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I guess I have to speak up as every one made their mind and knows how the blue-blocking glasses are useless placebo gimick made up to take your precious 20$ fro

I guess I have to speak up as every one made their mind and knows how the blue-blocking glasses are useless placebo gimick made up to take your precious 20$ from you. I developed an eye pain condition around 14 years ago in university years, my eye sight was not really degrading but I get physical tension turning into pain in the eyes if I look at the screen for about 3-4 hours. I know that I still have this condition because sometimes I forget my glasses to the office and I have to take breaks much more often than otherwise. With the glasses I can work all day, then play video games, watch movies etc without feeling anything. One thing I want to add is that there are seems to be different types of these glasses as I bought about 10 pairs and 2 of them also didn't work for me. So when I need a new pair I just take the one I know is good and ask optician if they have exactly the same type of filter. So if the research says there isn't enough evidence it's fine, do more researches and find out exactly what happens here, but don't go around and tell how it's all made up and not helping anyone.

google234123 3y ago
Fair enough, but we should be aware that the placebo effect is real and it could easily explain what you feel. > So if the research says there isn't enough evidence it's fine, do more researches and find out exactly what happens here, but don't go around and tell how it's all made up and not helping anyone. people aren't doing this though... Equating "not enough evidence" with "it's false" is a straw man argument. And starting with accepting the need for more research but then chastising them for expressing skepticism is bad. The emotional appeal is also bad, we aren't causing harm by voicing our skepticism. skepticism != dismissal BTW
- SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
  Placebo is real and non-placebo is also real.
Accacin 3y ago
I'll be honest, and a little rude (sorry!). If something is causing some physical pain in your eyes, why wouldn't your solution be to get off the computer and give your eyes a rest?
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
  “You should simply not do the thing!” Because life is about give and take?
  - Accacin 3y ago
    I don't say that at all, that's pretty bad faith. My point was that taking regular breaks as they say they do when they forget their glasses is a better solution than just powering through with some glasses that may or may not work.
- Hendrikto 3y ago
  People typically work to earn money, which they then use to buy necessities like food, water, and shelter.
  - Accacin 3y ago
    Fair, but they say: > With the glasses I can work all day, then play video games, watch movies etc without feeling anything. So it's not just working. It's working, then playing video games and watching movies. They also say they have to take breaks much more often when they don't wear them, which implies they don't take a break as many breaks when they are wearing them. I have quite bad wrist pain when I use a PC, and I'm a developer. I feel like it's like me taking ibuprofen to dampen the pain rather than taking regular breaks from my PC. Sometimes your body is trying to tell you something and IMO it's good to listen.
- mapcars 3y ago
  I mean definitely that would be best, but it so happened that most of my daily life, career and entertainment is related with screens. At least in my case this condition is not getting worse so for now these glasses allow me to do all this in a pretty comfortable way.
  - Accacin 3y ago
    Yeah that's fair enough :) I have similar issues with my wrist which is easy to say "take a break" but in reality it's not always that easy.
Tarsul 3y ago
I'm totally with you. I always had eye strain when on the PC but since wearing cheap orange glasses (with no dioptrine) I don't have it anymore. I can take of my glasses and within 5 minutes on the PC I notice the eye strain. It definitely works (for me, with certain glasses). I only use these glasses when at a screen, so basically it would make no sense at all to use it if it weren't helping (though I do like the orange effect ;)). btw. just because some people don't have this particular eye strain problem, doesn't mean it's all a giant hoax. Come on, people.
- google234123 3y ago
  > btw. just because some people don't have this particular eye strain problem, doesn't mean it's all a giant hoax. Come on, people. I wonder if this is what religious people tell each other about prayer ;)
- speccythrowaway 3y ago
  Have you also tried normal or light sunglasses (which also block blue light) and/or turning the brightness down? Or just turning on nightmode?
  - Tarsul 3y ago
    Actually, yes. It was a journey starting from regulating all kinds of monitor settings (brightness, contrast etc. The "warm" setting helps too.) and then just trying out my sunglasses which actually helped but were a little too dark. So I just splurged on 20 euro blue light filter glasses (this was about 4 years ago and even back then there were reports that some glasses weren't working for people. Which is why I "trust" my orange ones more than I would uncolorized. Though I would notice in a day if they wouldn't work..) I use nightmode + my glasses actually... nightmode alone is not sufficient for me (nightmode without glasses is ok for my smartphone use actually). I think it's important to recognize that we all have different sets of eyes and requirements. btw. I can't put nightmode in Windows too close to 100 percent (i put it between 50-65) because then the contrast is just too bad. That's why I use nightmode+glasses. btw2: QR codes (banking) don't work in nightmode^^
tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
I worked in a big box electronics retail store in the early 2010s. Most customers were reasonably trusting which as someone not looking to screw them over made for quite a pleasant job. Perhaps the worst type of customer, was the vaguely ‘informed’ know it all ‘nerd’. Around this time, the “don’t buy the expensive gold-plated HDMI cable” movement was in full swing, but it was also about this time that different types of HDMI cables were starting to matter for (higher-end) prosumer setups. Trying to convince some abrasive knowitall that our $15 home brand HDMI cable is going to be the bottleneck in their setup, and that it was basically orthogonal to any ‘good plated’ BS, was almost always not worth it. Eventually I learned to just let them make their own mistakes, dooming them to slink off to Amazon or whatever when they weren’t getting the resolution or frame rate they were after and eventually happened upon the CNET article that made them see the light. The fact that there is an objective functional difference between different types of HDMI cables, whereas the jury is still out on blue blocker glasses, is pretty much irrelevant to my point. Any ‘science says…’ rhetoric is almost always parroted by people that don’t know what they’re talking about. At the end of the day, self-described ‘informed consumers’ LOVE feeling like they’ve got The Knowledge that’s going to give them a leg up on the slimy salesperson. A fair bit of the time though, the fact that the majority of these people aren’t actually all that knowledgeable means that these pearls of wisdom get corrupted over time and end up being entirely untrue. I’ve got no doubt that plenty of Hacker News regulars are the sorts of people that were incredibly hard to work with back then.
- hderms 3y ago
  Well, engineers are kind of the archetypal model of the "but ackshually..." guy, so I'd venture to say you're right. I used to be more bold in my pronouncements when I was younger, now I think I like to repeat stuff I've heard like "interesting, I had heard that X was a factor with this, do you know if that's true or not?" In these situations. Having some intellectual humility and actively seeking opinions of people who might be more informed goes a long way.
  - veb 3y ago
    This also works in _so many different work environments too_! I like how you term it "intellectual humility" but I wonder if "professional intellectual humility" is more suited.
btreecat 3y ago
>If the eyestrain persists, see an eye-care health professional who can perform a thorough examination of your eye health, Downie said. “Sometimes eyestrain can be actually caused by an underlying eye health or vision problem,” she said. Idk if you have already, but could be a good idea to visit a professional for an evaluation. My friend was having eye sight issues and a bit of strain, turns out it was a brain injury.
- paulmd 3y ago
  Ocular pressure is a classic warning sign of brain tumors as well. My sister would report “colors look different in each eye” and so on.
speccythrowaway 3y ago
I'll start by saying I work in the industry and I have actually worked on making blue blocking coatings. There are two ways these filters work. The first and older method is to tint the lenses so that they absorb blue light. This will make the the lenses look yellow or orange. The wavelength that is normally targeted is 455nm. The more yellow or orange the lenses look the more blue light they are blocking. This tinting process works the same as it does in a normal sunglass lens (by dipping the lens in a hot water bath that has dyes dissolved in it; the dyes migrate to the porous lens material). The second method is to put a blue reflective coating on the lenses using vacuum deposition. You can recognize these lenses because they have a strong blue reflection (not to be confused with a subtle blue reflection which can be seen in a normal anti-reflective layer). These lenses won't block as much blue light as the tinted lenses but they look nearly like normal glasses. I suppose some manufactureres may try a hybrid approach although (both absorption and reflection). Anyway the general thing to think about is that the more "normal" the lenses appear the less blue light they will block. I never understood their use as computer glasses because all computers and phones have low blue light modes now and these do what they say they do, and I've measured the output of screens with a spectrophotometer. >So if the research says there isn't enough evidence it's fine, do more researches and find out exactly what happens here, but don't go around and tell how it's all made up and not helping anyone. I think most of the backlash is against the the claims that blue light is damaging and that these filters will protect your eyes. I think in these cases the evidence has to come first. https://www.aop.org.uk/ot/industry/high-street/2017/05/26/boots-opticians-fined-40000-over-misleading-blue-light-advertising https://www.aop.org.uk/ot/industry/high-street/2017/05/26/bo... Obviously if someone suffers from eyestrain it's great that there are products out there that you can try (on a personal scale it doesn't matter if the solution is placebo or a not yet clearly understood therapy) but this is different from saying that everyone should have these to protect their eyes from the danger of blue light. Personally I use the night mode feature on my devices but I wouldn't bother with the glasses because to me they seem redundant. Another thing I would like to add is that I've never met anyone technical working in the industry that actually believes these filters work and everyone considers them a marketing led exercise.
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  > I never understood their use as computer glasses because all computers and phones have low blue light modes now and these do what they say they do, and I've measured the output of screens with a spectrophotometer. Anecdotally, when I first had "anti-blue-light computer glasses" many years ago, nor windows nor mac os had the "night mode" feature. Run-of-the-mill monitors didn't have it, either, instead sporting an extremely blueish image. I don't know that my glasses helped with sleep, but they sure as hell made the screens more pleasant to look at. And no, fiddling with the monitor settings didn't really help. I'm talking about your standard crappy enterprise monitors, with abysmal contrast, so that if you lowered the brightness or some such you couldn't make out anything anymore on them.
BananaaRepublik 3y ago
But if researchers say there isn't enough evidence, where will the average consumer turn to to "do more research"? That's where the shady pseudoscience advertising articles come in, who will gladly make unfounded claims with absolute confidence.
- mapcars 3y ago
  I meant that specialists should do more research on the topic. For the average consumer there is not much choice, either wait for more conclusive results or try it out themselves and see if it makes a noticeable difference in their specific condition.
NickM 3y ago
“It works for me” does not imply “it can’t possibly be a placebo”. Both could be true. I’m not saying the blue light thing is or isn’t real, but I see this kind of argument made all the time, and I can’t tell if people just don’t understand what the placebo effect is or if everyone just thinks they’re special and the placebo effect doesn’t apply to them or what.
- giancarlostoro 3y ago
  Sure but how do you account for two of them not working vs other ones working? It's likely doing some effect, but it seems to be just nuanced enough. I feel like after I got the filter on my glasses that when I lay in bed, I'm not laying there feeling unable to sleep like I would many nights before. Is it placebo? Maybe, but I totally forgot I got the filter on my glasses and realized sometime later.
  - NickM 3y ago
    Simple. When the original poster tries a new pair, they assume it may not work. If they happen to feel pain they mentally mark the glasses as “one of the bad ones”. From then on the placebo effect won't apply to that pair because they don’t believe it will help. Humans are great at finding patterns in randomness like this; this is exactly why superstitions are so prevalent.
  - ugexe 3y ago
    It is possible that some pairs of said glasses were flawed -- and as such detrimental -- while other benign pairs were not.
Rudism 3y ago
When something is identified as a placebo, that is not the same as saying it can't or won't help anyone. The placebo effect is a real, measurable phenomenon. As a non-scientist I'm probably going to grossly oversimplify this, but when testing the efficacy of a drug or medical device the whole reason you need to have a control group taking a placebo (sugar pills, for example) is because the placebo will actually cause some people in that group to have a real, measurable improvement in whatever it is being measured. The only way to know if the real drug or device you're testing actually works is if the improvements experienced by the test group is better than the improvements experienced by the control group. Additionally, I think this research/review was focused only on whether blue light filters help reduce eyestrain in the general population. So saying it had no effect here doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility that they could help in individuals with specific medical conditions that weren't controlled for or factored in here, just that in the general case they seem to have no effect.
joker_minmax 3y ago
Exactly, I have some of the kind that actually have a visible yellow tint and blue reflect -- I get eyestrain after a long time, but without them on the crappy monitors at my old job I got eyestrain within one hour, and my phone was unusable at the end of the day.

google234123 3y ago

Fair enough, but we should be aware that the placebo effect is real and it could easily explain what you feel. > So if the research says there isn't enough evidence it's fine, do more researches and find out exactly what happens here, but don't go around and tell how it's all made up and not helping anyone. people aren't doing this though... Equating "not enough evidence" with "it's false" is a straw man argument. And starting with accepting the need for more research but then chastising them for expressing skepticism is bad. The emotional appeal is also bad, we aren't causing harm by voicing our skepticism. skepticism != dismissal BTW

SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
Placebo is real and non-placebo is also real.

Accacin 3y ago

I'll be honest, and a little rude (sorry!). If something is causing some physical pain in your eyes, why wouldn't your solution be to get off the computer and give your eyes a rest?

tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
“You should simply not do the thing!” Because life is about give and take?
- Accacin 3y ago
  I don't say that at all, that's pretty bad faith. My point was that taking regular breaks as they say they do when they forget their glasses is a better solution than just powering through with some glasses that may or may not work.
Hendrikto 3y ago
People typically work to earn money, which they then use to buy necessities like food, water, and shelter.
- Accacin 3y ago
  Fair, but they say: > With the glasses I can work all day, then play video games, watch movies etc without feeling anything. So it's not just working. It's working, then playing video games and watching movies. They also say they have to take breaks much more often when they don't wear them, which implies they don't take a break as many breaks when they are wearing them. I have quite bad wrist pain when I use a PC, and I'm a developer. I feel like it's like me taking ibuprofen to dampen the pain rather than taking regular breaks from my PC. Sometimes your body is trying to tell you something and IMO it's good to listen.
mapcars 3y ago
I mean definitely that would be best, but it so happened that most of my daily life, career and entertainment is related with screens. At least in my case this condition is not getting worse so for now these glasses allow me to do all this in a pretty comfortable way.
- Accacin 3y ago
  Yeah that's fair enough :) I have similar issues with my wrist which is easy to say "take a break" but in reality it's not always that easy.

Tarsul 3y ago

I'm totally with you. I always had eye strain when on the PC but since wearing cheap orange glasses (with no dioptrine) I don't have it anymore. I can take of my glasses and within 5 minutes on the PC I notice the eye strain. It definitely works (for me, with certain glasses). I only use these glasses when at a screen, so basically it would make no sense at all to use it if it weren't helping (though I do like the orange effect ;)). btw. just because some people don't have this particular eye strain problem, doesn't mean it's all a giant hoax. Come on, people.

google234123 3y ago
> btw. just because some people don't have this particular eye strain problem, doesn't mean it's all a giant hoax. Come on, people. I wonder if this is what religious people tell each other about prayer ;)
speccythrowaway 3y ago
Have you also tried normal or light sunglasses (which also block blue light) and/or turning the brightness down? Or just turning on nightmode?
- Tarsul 3y ago
  Actually, yes. It was a journey starting from regulating all kinds of monitor settings (brightness, contrast etc. The "warm" setting helps too.) and then just trying out my sunglasses which actually helped but were a little too dark. So I just splurged on 20 euro blue light filter glasses (this was about 4 years ago and even back then there were reports that some glasses weren't working for people. Which is why I "trust" my orange ones more than I would uncolorized. Though I would notice in a day if they wouldn't work..) I use nightmode + my glasses actually... nightmode alone is not sufficient for me (nightmode without glasses is ok for my smartphone use actually). I think it's important to recognize that we all have different sets of eyes and requirements. btw. I can't put nightmode in Windows too close to 100 percent (i put it between 50-65) because then the contrast is just too bad. That's why I use nightmode+glasses. btw2: QR codes (banking) don't work in nightmode^^

tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago

I worked in a big box electronics retail store in the early 2010s. Most customers were reasonably trusting which as someone not looking to screw them over made for quite a pleasant job. Perhaps the worst type of customer, was the vaguely ‘informed’ know it all ‘nerd’. Around this time, the “don’t buy the expensive gold-plated HDMI cable” movement was in full swing, but it was also about this time that different types of HDMI cables were starting to matter for (higher-end) prosumer setups. Trying to convince some abrasive knowitall that our $15 home brand HDMI cable is going to be the bottleneck in their setup, and that it was basically orthogonal to any ‘good plated’ BS, was almost always not worth it. Eventually I learned to just let them make their own mistakes, dooming them to slink off to Amazon or whatever when they weren’t getting the resolution or frame rate they were after and eventually happened upon the CNET article that made them see the light. The fact that there is an objective functional difference between different types of HDMI cables, whereas the jury is still out on blue blocker glasses, is pretty much irrelevant to my point. Any ‘science says…’ rhetoric is almost always parroted by people that don’t know what they’re talking about. At the end of the day, self-described ‘informed consumers’ LOVE feeling like they’ve got The Knowledge that’s going to give them a leg up on the slimy salesperson. A fair bit of the time though, the fact that the majority of these people aren’t actually all that knowledgeable means that these pearls of wisdom get corrupted over time and end up being entirely untrue. I’ve got no doubt that plenty of Hacker News regulars are the sorts of people that were incredibly hard to work with back then.

hderms 3y ago
Well, engineers are kind of the archetypal model of the "but ackshually..." guy, so I'd venture to say you're right. I used to be more bold in my pronouncements when I was younger, now I think I like to repeat stuff I've heard like "interesting, I had heard that X was a factor with this, do you know if that's true or not?" In these situations. Having some intellectual humility and actively seeking opinions of people who might be more informed goes a long way.
- veb 3y ago
  This also works in _so many different work environments too_! I like how you term it "intellectual humility" but I wonder if "professional intellectual humility" is more suited.

btreecat 3y ago

>If the eyestrain persists, see an eye-care health professional who can perform a thorough examination of your eye health, Downie said. “Sometimes eyestrain can be actually caused by an underlying eye health or vision problem,” she said. Idk if you have already, but could be a good idea to visit a professional for an evaluation. My friend was having eye sight issues and a bit of strain, turns out it was a brain injury.

paulmd 3y ago
Ocular pressure is a classic warning sign of brain tumors as well. My sister would report “colors look different in each eye” and so on.

speccythrowaway 3y ago

I'll start by saying I work in the industry and I have actually worked on making blue blocking coatings. There are two ways these filters work. The first and older method is to tint the lenses so that they absorb blue light. This will make the the lenses look yellow or orange. The wavelength that is normally targeted is 455nm. The more yellow or orange the lenses look the more blue light they are blocking. This tinting process works the same as it does in a normal sunglass lens (by dipping the lens in a hot water bath that has dyes dissolved in it; the dyes migrate to the porous lens material). The second method is to put a blue reflective coating on the lenses using vacuum deposition. You can recognize these lenses because they have a strong blue reflection (not to be confused with a subtle blue reflection which can be seen in a normal anti-reflective layer). These lenses won't block as much blue light as the tinted lenses but they look nearly like normal glasses. I suppose some manufactureres may try a hybrid approach although (both absorption and reflection). Anyway the general thing to think about is that the more "normal" the lenses appear the less blue light they will block. I never understood their use as computer glasses because all computers and phones have low blue light modes now and these do what they say they do, and I've measured the output of screens with a spectrophotometer. >So if the research says there isn't enough evidence it's fine, do more researches and find out exactly what happens here, but don't go around and tell how it's all made up and not helping anyone. I think most of the backlash is against the the claims that blue light is damaging and that these filters will protect your eyes. I think in these cases the evidence has to come first. https://www.aop.org.uk/ot/industry/high-street/2017/05/26/boots-opticians-fined-40000-over-misleading-blue-light-advertising https://www.aop.org.uk/ot/industry/high-street/2017/05/26/bo... Obviously if someone suffers from eyestrain it's great that there are products out there that you can try (on a personal scale it doesn't matter if the solution is placebo or a not yet clearly understood therapy) but this is different from saying that everyone should have these to protect their eyes from the danger of blue light. Personally I use the night mode feature on my devices but I wouldn't bother with the glasses because to me they seem redundant. Another thing I would like to add is that I've never met anyone technical working in the industry that actually believes these filters work and everyone considers them a marketing led exercise.

vladvasiliu 3y ago
> I never understood their use as computer glasses because all computers and phones have low blue light modes now and these do what they say they do, and I've measured the output of screens with a spectrophotometer. Anecdotally, when I first had "anti-blue-light computer glasses" many years ago, nor windows nor mac os had the "night mode" feature. Run-of-the-mill monitors didn't have it, either, instead sporting an extremely blueish image. I don't know that my glasses helped with sleep, but they sure as hell made the screens more pleasant to look at. And no, fiddling with the monitor settings didn't really help. I'm talking about your standard crappy enterprise monitors, with abysmal contrast, so that if you lowered the brightness or some such you couldn't make out anything anymore on them.

BananaaRepublik 3y ago

But if researchers say there isn't enough evidence, where will the average consumer turn to to "do more research"? That's where the shady pseudoscience advertising articles come in, who will gladly make unfounded claims with absolute confidence.

mapcars 3y ago
I meant that specialists should do more research on the topic. For the average consumer there is not much choice, either wait for more conclusive results or try it out themselves and see if it makes a noticeable difference in their specific condition.

NickM 3y ago

“It works for me” does not imply “it can’t possibly be a placebo”. Both could be true. I’m not saying the blue light thing is or isn’t real, but I see this kind of argument made all the time, and I can’t tell if people just don’t understand what the placebo effect is or if everyone just thinks they’re special and the placebo effect doesn’t apply to them or what.

giancarlostoro 3y ago
Sure but how do you account for two of them not working vs other ones working? It's likely doing some effect, but it seems to be just nuanced enough. I feel like after I got the filter on my glasses that when I lay in bed, I'm not laying there feeling unable to sleep like I would many nights before. Is it placebo? Maybe, but I totally forgot I got the filter on my glasses and realized sometime later.
- NickM 3y ago
  Simple. When the original poster tries a new pair, they assume it may not work. If they happen to feel pain they mentally mark the glasses as “one of the bad ones”. From then on the placebo effect won't apply to that pair because they don’t believe it will help. Humans are great at finding patterns in randomness like this; this is exactly why superstitions are so prevalent.
- ugexe 3y ago
  It is possible that some pairs of said glasses were flawed -- and as such detrimental -- while other benign pairs were not.

Rudism 3y ago

When something is identified as a placebo, that is not the same as saying it can't or won't help anyone. The placebo effect is a real, measurable phenomenon. As a non-scientist I'm probably going to grossly oversimplify this, but when testing the efficacy of a drug or medical device the whole reason you need to have a control group taking a placebo (sugar pills, for example) is because the placebo will actually cause some people in that group to have a real, measurable improvement in whatever it is being measured. The only way to know if the real drug or device you're testing actually works is if the improvements experienced by the test group is better than the improvements experienced by the control group. Additionally, I think this research/review was focused only on whether blue light filters help reduce eyestrain in the general population. So saying it had no effect here doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility that they could help in individuals with specific medical conditions that weren't controlled for or factored in here, just that in the general case they seem to have no effect.

joker_minmax 3y ago

Exactly, I have some of the kind that actually have a visible yellow tint and blue reflect -- I get eyestrain after a long time, but without them on the crappy monitors at my old job I got eyestrain within one hour, and my phone was unusable at the end of the day.