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Science is not a faith based system. If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. In the meantime, I will trust those sci

by yiyus 6y ago

Science is not a faith based system. If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. In the meantime, I will trust those scientific studies more than subjective opinions in hackernews comments.

pdimitar 6y ago
> If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. Sampling. It probably feels good hand-waving away the problem of "does this study apply to everyone?" by introducing the "representative sample" construct, but it has its problems and I doubt they will be ever solved. You can't speak for everyone when you have several thousands samples -- out of ~8 billion people. This is kind of akin to that artificially absurd example of "on average, every human on Earth has one testicle". (And don't get nitpicky here, please; it might be "median" or another term, and that's not the point.) What your parent poster says is that this article is kind of hiding behind science to be able to claim a generalisation it makes is true. Which it still isn't. Most people I asked said they prefer dark mode. Some said they like light mode. This article changes none of that.
- yiyus 6y ago
  > This is kind of akin to that artificially absurd example of "on average, every human on Earth has one testicle". No. If I claim everyone has 0.5 testicles, that's bad science. If I randomly choose a large enough number of subjects and report that approximately 50% have two testicles and approximately 50% have no testicles, with error bars, p-values, etc., saying that you don't trust this because I am trying to make a career and you prefer to follow your own experience, which after looking between your legs clearly shows that 100% of people have two testicles, would be quite stupid. If I chose only 3 people, or all of them are male or female, or I make any other mistake, point the mistake, but don't attack me personally, and much less science in general. For example, I followed the link to the study by the Nielsen Norman Group and then the reference to the study of Piepenbrock. They explain well their sampling method, with different groups by age and depending on vision problems. You can clearly see the individual results and the variance, and it is obvious that generalizing to the 100% of population would be wrong, but there are some very clear trends. Calling these researchers "someone trying to p-hack their way to a publishable result that's sensational enough to advance their career" without any proof whatsoever is insulting. To be clear, I do not intend that anyone changes habits because of these studies. I agree that this is subjective enough to make it a personal decision. But as a scientist trying to make a career, I found the above comment very disrespectful.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    I apologise then. I didn't mean to insult scientists. I was more trying to point out the difference between The Scientific Method and Academic Practice. Especially in the social sciences, there's been a whole discussion recently about how our current system of evaluating and rewarding scientists is not benefitting Science. There's even been high-profile commentators disputing whether the social sciences are actually Science at all. As you're a scientist I won't bother explaining this to you. I'm sure you're aware of the problems here. So my point is that for a study like this, there's lots of room for playing statistical games in order to achieve a more "sensational" result that is more publishable and more likely to get cited. We know this happens and we know this is especially rife in this area of study. So I have become much more sceptical of social-science studies showing broad generalised results about a subject applying to the whole human race. Especially if those studies contravene some commonly-held view about the subject. My default position has moved from "well, they know what they're doing so there must be something to it", to "I'm going to assume that they p-hacked their way to a sensational result until I have evidence to prove otherwise". I might be wrong in taking that stance. I will change it if I have better evidence.
    - yiyus 6y ago
      Fair enough, and apologies accepted. I agree that many social studies lack rigor. And, unfortunately, it also happens quite a lot with more technical topics in which it is much easier to be objective. I get easily triggered when science is presented as a matter of faith, but in fact I totally agree with your skeptical point of view.
m12k 6y ago
Well, arguably science is just the superior faith-based system. Nothing is ever proven, but it contains a method to constantly find the theory most likely to deserve your faith.
- guykdm 6y ago
  A method that one can choose to follow or to fake.
- xtracto 6y ago
  That's my problem with science (and I am an atheist who is 100% for the scientific method and even have a PhD): The "real" science has no absolutes. But the problem is that it is very difficult for humans to operationalize it that way. Take for example eggs and cholesterol. I remember in the late 80s, my father (also a scientist/biologist) stopped eating eggs because apparently Science said eggs are bad for you (due to some papers)... later in the mid/late 90s Science said that eggs are actually not bad, but good for you (because, even if they where high on cholesterol, it was the good cholesterol). So, for people (even other scientists!) that are not experts in the subject, it becomes a matter of belief... believe in the papers some random team published, because it was published in Nature. > Nothing is ever proven, but it contains a method to constantly find the theory most likely to deserve your faith. I love this quote!
guykdm 6y ago
While this commentator invested far less effort than the scientists in reaching his result about dark mode, he also has no benefits from you choosing to believe him or not. You are in fact choosing to see the brand "science" as something transcendental that doesn't concern any incentive structures, which if false and opens you to lots of manipulation.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  I am just wondering does the author alao distrust science when it comes to medical treatments and the law of gravity, or does is his distrust highly selective.
  - ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
    Medical treatments can be really faulty too.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    pretty selective. Maths has proofs. Logical reasoning from first arguments that a thing is true or not. It either is, or is not, proven. End of. Physics as applied maths, pretty solid. We need to conduct experiments to verify that nature agrees with our mathematical constructs, but on the whole these are simple and unequivocal. e.g . gravity. Particle physics gets dodgy because of the vast range of collision results - statistics starts creeping in. Rather than being able to say that particle A collides with particle B to produce particles D an E, we now have a statistical chance that somethng might happen. Chemistry as applied physics, again, pretty solid. Everything has to be tested by experiment, and experiment frequently throws up surprises, but if a reacts with B in Chicago, it probably does in Moscow too. Biology as applied chemistry. Mostly solid. It gets massively complex, and so the temptation to resort to statistics is overwhelming and most biological papers start talking about statistical probabilities rather than actual results. But the basic biology is mostly the same for most subjects, and if the conclusion is simple (virology and the effectiveness of vaccines, for example) then we're all good. Any social science as applied biology: not much. This is really dodgy territory where the experiment design totally dominates the result, and the result is statistical data that has to be massaged into a definitive statement. This is p-hacking territory, where experiments are largely unreproducible, very subject to bias, cultural references, and academia politics. E.g. whether creativity shares a limited resource pool with willpower - highly subjective, highly variable between individuals, hihgly suspect if your paper cites this as a proven result. Not all science is worthy of the same level of trust. The scientific method is trustworthy. Academia is not.
marcus_holmes 6y ago
Why not conduct your own experiment, using Science? 1. Start with a hypothesis, that "dark mode is less comfortable for me than light mode". 2. Design an experiment: find the sites that you use most. Use them for 10 minutes each in light mode and dark mode. Write down your impressions. 3. Build a conclusion: was your hypothesis correct? Was it partially correct for some sites? Then you can adapt your behaviour according to your new, Scientifically-proven knowledge. Science isn't faith-based, but there are a ton of problems with Academia and the way Science is practised and published at the moment. Science is also not connected with Academia - the scientific method doesn't need a university grant to work. You can literally conduct your own experiment in a couple of hours (as above) to get better information than any study. Not publishing it doesn't make it any less scientific. It makes no sense to me to trust an unknown number of studies over my personal experience. I prefer dark mode. I'll stick with that. You do you.
- cooper12 6y ago
  Unfortunately your proposed study design does not control for biases. For example, say I'm an audiophile comparing two audio formats, x and y, and I hear y is remarkably better. If I compare them side by side, my own brain might fool me that y is better. The way to control that is to do a blind test, where I won't know which one is x or y. Also, asking people their impressions can be helpful in the human aspect of the research, but quantitatively you need some sort of metric you can evaluate their experience on. For example, you'd assign a task and see how well people did comparing the two modes, while also making sure the difference is statistically significant (meaning it wasn't just as likely to be chance). This is just the beginning of where good study design starts. You'd also do things like assigning the modes themselves randomly, so to go back to the audiophile example, I might notice if it's always x and then y, but not if it's scrambled. You'd could go further and try to stratify the groups, so for example making sure one group isn't all elderly people and the other young. It goes on and on... So while the scientific method is nice, especially for introducing science in educational contexts, the methodology and rationale behind research is much more deliberate and involved. By all means they can try out things themselves, but no, they will not "get better information than any study".
  - 6y ago
etage3 6y ago
Science is faith based for the non-scientific. As you put it yourself, it is about trusting studies and the institutions that produced it (including whatever in them creates the incentives for p-hacking).
- sgift 6y ago
  No scientist expects anyone to trust studies or the institutions producing them. So, that's wrong from the beginning. The expectation of refuting something is just a bit higher than "I don't believe it!", e.g. read the study and show flaws in it - or make a counter study which shows different results. Maybe combine both. Comparing this to faith where from the start you cannot check anything doesn't make any sense (if you know that something is true or false it isn't faith anymore, that's the point).
  - mthoms 6y ago
    I agree with what you're saying. However, I think the parent's point is that people without education or a good understanding of the scientific process feel like they are accepting it (or not) based on faith. I think this total lack of understanding of how the scientific process works is one of the biggest problems facing America today.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    and yet if you dare to disagree with a scientist (as we see in the comments here) you can expect to be shouted down because SCIENCE!
  - ironmagma 6y ago
    That's not really true. Scientists do (and expect others to) respect "established" and "trusted" journals that group studies together in some kind of authentication process. Even open journals like Sci-Hub are like this. Otherwise, you could believe any PDF you can find on Google and know it to be true and representative. What if someone wrote a net to generate 10,000,000 studies on the same set of topics and scattered them throughout the Internet? Given a random study, you wouldn't know whether it's real or generated, without the "authority" aspect of a journal. Now, whether or not the journals actually do a good job at authenticating the studies is another question. But, the principle stands that they are what we trust as consumers of science (a role which scientific researchers themselves play as well).
ColanR 6y ago
You seem to have a lot of faith in scientists.
- yiyus 6y ago
  I don't, that's why I'm a scientist.
tomp 6y ago
> by all means point the errors you find That it's conducted on humans (a.k.a. very small sample, not generalizable, non-objective metrics, hard to remove observer bias etc.)? I think regardless of personal opinion, just based on a Bayesian / base rate mental model, you should default to disbelieving any published social studies (I refuse to call it "science") that haven't been rigorously replicated.
taneq 6y ago
> point the errors you find All of those studies are studies of how other people experienced dark mode vs. normal mode. All of my studies are studies of how I experience dark mode vs. normal mode. I feel that my sample more closely aligns to the population I'm trying to study. Also it mentions spectrum-shifting software like 'night light' or f.lux or whatever Android and Windows call it when they do this by default. And the thing about dark-on-white being more visible than white-on-dark is just blatantly wrong and the military anecdote makes no sense, camo against dark background in the dark is going to be low contrast because the camo you wear in the dark is dark, muted colours.
- onli 6y ago
  It's easy to be wrong even about your own perception. You might think you like the dark mode because it strains your eyes less, but in reality you just like how it looks and you strain your eyes more, being more fatigued at the end of the day without even noticing. Or the other direction. This whole "those studies are studies of how other people experienced X" is a typical argumentation scheme of esoteric fields like homeopathy, where science, logic and data is completely rejected and replaced with pure faith. Real studies can be criticized without relying on that trap.
  - taneq 6y ago
    So you're telling me I'm wrong and I actually like bright mode more than dark mode? We are literally discussing my subjective experiences here. And you're telling me I'm wrong. About my subjective experiences. Ohhh-kay.
    - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      I think they were discussing the subject of, how our conscious estimation of our subjective experience can be way off. Which is a legitimate point?
      - taneq 6y ago
        Is it? I mean, serious question - aren't they they same thing? What IS our subjective experience if not our conscious estimation of how we experienced the thing? Is it possible to think you're enjoying something when really you're not, and if so then what the heck does that even mean?
dlkinney 6y ago
The study referenced by his reference is not very good.[1] They use full white and full black for all modes. As we know, dark theme is typically white on dark gray (or equivalent), not pure white on pure black. I can't think of any dark mode that uses pure black. (AOSP, IOS, macOS, etc.) This alone invalidates the study, because it doesn't reflect the real world. Science is only as good as it is rigorous, and if it fails to model the real world, then it's not very good. Science, these days, seems to have become a faith based system, because most people don't usually review the content of the studies. That (and bad science, like this study) is a shame. 1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0018720813515509?journalCode=hfsa https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001872081351550...
- pb7 6y ago
  iOS is pure black in dark mode.
  - mitjak 6y ago
    it is absolutely not. 90% of visible UI is dark grey painted over a black background. a lot of apps also use dark tones too, like dark blue or green.
    - chooseaname 6y ago
      Blue on black/dark gray is horrible for visual acuity.
      - there_the_and 6y ago
        Blues exist along a range of brightness values and blues work great in dark terminals and editors all day every day for many many people. I'm typing into a browser window surrounded by probably about 4 or 5 terminal and editor windows peeking out of the background with somewhere between 5 and 10 different shades of blue on dark grey backgrounds and they look clear, bright, and amazing. The dark background makes the blues pop.
ekianjo 6y ago
> If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. In the meantime, I will trust those scientific studies more than subjective opinions in hackernews comments. Maybe, but most published studies are close to pure garbage and even in clinical trials which is supposed to be the holy grail of Science there's cherry picking, improper design, and lack of repeatability across the board. "Science" is only as good as the humans conducting it. Unfortunately us humans are pretty bad at doing Science.
- sandgiant 6y ago
  Nice.
rconti 6y ago
I also cringed at the "I don't trust science" vibe, but I also don't feel like someone should have to be an expert in statistics AND eyestrain measurement AND visible spectrum of light in order to credibly disagree with the results of a study. IOW, we shouldn't be able to reject someone's disagreement merely because they're not credentialed enough; that would lead to a tyranny of supposed expertise.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I should have made it clear. I trust the scientific method. I don't trust that that method is being rigorously applied by social scientists seeking tenure.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cmonnow 6y ago
> Science is not a faith based system False. If you did not do the study/experiment yourself, you are putting your faith in scientists that did. This is philosophically equivalent to someone putting their faith in, say a monk, or a pastor. If you go one level deeper, the monk might say, 'do X penance for Y years to verify Z claim', then it's up to you whether you want to follow that route or not. Until then, his claim is not unfalsifiable, like many skeptics claim. Even for mundane day-to-day claims, 'science', as commonly understood, falls short. e.g. Science cannot prove to me that a mango tastes sweet, without putting the condition that I must taste it. The only 'proof' it can provide is 'Taste it and see for yourself'. If I say, 'I will only taste it AFTER you prove it is sweet', then nothing will happen. Because Taste is subjective. Yet, everyone, 'miraculously' is able to come to a consensus. There are truths that are individually/subjectively verifiable, but collectively/objectively unverifiable. The denigration of the former type of truths is something armchair scientists must avoid. Real scientists never denigrate them.
- bobdole12345 6y ago
  No, you don't understand science. Science can define what a sweet taste is, by assigning it to a set of measurements that define the boundaries of sweetness, as a technical term. Is that sweetness to you? Nobody cares. It's a technical term that you need to accept to participate in the conversation productively.
  - cmonnow 6y ago
    > It's a technical term that you need to accept "need to accept" is a "subjective" consensus - meaning it is useless if the terminology is not accepted. Acceptance is a subjective decision, at which point you're simply going by majority vote. And majority is not a barometer for truth. Science absolutely cares about subjective acceptance, and faith in experts.
bobdole12345 6y ago
Science might tell me that on average, most people prefer beer to wine. That doesn't mean I preach to someone that they shouldn't be drinking wine because beer is superior.
retox 6y ago
>Science is not a faith based system Some disciplines certainly are, you only need to look at the current rigamaroo around COVID and climate change models. Some 'models' saying millions of deaths before being re-engineered a few weeks later to be mere thousands, or predicting huge swaths of the Earth being uninhabitable by now, etc. You can also look into climate models that predicted perilous cooling on a global scale from decades past. These sorts of model, which are presented as capital S Science, are at best guesstimates, that don't receive nearly the amount of popular coverage when they shown to be wrong in the fullness of time (or indeed need to be reinforced by changing data). If a model is no better than a coin toss that's faith based to me. A recent example; WHO "walks backs" statement made a day before about data showing that asymptomatic carriers infecting others is very rare. At the same time saying between 6% and 41% of the population may be asymptomatic with a 16% error margin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im0G7jb78jc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im0G7jb78jc
Apofis 6y ago
So, in the meantime you will use light mode... against your own comfort?
loco5niner 6y ago
> If you doubt about the rigor of some study... I doubt the rigor of MOST studies.

by yiyus 6y ago

pdimitar 6y ago

> If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. Sampling. It probably feels good hand-waving away the problem of "does this study apply to everyone?" by introducing the "representative sample" construct, but it has its problems and I doubt they will be ever solved. You can't speak for everyone when you have several thousands samples -- out of ~8 billion people. This is kind of akin to that artificially absurd example of "on average, every human on Earth has one testicle". (And don't get nitpicky here, please; it might be "median" or another term, and that's not the point.) What your parent poster says is that this article is kind of hiding behind science to be able to claim a generalisation it makes is true. Which it still isn't. Most people I asked said they prefer dark mode. Some said they like light mode. This article changes none of that.

yiyus 6y ago
> This is kind of akin to that artificially absurd example of "on average, every human on Earth has one testicle". No. If I claim everyone has 0.5 testicles, that's bad science. If I randomly choose a large enough number of subjects and report that approximately 50% have two testicles and approximately 50% have no testicles, with error bars, p-values, etc., saying that you don't trust this because I am trying to make a career and you prefer to follow your own experience, which after looking between your legs clearly shows that 100% of people have two testicles, would be quite stupid. If I chose only 3 people, or all of them are male or female, or I make any other mistake, point the mistake, but don't attack me personally, and much less science in general. For example, I followed the link to the study by the Nielsen Norman Group and then the reference to the study of Piepenbrock. They explain well their sampling method, with different groups by age and depending on vision problems. You can clearly see the individual results and the variance, and it is obvious that generalizing to the 100% of population would be wrong, but there are some very clear trends. Calling these researchers "someone trying to p-hack their way to a publishable result that's sensational enough to advance their career" without any proof whatsoever is insulting. To be clear, I do not intend that anyone changes habits because of these studies. I agree that this is subjective enough to make it a personal decision. But as a scientist trying to make a career, I found the above comment very disrespectful.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I apologise then. I didn't mean to insult scientists. I was more trying to point out the difference between The Scientific Method and Academic Practice. Especially in the social sciences, there's been a whole discussion recently about how our current system of evaluating and rewarding scientists is not benefitting Science. There's even been high-profile commentators disputing whether the social sciences are actually Science at all. As you're a scientist I won't bother explaining this to you. I'm sure you're aware of the problems here. So my point is that for a study like this, there's lots of room for playing statistical games in order to achieve a more "sensational" result that is more publishable and more likely to get cited. We know this happens and we know this is especially rife in this area of study. So I have become much more sceptical of social-science studies showing broad generalised results about a subject applying to the whole human race. Especially if those studies contravene some commonly-held view about the subject. My default position has moved from "well, they know what they're doing so there must be something to it", to "I'm going to assume that they p-hacked their way to a sensational result until I have evidence to prove otherwise". I might be wrong in taking that stance. I will change it if I have better evidence.
  - yiyus 6y ago
    Fair enough, and apologies accepted. I agree that many social studies lack rigor. And, unfortunately, it also happens quite a lot with more technical topics in which it is much easier to be objective. I get easily triggered when science is presented as a matter of faith, but in fact I totally agree with your skeptical point of view.

m12k 6y ago

Well, arguably science is just the superior faith-based system. Nothing is ever proven, but it contains a method to constantly find the theory most likely to deserve your faith.

guykdm 6y ago
A method that one can choose to follow or to fake.
xtracto 6y ago
That's my problem with science (and I am an atheist who is 100% for the scientific method and even have a PhD): The "real" science has no absolutes. But the problem is that it is very difficult for humans to operationalize it that way. Take for example eggs and cholesterol. I remember in the late 80s, my father (also a scientist/biologist) stopped eating eggs because apparently Science said eggs are bad for you (due to some papers)... later in the mid/late 90s Science said that eggs are actually not bad, but good for you (because, even if they where high on cholesterol, it was the good cholesterol). So, for people (even other scientists!) that are not experts in the subject, it becomes a matter of belief... believe in the papers some random team published, because it was published in Nature. > Nothing is ever proven, but it contains a method to constantly find the theory most likely to deserve your faith. I love this quote!

guykdm 6y ago

While this commentator invested far less effort than the scientists in reaching his result about dark mode, he also has no benefits from you choosing to believe him or not. You are in fact choosing to see the brand "science" as something transcendental that doesn't concern any incentive structures, which if false and opens you to lots of manipulation.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
I am just wondering does the author alao distrust science when it comes to medical treatments and the law of gravity, or does is his distrust highly selective.
- ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
  Medical treatments can be really faulty too.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  pretty selective. Maths has proofs. Logical reasoning from first arguments that a thing is true or not. It either is, or is not, proven. End of. Physics as applied maths, pretty solid. We need to conduct experiments to verify that nature agrees with our mathematical constructs, but on the whole these are simple and unequivocal. e.g . gravity. Particle physics gets dodgy because of the vast range of collision results - statistics starts creeping in. Rather than being able to say that particle A collides with particle B to produce particles D an E, we now have a statistical chance that somethng might happen. Chemistry as applied physics, again, pretty solid. Everything has to be tested by experiment, and experiment frequently throws up surprises, but if a reacts with B in Chicago, it probably does in Moscow too. Biology as applied chemistry. Mostly solid. It gets massively complex, and so the temptation to resort to statistics is overwhelming and most biological papers start talking about statistical probabilities rather than actual results. But the basic biology is mostly the same for most subjects, and if the conclusion is simple (virology and the effectiveness of vaccines, for example) then we're all good. Any social science as applied biology: not much. This is really dodgy territory where the experiment design totally dominates the result, and the result is statistical data that has to be massaged into a definitive statement. This is p-hacking territory, where experiments are largely unreproducible, very subject to bias, cultural references, and academia politics. E.g. whether creativity shares a limited resource pool with willpower - highly subjective, highly variable between individuals, hihgly suspect if your paper cites this as a proven result. Not all science is worthy of the same level of trust. The scientific method is trustworthy. Academia is not.

marcus_holmes 6y ago

Why not conduct your own experiment, using Science? 1. Start with a hypothesis, that "dark mode is less comfortable for me than light mode". 2. Design an experiment: find the sites that you use most. Use them for 10 minutes each in light mode and dark mode. Write down your impressions. 3. Build a conclusion: was your hypothesis correct? Was it partially correct for some sites? Then you can adapt your behaviour according to your new, Scientifically-proven knowledge. Science isn't faith-based, but there are a ton of problems with Academia and the way Science is practised and published at the moment. Science is also not connected with Academia - the scientific method doesn't need a university grant to work. You can literally conduct your own experiment in a couple of hours (as above) to get better information than any study. Not publishing it doesn't make it any less scientific. It makes no sense to me to trust an unknown number of studies over my personal experience. I prefer dark mode. I'll stick with that. You do you.

cooper12 6y ago
Unfortunately your proposed study design does not control for biases. For example, say I'm an audiophile comparing two audio formats, x and y, and I hear y is remarkably better. If I compare them side by side, my own brain might fool me that y is better. The way to control that is to do a blind test, where I won't know which one is x or y. Also, asking people their impressions can be helpful in the human aspect of the research, but quantitatively you need some sort of metric you can evaluate their experience on. For example, you'd assign a task and see how well people did comparing the two modes, while also making sure the difference is statistically significant (meaning it wasn't just as likely to be chance). This is just the beginning of where good study design starts. You'd also do things like assigning the modes themselves randomly, so to go back to the audiophile example, I might notice if it's always x and then y, but not if it's scrambled. You'd could go further and try to stratify the groups, so for example making sure one group isn't all elderly people and the other young. It goes on and on... So while the scientific method is nice, especially for introducing science in educational contexts, the methodology and rationale behind research is much more deliberate and involved. By all means they can try out things themselves, but no, they will not "get better information than any study".
- 6y ago

etage3 6y ago

Science is faith based for the non-scientific. As you put it yourself, it is about trusting studies and the institutions that produced it (including whatever in them creates the incentives for p-hacking).

sgift 6y ago
No scientist expects anyone to trust studies or the institutions producing them. So, that's wrong from the beginning. The expectation of refuting something is just a bit higher than "I don't believe it!", e.g. read the study and show flaws in it - or make a counter study which shows different results. Maybe combine both. Comparing this to faith where from the start you cannot check anything doesn't make any sense (if you know that something is true or false it isn't faith anymore, that's the point).
- mthoms 6y ago
  I agree with what you're saying. However, I think the parent's point is that people without education or a good understanding of the scientific process feel like they are accepting it (or not) based on faith. I think this total lack of understanding of how the scientific process works is one of the biggest problems facing America today.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  and yet if you dare to disagree with a scientist (as we see in the comments here) you can expect to be shouted down because SCIENCE!
- ironmagma 6y ago
  That's not really true. Scientists do (and expect others to) respect "established" and "trusted" journals that group studies together in some kind of authentication process. Even open journals like Sci-Hub are like this. Otherwise, you could believe any PDF you can find on Google and know it to be true and representative. What if someone wrote a net to generate 10,000,000 studies on the same set of topics and scattered them throughout the Internet? Given a random study, you wouldn't know whether it's real or generated, without the "authority" aspect of a journal. Now, whether or not the journals actually do a good job at authenticating the studies is another question. But, the principle stands that they are what we trust as consumers of science (a role which scientific researchers themselves play as well).

ColanR 6y ago

You seem to have a lot of faith in scientists.

yiyus 6y ago
I don't, that's why I'm a scientist.

tomp 6y ago

> by all means point the errors you find That it's conducted on humans (a.k.a. very small sample, not generalizable, non-objective metrics, hard to remove observer bias etc.)? I think regardless of personal opinion, just based on a Bayesian / base rate mental model, you should default to disbelieving any published social studies (I refuse to call it "science") that haven't been rigorously replicated.

taneq 6y ago

> point the errors you find All of those studies are studies of how other people experienced dark mode vs. normal mode. All of my studies are studies of how I experience dark mode vs. normal mode. I feel that my sample more closely aligns to the population I'm trying to study. Also it mentions spectrum-shifting software like 'night light' or f.lux or whatever Android and Windows call it when they do this by default. And the thing about dark-on-white being more visible than white-on-dark is just blatantly wrong and the military anecdote makes no sense, camo against dark background in the dark is going to be low contrast because the camo you wear in the dark is dark, muted colours.

onli 6y ago
It's easy to be wrong even about your own perception. You might think you like the dark mode because it strains your eyes less, but in reality you just like how it looks and you strain your eyes more, being more fatigued at the end of the day without even noticing. Or the other direction. This whole "those studies are studies of how other people experienced X" is a typical argumentation scheme of esoteric fields like homeopathy, where science, logic and data is completely rejected and replaced with pure faith. Real studies can be criticized without relying on that trap.
- taneq 6y ago
  So you're telling me I'm wrong and I actually like bright mode more than dark mode? We are literally discussing my subjective experiences here. And you're telling me I'm wrong. About my subjective experiences. Ohhh-kay.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    I think they were discussing the subject of, how our conscious estimation of our subjective experience can be way off. Which is a legitimate point?
    - taneq 6y ago
      Is it? I mean, serious question - aren't they they same thing? What IS our subjective experience if not our conscious estimation of how we experienced the thing? Is it possible to think you're enjoying something when really you're not, and if so then what the heck does that even mean?

dlkinney 6y ago

The study referenced by his reference is not very good.[1] They use full white and full black for all modes. As we know, dark theme is typically white on dark gray (or equivalent), not pure white on pure black. I can't think of any dark mode that uses pure black. (AOSP, IOS, macOS, etc.) This alone invalidates the study, because it doesn't reflect the real world. Science is only as good as it is rigorous, and if it fails to model the real world, then it's not very good. Science, these days, seems to have become a faith based system, because most people don't usually review the content of the studies. That (and bad science, like this study) is a shame. 1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0018720813515509?journalCode=hfsa https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001872081351550...

pb7 6y ago
iOS is pure black in dark mode.
- mitjak 6y ago
  it is absolutely not. 90% of visible UI is dark grey painted over a black background. a lot of apps also use dark tones too, like dark blue or green.
  - chooseaname 6y ago
    Blue on black/dark gray is horrible for visual acuity.
    - there_the_and 6y ago
      Blues exist along a range of brightness values and blues work great in dark terminals and editors all day every day for many many people. I'm typing into a browser window surrounded by probably about 4 or 5 terminal and editor windows peeking out of the background with somewhere between 5 and 10 different shades of blue on dark grey backgrounds and they look clear, bright, and amazing. The dark background makes the blues pop.

ekianjo 6y ago

> If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. In the meantime, I will trust those scientific studies more than subjective opinions in hackernews comments. Maybe, but most published studies are close to pure garbage and even in clinical trials which is supposed to be the holy grail of Science there's cherry picking, improper design, and lack of repeatability across the board. "Science" is only as good as the humans conducting it. Unfortunately us humans are pretty bad at doing Science.

sandgiant 6y ago
Nice.

rconti 6y ago

I also cringed at the "I don't trust science" vibe, but I also don't feel like someone should have to be an expert in statistics AND eyestrain measurement AND visible spectrum of light in order to credibly disagree with the results of a study. IOW, we shouldn't be able to reject someone's disagreement merely because they're not credentialed enough; that would lead to a tyranny of supposed expertise.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
I should have made it clear. I trust the scientific method. I don't trust that that method is being rigorously applied by social scientists seeking tenure.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cmonnow 6y ago

> Science is not a faith based system False. If you did not do the study/experiment yourself, you are putting your faith in scientists that did. This is philosophically equivalent to someone putting their faith in, say a monk, or a pastor. If you go one level deeper, the monk might say, 'do X penance for Y years to verify Z claim', then it's up to you whether you want to follow that route or not. Until then, his claim is not unfalsifiable, like many skeptics claim. Even for mundane day-to-day claims, 'science', as commonly understood, falls short. e.g. Science cannot prove to me that a mango tastes sweet, without putting the condition that I must taste it. The only 'proof' it can provide is 'Taste it and see for yourself'. If I say, 'I will only taste it AFTER you prove it is sweet', then nothing will happen. Because Taste is subjective. Yet, everyone, 'miraculously' is able to come to a consensus. There are truths that are individually/subjectively verifiable, but collectively/objectively unverifiable. The denigration of the former type of truths is something armchair scientists must avoid. Real scientists never denigrate them.

bobdole12345 6y ago
No, you don't understand science. Science can define what a sweet taste is, by assigning it to a set of measurements that define the boundaries of sweetness, as a technical term. Is that sweetness to you? Nobody cares. It's a technical term that you need to accept to participate in the conversation productively.
- cmonnow 6y ago
  > It's a technical term that you need to accept "need to accept" is a "subjective" consensus - meaning it is useless if the terminology is not accepted. Acceptance is a subjective decision, at which point you're simply going by majority vote. And majority is not a barometer for truth. Science absolutely cares about subjective acceptance, and faith in experts.

bobdole12345 6y ago

Science might tell me that on average, most people prefer beer to wine. That doesn't mean I preach to someone that they shouldn't be drinking wine because beer is superior.

retox 6y ago

>Science is not a faith based system Some disciplines certainly are, you only need to look at the current rigamaroo around COVID and climate change models. Some 'models' saying millions of deaths before being re-engineered a few weeks later to be mere thousands, or predicting huge swaths of the Earth being uninhabitable by now, etc. You can also look into climate models that predicted perilous cooling on a global scale from decades past. These sorts of model, which are presented as capital S Science, are at best guesstimates, that don't receive nearly the amount of popular coverage when they shown to be wrong in the fullness of time (or indeed need to be reinforced by changing data). If a model is no better than a coin toss that's faith based to me. A recent example; WHO "walks backs" statement made a day before about data showing that asymptomatic carriers infecting others is very rare. At the same time saying between 6% and 41% of the population may be asymptomatic with a 16% error margin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im0G7jb78jc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im0G7jb78jc

Apofis 6y ago

So, in the meantime you will use light mode... against your own comfort?

loco5niner 6y ago

> If you doubt about the rigor of some study... I doubt the rigor of MOST studies.