[thenewnewguy]

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]

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]

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]

> 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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?

[philwelch]

I have direct scientific evidence contrary to the claim that parachutes improve the safety of jumping out of airplanes.

https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094

[geoduck14]

>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]

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]

It's not about how it looks aesthetically, you can feel your eye muscles release tension when you go from light to dark mode.

[theshackleford]

> you can feel your eye muscles release tension when you go from light to dark mode

For those like me, i'd like to add, this is not universally true. For some, dark mode will provide a significant reduction in comfort and increase in your fatigue and other symptoms.

Quite a few years back now, I started having significant problems with my eyesight that for the longest time I failed to match up to the switch to significant dark mode usage.

Turns out for many (though perhaps not all) with astigmatism, dark mode can induce issues that will wipe any potential positive impacts normal people experience. In my case, it gave me horrific blurryness/double vision that I thought was my eyes developing some new problem.

I'd tell the eye doctors "it seems to start fine then get worse as the day goes on!"

No, in fact what was actually happening, was in the afternoon my machines were scheduled to start shifting to dark mode. At which point the issues would start and my eyes would feel "heavy." It would fatigue my eyes so heavily that even not looking at displays would be affected.

I can not believe it took so long to connect the two, but I never even considered dark mode because it was so heavily pushed (along with reductions in brightness) as the answer to general monitor usage fatigue that I never remotely considered it may do the opposite, which to be fair, is on me.

Point is...if you have astigmatism, verify for yourself before rolling over to the full commit. Hopefully you are fine, but if not, you'll know why.

[0x1ch]

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.

[tcfhgj]

Benefit: saves battery on OLED and goes easier on the OLEDs themselves

[IAmBroom]

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.

[thatcat]

A phrase like I'm more trained in science is an appeal to authority, which is pretty suspicious, as is not trusting your own observations. How do you trust the data you collect?

feel in this case is a muscle contraction not psychological as you're suggesting

[wtetzner]

Regardless of "health benefits", the phrase "you can feel" seems pretty relevant when it comes to what someone finds comfortable.

[nandomrumber]

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

[bob1029]

> 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]

> 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.