5 ms·
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
by 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 agoThe 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 agoLight 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 agoRight, but for some reason the SAD light boxes you could get produced much less light, so they weren't effective for her.
- jerf 5y agoIn 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.)
- kragen 5y agoBy the 01980s you could have easily been using fluorescents, which went mainstream a quarter century earlier, so I think your stickiness hypothesis is the more likely problem. This had been puzzling me! Thank you for providing the likely solution!
- uxp100 5y agoMaybe fluorescents with the idea that the narrow spectrum of light produced was less likely to be effective?
- kragen 5y agoWell, I mean, SAD lightboxes do use fluorescents.
- Retric 5y agoI spoke to a physiatrist who considered full spectrum light to be essential in the light boxes. Don’t know about the actual research on the topic.
- ghostly_s 5y agoThe entire market of SAD lights was fluorescents pre-LEDs, they can be made just as "full spectrum" as LEDs are (by which I mean neither is capable of true full spectrum, just an approximation with appropriate phosphors).