5 ms·

Since the OP is quite courageous about claiming someone "inventing" this in 2017, I'd like to highlight your prior art: > Been using one of those in my office

Since the OP is quite courageous about claiming someone "inventing" this in 2017, I'd like to highlight your prior art: > Been using one of those in my office for the last eight years or so. I use a server PSU for power. And as you mention, articles on it have been circulating for even longer.

Udo 5y ago
It's Yudkowsky from LessWrong, he is actually a quite insightful thinker, but his disciples claim stuff like this all the time. LessWrong is an extreme echo chamber. For me the breaking point was Roko's Basilisk, a self-proclaimed "most-dangerous idea of our time".
- thewakalix 5y ago
  Are you honestly claiming that the author believes that Yudkowsky was literally the first person in history to suggest making lights brighter? Also, you should read anything Yudkowsky himself has written about Roko’s basilisk. He’s never claimed that it could work, or that it’s dangerous at all. (“Why did he ban it then?” Because he wanted to prevent it from inspiring an infohazard brainstorming session that could produce a real danger, and he apparently hadn’t heard about the Streisand effect.)
  - Jiro 5y ago
    Yudkowsky claimed that the exact basilisk as described by Roko wouldn't work, but he also believes that something like it would.
    - thewakalix 5y ago
      Sort of. He believes that if people try to come up with infohazards and then immediately spread them, there’s a nonzero chance that they succeed. It’s unlikely, but still not something to encourage. (This is not the same thing as “being certain that a minor modification of Roko’s basilisk would produce an evil time-travelling AI,” to be clear.)
      - user-the-name 5y ago
        This kind of utter gibberish is exactly why people don't take LessWrong seriously.
        thewakalix 5y ago
        “Ideas can be harmful” is gibberish?
        Udo 5y ago
        The amount of self-importance on display is what makes it sound like gibberish. A: "I have the most ground-breaking idea ever!" B: "Okay, let's hear it?" A: "No, it's too dangerous, it may well destroy the world, but trust me it's brilliant and completely novel." It's a religion at that point.
        traverseda 5y ago
        How about bitcoin? It's not so much an idea as a piece of software, but being predicted on wasting energy it's going to do a lot of harm. That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas. I believe that there are other ideas like that, things that set up spirals that are a lot worse than just "destroy energy to make money". Obviously they're not going to be universally compelling, an idea that's dangerous like that in one context might be perfectly safe in another. It depends on the target audience.
        Udo 5y ago
        > That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas. That's a good point on its own, but it's not a response. At no time did I or anyone here in this thread assert that "info hazards" do not exist. What is being discussed is whether it's worthwhile to be deferential to a person/community who is making claims of being in possession of an exceptionally catastrophic piece of information that by its nature would preclude public scrutiny on ethical grounds.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - pelario 5y ago
    From the article: >Elevator pitch: Bring enough light to simulate daylight into your home and office. >This idea has been shared in Less Wrong circles for a couple years. Yudkowsky wrote Inadequate Equilibria in 2017 where he and his wife invented the idea
    - thewakalix 5y ago
      Yes, I read the same article. Do you believe, based on a single word, that the author believes that literally zero people in the entire course of human history have ever suggested “brighter lights” until Yudkowsky came along?
      - drcongo 5y ago
        I don't know who any of these people are, but that is exactly what the article says, so why should we not believe that that's what the author believes?
        sokoloff 5y ago
        Because it’s far more likely that the author chose slightly wrong words that ended up conflating a specific invention with being the first human “to invent the idea” that “hey, brighter lights would be closer to obviously brighter daylight” only 5 years ago. I’d wager that the author realizes that more than half of adults today had that insight sometime prior to 2017.
        jl6 5y ago
        Some people read websites the way they would read a math proof. One tiny error and the whole thing comes down. A more charitable reading is often perfectly appropriate.
        necovek 5y ago
        If you are reading it as a math proof, I am only disputing the claim when the idea was invented. As I don't bring up the rest of the article's points, I am neither supporting nor refuting them with that particular comment. Math (or actually, logic) is a bit more resilient than you make it out to be.
- Viliam1234 5y ago
  [removed by author as off-topic]
  - Udo 5y ago
    In hindsight, I should not have included the comment about Roko's Basilisk. It was really nothing more than a personal observation that had nothing to do with the topic at hand. As a result, this thread attracted a lot of people who have very strong opinions on an off-topic matter, and for that I'm sorry. It muddled an already tense discussion on whether any sane person should take the claim of inventing brightly lit homes in 2017 literally or not. For what it's worth, I would have deleted the Basilisk portion if people hadn't already responded to it.
    - Viliam1234 5y ago
      Cool, I didn't even know comments could be deleted! I appreciate your reaction.
gjm11 5y ago
Yudkowsky says he and his wife did it in 2014, so it sounds as if it was actually pretty much at the same time as said prior art. (Also, they were specifically doing it as a treatment for SAD; I don't think Yudkowsky claims novelty for anything other than the idea that SAD might be effectively treated by having very bright indoor lighting all the time rather than e.g. a lightbox that you sit next to for half an hour a day.)
- raegis 5y ago
  The Paris hotel in Las Vegas has had this for at least 20 years. When you're inside at 3am it feels like daytime. I think the idea is to keep you awake and gambling at all times.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 5y ago
  Light as a treatment for SAD has been looked at since 1984, all day exposure is hardly a new idea. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/493246 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...
  - kragen 5y ago
    Right, but for some reason the SAD light boxes you could get produced much less light, so they weren't effective for her.
    - jerf 5y ago
      In 1984, to get the amount of light put out by ~250-300 watts of LEDs in 2022 would have required the incandescent light array to come perilously close to the limit of what it is safe to pull from a single outlet continuously in the US, which is 1500 watts. (You can transiently pull 1800 from a standard wall outlet, which is used by hair dryers, but you're not supposed to pull it continuously for hours at a time.) It also would have functioned as a full-on space heater (that was on continuously, not on a thermostat as needed), and very careful attention would need to be paid to cooling this massive array. So, I'm gonna read between some lines here, but: I imagine earlier efforts would then by necessity have produced less light, because it's actually a lot easier to deal with ~400-500 watts of incandescent light than 1500 watts of incandescent light. 400-500 I think you could just about get away with putting a diffusion screen in front of them and making sure the enclosure has a lot of passive air flow. At 1500, if you're going to enclose this into a reasonably-sized product you're going to need active cooling with fans. And there is a little noticed and rarely talked about weakness I've seen in several science fields where I've dug into a history of papers, which is that once one investigator picks the parameters of an investigation, it tends to "stick". If the first scientist investigating "Light therapy for SAD" and picked a 500 watt incandescent setup, it is extremely likely that many further papers will try to match their lumens setup, in the interests of trying to keep the papers informing each other. The entire therapy may live and die on the contingent conditions the first couple of researchers happened to pick, even after the entire lighting landscape has changed and it's practical to blast 5 times the light per watt and have time-varying light temperature now, which would have been even more difficult in 1984. (Conceivable, with some sort of rotating filter screen in front of it, but now you're cutting in to your light output even more, unlike modern LEDs which give you more options in dealing with this.)

Udo 5y ago

It's Yudkowsky from LessWrong, he is actually a quite insightful thinker, but his disciples claim stuff like this all the time. LessWrong is an extreme echo chamber. For me the breaking point was Roko's Basilisk, a self-proclaimed "most-dangerous idea of our time".

thewakalix 5y ago
Are you honestly claiming that the author believes that Yudkowsky was literally the first person in history to suggest making lights brighter? Also, you should read anything Yudkowsky himself has written about Roko’s basilisk. He’s never claimed that it could work, or that it’s dangerous at all. (“Why did he ban it then?” Because he wanted to prevent it from inspiring an infohazard brainstorming session that could produce a real danger, and he apparently hadn’t heard about the Streisand effect.)
- Jiro 5y ago
  Yudkowsky claimed that the exact basilisk as described by Roko wouldn't work, but he also believes that something like it would.
  - thewakalix 5y ago
    Sort of. He believes that if people try to come up with infohazards and then immediately spread them, there’s a nonzero chance that they succeed. It’s unlikely, but still not something to encourage. (This is not the same thing as “being certain that a minor modification of Roko’s basilisk would produce an evil time-travelling AI,” to be clear.)
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      This kind of utter gibberish is exactly why people don't take LessWrong seriously.
      - thewakalix 5y ago
        “Ideas can be harmful” is gibberish?
        Udo 5y ago
        The amount of self-importance on display is what makes it sound like gibberish. A: "I have the most ground-breaking idea ever!" B: "Okay, let's hear it?" A: "No, it's too dangerous, it may well destroy the world, but trust me it's brilliant and completely novel." It's a religion at that point.
        traverseda 5y ago
        How about bitcoin? It's not so much an idea as a piece of software, but being predicted on wasting energy it's going to do a lot of harm. That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas. I believe that there are other ideas like that, things that set up spirals that are a lot worse than just "destroy energy to make money". Obviously they're not going to be universally compelling, an idea that's dangerous like that in one context might be perfectly safe in another. It depends on the target audience.
        Udo 5y ago
        > That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas. That's a good point on its own, but it's not a response. At no time did I or anyone here in this thread assert that "info hazards" do not exist. What is being discussed is whether it's worthwhile to be deferential to a person/community who is making claims of being in possession of an exceptionally catastrophic piece of information that by its nature would preclude public scrutiny on ethical grounds.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- pelario 5y ago
  From the article: >Elevator pitch: Bring enough light to simulate daylight into your home and office. >This idea has been shared in Less Wrong circles for a couple years. Yudkowsky wrote Inadequate Equilibria in 2017 where he and his wife invented the idea
  - thewakalix 5y ago
    Yes, I read the same article. Do you believe, based on a single word, that the author believes that literally zero people in the entire course of human history have ever suggested “brighter lights” until Yudkowsky came along?
    - drcongo 5y ago
      I don't know who any of these people are, but that is exactly what the article says, so why should we not believe that that's what the author believes?
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        Because it’s far more likely that the author chose slightly wrong words that ended up conflating a specific invention with being the first human “to invent the idea” that “hey, brighter lights would be closer to obviously brighter daylight” only 5 years ago. I’d wager that the author realizes that more than half of adults today had that insight sometime prior to 2017.
        jl6 5y ago
        Some people read websites the way they would read a math proof. One tiny error and the whole thing comes down. A more charitable reading is often perfectly appropriate.
        necovek 5y ago
        If you are reading it as a math proof, I am only disputing the claim when the idea was invented. As I don't bring up the rest of the article's points, I am neither supporting nor refuting them with that particular comment. Math (or actually, logic) is a bit more resilient than you make it out to be.
Viliam1234 5y ago
[removed by author as off-topic]
- Udo 5y ago
  In hindsight, I should not have included the comment about Roko's Basilisk. It was really nothing more than a personal observation that had nothing to do with the topic at hand. As a result, this thread attracted a lot of people who have very strong opinions on an off-topic matter, and for that I'm sorry. It muddled an already tense discussion on whether any sane person should take the claim of inventing brightly lit homes in 2017 literally or not. For what it's worth, I would have deleted the Basilisk portion if people hadn't already responded to it.
  - Viliam1234 5y ago
    Cool, I didn't even know comments could be deleted! I appreciate your reaction.

gjm11 5y ago

Yudkowsky says he and his wife did it in 2014, so it sounds as if it was actually pretty much at the same time as said prior art. (Also, they were specifically doing it as a treatment for SAD; I don't think Yudkowsky claims novelty for anything other than the idea that SAD might be effectively treated by having very bright indoor lighting all the time rather than e.g. a lightbox that you sit next to for half an hour a day.)

raegis 5y ago
The Paris hotel in Las Vegas has had this for at least 20 years. When you're inside at 3am it feels like daytime. I think the idea is to keep you awake and gambling at all times.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Retric 5y ago
Light as a treatment for SAD has been looked at since 1984, all day exposure is hardly a new idea. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/493246 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...
- kragen 5y ago
  Right, but for some reason the SAD light boxes you could get produced much less light, so they weren't effective for her.
  - jerf 5y ago
    In 1984, to get the amount of light put out by ~250-300 watts of LEDs in 2022 would have required the incandescent light array to come perilously close to the limit of what it is safe to pull from a single outlet continuously in the US, which is 1500 watts. (You can transiently pull 1800 from a standard wall outlet, which is used by hair dryers, but you're not supposed to pull it continuously for hours at a time.) It also would have functioned as a full-on space heater (that was on continuously, not on a thermostat as needed), and very careful attention would need to be paid to cooling this massive array. So, I'm gonna read between some lines here, but: I imagine earlier efforts would then by necessity have produced less light, because it's actually a lot easier to deal with ~400-500 watts of incandescent light than 1500 watts of incandescent light. 400-500 I think you could just about get away with putting a diffusion screen in front of them and making sure the enclosure has a lot of passive air flow. At 1500, if you're going to enclose this into a reasonably-sized product you're going to need active cooling with fans. And there is a little noticed and rarely talked about weakness I've seen in several science fields where I've dug into a history of papers, which is that once one investigator picks the parameters of an investigation, it tends to "stick". If the first scientist investigating "Light therapy for SAD" and picked a 500 watt incandescent setup, it is extremely likely that many further papers will try to match their lumens setup, in the interests of trying to keep the papers informing each other. The entire therapy may live and die on the contingent conditions the first couple of researchers happened to pick, even after the entire lighting landscape has changed and it's practical to blast 5 times the light per watt and have time-varying light temperature now, which would have been even more difficult in 1984. (Conceivable, with some sort of rotating filter screen in front of it, but now you're cutting in to your light output even more, unlike modern LEDs which give you more options in dealing with this.)