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Posted by pminimax 4 hours ago

Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet(www.neuroai.science)
73 points | 111 comments
iainctduncan 25 seconds ago|
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.

aethrum 3 hours ago||
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?

taeric 38 minutes ago||
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 6 minutes ago||
> 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

tartoran 3 hours ago|||
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 1 hour ago||
Can you elaborate on “no way back”?
tartoran 1 hour ago|||
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 39 minutes ago||
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.
denkmoon 1 hour ago|||
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.
pseudalopex 24 minutes ago|||
Your assumption was false.[1]

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

ifwinterco 42 minutes ago|||
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

himata4113 50 minutes ago|||
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.

amelius 56 minutes ago|||
Are you sure you are not also changing total luminance?
metalliqaz 22 minutes ago|||
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
thenewnewguy 3 hours ago|||
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).

jack_pp 3 hours ago|||
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 2 hours ago|||
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.

crazygringo 2 hours ago|||
> 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.

jack_pp 2 hours ago||||
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.
nandomrumber 19 minutes ago|||
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.

BobaFloutist 1 hour ago|||
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 41 minutes ago||
That’s how it should be but the poster is literally calling the individual experiences of others “superstition” based on the population at large.
wat10000 33 minutes ago|||
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?

smohare 1 hour ago|||
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geoduck14 3 hours ago||||
>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 3 hours ago||
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 1 hour ago||
It's not about how it looks aesthetically, you can feel your eye muscles release tension when you go from light to dark mode.
0x1ch 41 minutes ago|||
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.
IAmBroom 57 minutes ago|||
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.

taco_emoji 2 hours ago||||
> 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.

bob1029 3 hours ago|||
> 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

KaiserPro 3 hours ago|||
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.

cpburns2009 2 hours ago|||
Blue light filtering lenses come at a premium. You don't accidentally get them.
KaiserPro 2 hours ago||
I wasn't paying for them, so it was very much accidental.
mikkupikku 1 hour ago|||
You should go back and demand they be replaced. Such a mistake isn't something you should tolerate.
pavel_lishin 2 hours ago|||
Someone ran up to you and put them on your face?
robinsonb5 3 hours ago|||
If you wait long enough cataracts will give you that for free.
NedF 14 minutes ago|||
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smohare 1 hour ago|||
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nsxwolf 43 minutes ago||
I love Night Shift.
yathern 1 hour ago||
> 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 1 hour ago|
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.

pclowes 3 hours ago||
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!

tartoran 2 hours ago||
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 45 minutes ago||
You can test the negative easily, but the positive is harder. Thus: placebos.
IAmBroom 45 minutes ago|||
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 38 minutes ago||
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.

Barbing 2 hours ago||
(just nothing from Goop)
lisper 3 hours ago||
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.

gowld 1 hour ago||
> 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.

Barbing 3 hours ago|||
>inspired me to do a control experiment

Delightful, see ya the 27th!

ndkdofococofo 3 hours ago||
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alejohausner 2 hours ago||
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 41 minutes ago|
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.
SoftTalker 3 hours ago||
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.
zcw100 48 minutes ago||
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.
harrall 3 hours ago||
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 3 hours ago|
>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 1 hour ago||
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.

TACIXAT 26 minutes ago|
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.
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