
| if there wasn't a perceivable benefit, placebo or not.
| People want to make everything difficult, I guess.
| jack_pp wrote:
| Is it superstition to deduce that I get gassy after eating
| beans? I need a scientific study to tell me this? Same for if
| a screen hurts my eyes (not long term, like truly my eyes
| hurt) when using bright white colors at night.
| thenewnewguy wrote:
| 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
| events: you may think it's because you turned on a blue-
| light filter, but it actually could be because you used
| your phone for an hour less.
|
| That's why we have science to actually isolate variables
| and prove (or at least gather strong evidence for) things
| about the world, and why doctors don't (or at least
| shouldn't) make health-related recommendations based on
| vibes.
| jack_pp wrote:
| 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.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| 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_.
| cgriswald wrote:
| That's how it _should_ be but the poster is literally
| calling the individual experiences of others
| "superstition" based on _the population at large_.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _if someone has direct scientific evidence contrary to
| the claim_
|
| Except they don't. This is evidence about _one_ potential
| mechanism. Not evidence saying there are _no other_
| potential mechanisms.
|
| This is actually a very common mistake in popular science
| writing, to confuse the two.
| wat10000 wrote:
| If your eyes routinely hurt when doing something, and
| then they stop routinely hurting after you make a change,
| that's pretty good reason to believe that there's a
| causal effect there.
|
| Sometimes the causality is clear enough that you don't
| need sophisticated science to figure it out. Did you know
| that the only randomized controlled trial on the
| effectiveness of parachutes at preventing injury and
| death when jumping out of an airplane found that there is
| no effect? Given that, do you believe there really is no
| effect?
| bob1029 wrote:
| > I think it's fairly reasonable to be irritated people are
| pushing software based on vibes/feels.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry
| taco_emoji wrote:
| > I thought we as a society had moved on from superstition to
| evidence-based medicine
|
| Surely you didn't actually believe that unless you JUST
| landed here from space after being away for 60 years.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| because if you read the article its about blue light filters
| _to aid sleep_ not ease of reading.
|
| The the grift wheel on this particular bandwagon is strong. To
| the point where my fucking glasses have a blue filter on them,
| which fucks up my ability to do colour work becuase everything
| is orange.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| If you wait long enough cataracts will give you that for
| free.
| cpburns2009 wrote:
| Blue light filtering lenses come at a premium. You don't
| accidentally get them.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I wasn't paying for them, so it was very much accidental.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Someone ran up to you and put them on your face?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| You should go back and demand they be replaced. Such a
| mistake isn't something you should tolerate.
| tartoran wrote:
| I confirm that this helps me as well. Quite often I don't have
| any fancy filter, I'm permanently setting display/monitor to
| low temperature and my eyes/vision couldn't be happier. I don't
| even need darkmode, regular mode works just fine for me as long
| as blue light is toned down. Granted, I'm not doing any color
| correction or anything color sensitive work.
|
| I used to have terrible headaches about 20 years ago when I
| started spending a lot of time in front of the screen. I went
| to an optometrist who tested my eyes and told me I could get
| low prescriptions (.5) but warned me that there's no way back
| and that many people are fine with my current vision, choosing
| not to get a prescription. Luckily I figured out that it was
| blue light that was bothering me and once I turned it down I
| haven't had any problems since. I'm in my mid 40s and my vision
| has naturally deteriorated a bit but I am still fine with no
| prescriptions.
|
| And I don't believe this to be placebo. Every time I stare at a
| regular screen for longer than 5 minutes I get eye strain. At
| the same time I suspect this doesn't help everyone, but at
| least to me this is a great solution that still works.
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| Can you elaborate on "no way back"?
| denkmoon wrote:
| 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.
| ifwinterco wrote:
| I've got half a diopter (ish) of astigmatism in my right
| eye and it can be slightly annoying but interesting to
| know that using glasses would risk making it worse.
|
| The weird thing is it seems to get noticeably worse or
| better depending on how much time I spend outside
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Your assumption was false.[1]
|
| [1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/do-glasses-make-
| your-eyes...
| maccard wrote:
| I got glasses 2 years ago for a very minor prescription.
| Your eyesight sucked before you've just forgotten how
| badly. I had an eye test very recently for Contacts and
| my prescription is the same 2 years later
| tartoran wrote:
| I meant that once you decide to wear prescription optics
| you can't go back to not wearing them, of course excluding
| eye surgery. In my case I could stick to good enough vision
| and luckily 20 years later Im still not wearing glasses. My
| main point was that I was getting eye strain from blue
| light and once I reduced it the problem dissapeared.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| This isn't true? Myopia develops rapidly in youth then
| stabilizes in adulthood. It gets a worse with age, not
| corrective lenses. Then sometime after 40 you flip to
| presbyopia when your lenses lose flexibility.
| tartoran wrote:
| I don't have severe myopia and I'm fine with no glasses
| for now. The optometrist detected .5 correction needed
| but advised me to not go for it for the reason I
| mentioned. I think they are more qualified to give this
| advice than some rando on the internet. If they were a
| mercenary they'd tell me to go for it, that optometry
| practice was part of an eye glasses store and I'm sure
| they'd gain from my business there. And here I am 20
| years later not wearing glasses yet. As I'm getting older
| my vision is getting slightly worse, I'll probably get to
| wear them at some point but that's beside the point.
| amelius wrote:
| Are you sure you are not also changing total luminance?
| himata4113 wrote:
| I actually cannot use my monitor without nightshift, any white
| page just makes my eyes water, painful even. I had it off for a
| day when I switched to linux and immediately my eyes started
| drying out.
|
| Safe to say it works for making your eyes less tired at least.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I love Night Shift.
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| kpw94 wrote:
| > 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
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| 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
| pier25 wrote:
| > _I took a sample of 4 websites /apps (Google, X, Github, and
| VSCode) with the SpyderX colorimeter + a diffuser to average over
| a larger area of the screen, and found reductions in luminance
| ranging from 92% to 98%! That's huge._
|
| What about TikTok or Youtube?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I have my phone in monochrome (i.e. greyscale) mode and just
| subjectively it's much easier to look at especially at night. I
| have it at the lowest brightness and it's still very readable.
| Human eyesight is basically monochrome in low light settings
| anyway.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I use blue blocking glasses, like Bono but darker and they do
| work. I also use UV LEDs to help me wake up, which also works.
|
| I agree with the premise that night shift and other color warmth
| features are insufficient to have a strong effect, though they do
| help with eye strain which is still a positive.
| harrall wrote:
| 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 over the
| day that induces sleepiness and there are genetic variations that
| can affect your susceptibility to it. Receptors notice the
| accumulation of adenosine and use it as a signal to "scale down."
|
| I think that I am more sensitive, explaining my ease of sleep but
| also the effect of it when it accumulates due to poor sleep
| (sleep flushes it away). Yeah it's great when I'm in bed but it's
| not great when I want to throw a ball and my brain wants to be
| stingy. It basically means that someone else's "helpful guide to
| sleep" is completely different from my "helpful guide to sleep."
| lowdest wrote:
| >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 tolerate small interruptions.
| harrall wrote:
| 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.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Why is it that a few people seem to get bent out of shape by
| redshift and/or dark modes? If you don't like it, don't use it.
| Whining about scientific evidence is pointless, even if it all
| only comes down to user preferences with no science behind it, so
| what? Let people enjoy things.
| ctbeiser wrote:
| It seems pretty clear in the OP that headline is misleading--they
| do work, just not as well as he would like. I think that a 50%
| cut in light emission is pretty good--and you can stack that with
| the other interventions listed, like auto-dark mode and reducing
| light in your room.
| leni536 wrote:
| Note that it's only 50% if you don't normalise back to absolute
| brightness.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Blue light filters definitely work for me. But it needs to be a
| strong filter (quite a bit stronger than the strongest setting of
| Apple's built-in filter).
| nomel wrote:
| Yes, article title is clickbait. Partial filters don't work,
| but as they suggest, 100% filter of blue light (resulting in no
| blue light present), DO work.
|
| You can get this with Apple's strongest filter, the color
| filter, in Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size >
| Color Filters, rather than night shift. Only red sub-pixels are
| illuminated with it. It can be added to the triple click power
| button accessibility shortcut.
|
| That's what I use. I have a shortcut set to enable it when I
| put my AirPods in at night.
| Groxx wrote:
| 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 Useful and Good and is Achieving Its
| Intended Goal. It's reducing total luminance, _because people
| prefer it over reducing screen brightness overall_. I sure as
| heck do anyway (as night shift modes, they 're a more
| comprehensive option than dark mode), though I think I'll
| experiment with just reducing brightness a bit.
|
| ----
|
| For melatonin in particular, fully agreed. The recent trend of
| "can't even get <5mg in stores, and >10mg is appearing regularly"
| in the USA is mind-boggling to me. AFAICT it's exclusively
| because it's a "supplement" and therefore practically
| unregulated, and these companies don't give a shit about anyone
| they harm, just profit.
|
| Start with something like https://a.co/d/0dISg7oa (0.3mg, this is
| what I personally use) and go up from there, slowly.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| So buy 5mg, and split the tablet in half.
| Groxx wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Oops, missed the decimal position!
| IAmBroom wrote:
| 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 ...).
| Groxx wrote:
| 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!)
| gowld wrote:
| 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.
| Groxx wrote:
| 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.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Well they work in that the color temperature of the light in my
| house is much cooler during the day than at night, and it's nice
| to match it so it doesn't look jarring.
| pclowes wrote:
| 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!
| Barbing wrote:
| (just nothing from Goop)
| tartoran wrote:
| 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.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| You can test the negative easily, but the positive is harder.
| Thus: placebos.
| tartoran wrote:
| You're saying that my eyes straining going away from
| reduced blue light is placebo? I can feel it right away and
| it gets worse in minutes, time and time again. As soon as I
| remove blue light the strain is gone. Honestly, I don't
| care what other people have to say, to me it's obvious that
| it helps and I stick to it. Again, I don't think this is
| universal and it may not help you if you don't notice
| immediate improvement.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| I am aware that meta-studies of glucosamine chondroitin show No
| Significant Gains in joint pain. I would never waste my money
| on it.
|
| But my newly adopted dog had hip issues, and I bought a few
| months worth of a diet supplement in the hopes of doing
| something meaningf... dammit, it's glucosamine.
|
| They claimed double-blind studies showed decreases in limping
| in just two months.
|
| Two months, more or less, I stopped seeing him limp by the time
| we left the dog park. He still does sometimes, but it's rare -
| not every damn day, by any means.
|
| We aren't that fricking different biologically from dogs in our
| skeletal attachment system. Maybe it's still a placebo, but it
| seems to defeat that idea. Maybe enough human issues are based
| on things that don't translate to dogs - sitting at a desk all
| day, eating junk food, walking upright... - that it helps them,
| but not enough of us.
|
| Don't know. These GC supplements have convinced me it's worth
| my money, and he loves eating them, so he votes 'yes', too.
| rkomorn wrote:
| I found it interesting that placebo effect is also sort of
| relevant in pet care: it makes owners believe the pet is
| doing better.
|
| Unfortunately, the study that showed this used the same
| medicine my dog had been on, and since it was for epilepsy, I
| can totally believe that whether I thought it worked had no
| connection to its effectiveness.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| If you aren't aware, your phone's screen can go much dimmer than
| the minimum brightness offered by the slider, if it supports HDR.
| There are apps that use an HDR screen overlay to lower brightness
| all the way down to the dimmest you can perceive. In my own
| experience, 'half' the brightness of 'minimum' brightness is
| plenty dark enough to not disturb sleeping at all if using my
| phone in bed.
| Barbing wrote:
| Also for third-party monitors with MacBooks: BetterDisplay
|
| Can even use an external keyboard's native brightness buttons.
| Can still use f.lux if desired too though Night Shift maybe
| Sherlocked there a bit...
| lisper wrote:
| 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 time zone on my
| computer (because it screws up my calendar). But my sleep cycle
| continues to track my home time zone for a very long time. I life
| in California, but at the moment I'm in Hawaii. I've been here
| three weeks so far. At home I'd fall asleep around 11 and wake up
| around 7, but here I'm getting sleepy at 9 and waking up at 5.
|
| My wife, on the other hand, is a hard-core night owl even with
| night shift. So apparently there is a lot of individual
| variation.
|
| This article has inspired me to do a control experiment by
| switching night shift off. Check back here in a week or so for
| the results.
| Barbing wrote:
| >inspired me to do a control experiment
|
| Delightful, see ya the 27th!
| gowld wrote:
| > Night shift seems to have a very strong causal effect on my
| sleep cycles.
|
| > light hygiene and using night shift
|
| The OP article is primarily about separating the variables you
| lumped together.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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,
| cold, blue-tinted light does not. That's why I use different,
| warmer lamps at night with dimmers, and keep my devices on Night
| Shift _and_ lower brightness. It works for me, and seems to mimic
| the lighting conditions we evolved with -- strong blue light
| around noon, weaker warmer light at sunset, weakest warmest light
| from the fire until we go to sleep. Maybe it doesn 't work for
| everybody. That's fine. But it certainly does for me.
|
| And maybe it's not modulated by melanopsin. Or maybe it's not
| about blue light, but rather the overall correlated color
| temperature (CCT), e.g. 2100K instead of 5700K. Who knows.
|
| But this type of article is bad science writing. It shows why
| _one hypothesis_ as to why a warmer color temperature would
| result in _one other physiological change_ isn 't supported. That
| doesn't mean "blue light filters don't work" as a universal
| statement. It's hubris on the part of the author to assume that
| this _one_ hypothesis is the _only potential mechanism_ by which
| warmer light might help with sleep.
|
| And it's this kind of science writing that turns people off to
| science. I know, through lots of trial and error and
| experimentation, that warm light helps me fall asleep. And here
| comes some "AI researcher and neurotechnologist" trying to tell
| me I'm wrong? He says it's "aggravating" that people are
| "actually using Night Shift". I say it's aggravating when people
| like him make the elemental mistake that showing _one_ biological
| mechanism doesn 't have an effect, means _no other_ mechanisms
| can either.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > 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.
| chuckadams wrote:
| 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.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| 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).
| chuckadams wrote:
| The direct insult where I said "touch some fucking
| grass"?
|
| I certainly stand by it now.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Why? You're proud of your insults?
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _" Feels good to me" is hardly evidence to begin with_
|
| Where did I say anything like that? Please don't
| mischaracterize my comment, that's not helpful. It's not that
| it "feels good", it's that it helps at least some people fall
| asleep more easily, and I know this from personal experience.
| And many, many other people have written that it does the
| same for them.
|
| > _" Blue light effects" have always had highly questionable
| evidence behind it... But now that you are reminded that it
| is actually bullshit_
|
| You're right that the evidence _for_ it is questionable. But
| you know what else there 's no conclusive evidence for? That
| hot herbal tea helps you fall asleep. Or soothing music. Or
| bedtime stories. Because the funding usually isn't there to
| perform the kind of large-scale studies required to establish
| these things, because it's just not a priority or even a good
| use of our dollars. And lack of evidence for, is not the same
| as evidence against.
|
| My point is, nothing in this article _does_ establish that it
| is "actually bullshit". That's a _gross_ misreading of the
| science, and that 's what I'm criticizing the article over.
|
| People experiment with things and discover what works and
| what doesn't. Again, nobody's going around complaining that
| there's no scientific evidence lullabyes don't help put you
| to sleep. And neither lullabyes, nor turning your lights down
| to amber, have anything to do with homeopathy. You can't
| possibly suggest they're doing _harm_. People aren 't using
| amber lighting at night _instead of getting their cancer
| treated_.
|
| But for some reason, low amber lighting to help with sleep
| makes you and the article author upset? Why? Why does that
| make you upset, but not hot tea or lullabyes? Or do those
| make you upset too?
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| "feels good to me" and "helps me sleep more easily" are
| about the same thing: flimsy and almost non-quantifiable
| personal experiences. About the same level with "I dream of
| nicer things".
|
| > And many, many other people have written that it does the
| same for them.
|
| So people write for homeopathy. Homepathy actually is the
| precursor for using this type of "evidence" for development
| and study of new "drugs" (hint: this evidence ends up going
| nowhere useful, quickly).
|
| > Or soothing music. Or bedtime stories. Because the
| funding usually isn't there to perform the kind of large-
| scale studies required to establish these things, because
| it's just not a priority or even a good use of our dollars.
|
| Oh, there is. There are way more studies about this than
| you can possibly think of. There are medical journals
| reporting clinical experiences about this daily. You are
| saying this on an article about study about one of these,
| ironically enough.
|
| > And lack of evidence for, is not the same as evidence
| against.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
|
| > My point is, nothing in this article does establish that
| it is "actually bullshit".
|
| Why not?
|
| > But for some reason, low amber lighting to help with
| sleep makes you and the article author upset? Why? Why does
| that make you upset, but not hot tea or lullabyes? Or do
| those make you upset too?
|
| You are the one who suddenly claims this makes people
| "anti-science", when this particular bullshit is not even
| 20 years old, and it was already known to be suspect 20
| years ago. It is just ridiculous that it is now suddenly
| such a core belief of your persona that even being reminded
| that it is most likely bullshit is going to drive you to
| reject science outright.
|
| As I said, I could at least _understand_ (but not justify)
| much older claims, such as ancient chinese practices or
| whatever. This makes they make me upset indeed (this is
| pseudoscience, after all), but what makes me even more
| upset is the creation of new pseudo-scientific or even
| anti-scientific "popular wisdom" _in this age_.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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 that
| this is the core mistake of the article, and the core
| mistake of what you're trying to argue.
|
| You reply with a reference to Russell's teapot, and that
| would be fine if you were merely trying to make the point
| that the effect of amber light on sleep has not been
| sufficiently proven. But _you 're_ the one literally
| calling it "bullshit", i.e. _dis_ proven. That's wrong.
| There's no high-quality study conclusively demonstrating
| it _doesn 't_ have an effect.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| 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 putting the example of
| homeopathy because it is exactly the same. Homeopathy has
| plenty of (weak) evidence, but no known mechanism of
| action. All the proposed religious, memory of water, etc.
| have been disproved. Certainly you can argue that
| homeopathy could still be a thing because there could be
| some physical/biological mechanism that has not yet been
| disproved! But this is just nitpicking: homeopathy is
| still bullshit. In the same way that a teapot in space is
| bullshit.
|
| Anything else is a (useless) nitpick.
|
| In any case, even from day #1 it's been known that blue
| light could possibly have a mechanism, but there's always
| been a big stretch from there to claiming that blue light
| filters/night shift have an effect, and the evidence for
| the latter is substantially lacking.
| https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/blue-light/
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| 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...
| anonymars wrote:
| > But this type of article is bad science writing. It shows why
| one hypothesis as to why a warmer color temperature would
| result in one other physiological change isn't supported
|
| I don't know if I'd even give them that credit (emphasis mine):
|
| > Halving the luminance, at best (around 20 lux baseline)
| _might get you from 50% to 25% melatonin suppression._
| orbital-decay wrote:
| What if these filters also cure cancer by some mechanism that
| isn't known yet? Who knows, it might be true!
|
| 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.
| wa008 wrote:
| Based on my experience, most health benefits are from personal
| habits over external hardware. But people care health so much,
| it's a great opportunity for merchants to get revenue.
| alejohausner wrote:
| I bought some amber glasses from blublocker.com[1], because they
| link to a research paper that actually measured how much of each
| wavelength their filters allow (as well as other brands). They're
| pretty dark, so you have to crank up the brightness on your
| screen, but I'm confident that I'm not getting ANY blue.
|
| 1: https://www.blublocker.com/blogs/news/what-blue-light-
| blocki...
| kb9alpp wrote:
| Nice. The article also mentions BluTech lenses (BluTech LLC,
| Alpharetta, GA). I've found the marginal utility of bluelight
| blocking solutions are very context specific, indeed. And
| mostly-completely bahokie garbage, sadly, but not when it's
| BluTech and BluBlocker. BluTech/BluBlocker for the screen-
| induced fatigue is the correct solution. I always get BluTech
| HI Indoor AR pucks for my prescription lenses. And just switch
| to prescription sunglasses when I go outside.
| cptskippy wrote:
| I have Night Light perpetually on with all of my devices because
| I find it softens everything and makes viewing displays less
| harsh, less garish, less vivid, and less intense. I don't need
| eye searing HDR constantly cooking my retinas.
| yathern wrote:
| > 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.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| zcw100 wrote:
| I replaced all the light switches in my house with smart dimmers
| and have the lights dim in the evening. It happens in steps so
| it's noticeable and it's like a clock ticking down. I don't know
| if there's anything scientific about it but it's pleasant, like
| the house is going to sleep so maybe I should too.
| TACIXAT wrote:
| I have had success with an extremely aggressive red filter. My
| unchecked sleep schedule has me going to bed around 4 am,
| consistent over decades. I don't consume caffeine or any other
| stimulant. In the last 4 months I switched my lights to LED bulbs
| to turn red at 6pm and use QRedshift on Linux (Mint) with the
| temperature set to 1000k at 6pm. I have consistently been falling
| asleep around midnight. What is remarkable to me is that I am
| actually feeling tired at night.
| jrm4 wrote:
| 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.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| Regardless of the sleep effect (or lack of) they absolutely do
| work for reducing eye strain for migraineurs.
|
| It's noticeable to me all the time, but if I'm borderline
| migraining, or recovering from a migraine, the difference between
| shifted and not is something I can feel instantly. Shifting all
| the way over enables me to eek out some work after a migraine
| without it flaring back up again.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I really don't care if they "work" or not. I find it incredibly
| cozy to have a warmer, calmer screen in the evening.
| reenorap wrote:
| The entire blue light madness is based on a poor study where N
| was around 8. And the difference in sleep was something like 15
| mins. The entire study was based on crap but somehow the entire
| world has run rampant on the idea that blue light has this
| profound effect. It just goes to show that bad science is easily
| propagated, even when there's even more sources of information.
| baud9600 wrote:
| I added the "Noir" extension to mobile Safari, now I
| automatically get dark mode on all websites including Hacker
| News.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm surprised by how may don't have a dark mode though. I
| decided to do it for my blog despite not really using it
| myself, and ended up sticking with it on. Still getting blasted
| in the face by eggshell white everywhere I click.
| james_marks wrote:
| I have a triple-click shortcut in iOS to use the accessibility
| features to go below the min dim settings.
|
| Otherwise even dark mode is way too bright in a dark room.
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