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).
>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
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.
It's not about how it looks aesthetically, you can feel your eye muscles release tension when you go from light to dark mode.
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.
Benefit: saves battery on OLED
As someone more trained in science than software, the phrase "you can feel..." is suspicious, even if it's my own feelings.
Not invalid; suspicious.
As a complete psychopath:
If I put your hand in a vice and do the vice up to the point where you start saying you can feel the pressure…
Yes, of course I’m going to be suspicious.
Gaslighting doesn’t exist, you made that up because you’re fucking crazy.
/s
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s how it should be but the poster is literally calling the individual experiences of others “superstition” based on the population at large.
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?
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> 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.
> 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