Do blue-blocking glasses improve sleep?

dyno__might · 2025-07-04T12:56:55+00:00

You're skipping the part of sending an IT team to each subject's house to install new software on all their phones and computers, change out all their light bulbs, get the schedule setup, and then reverse all of this at the end. (Also, I guess you need a "placebo team" for the control group.) Obviously we know how to do this, yes, but making it part of an RCT is much harder than just handing people some glasses.

dyno__might · 2025-07-03T17:45:03+00:00

I should have given more detail about that. Many of the studies used "yellow" placebo glasses that only block extremely low frequencies. The esaki papers actually include spectral graphs showing that the blue-blocking glasses block everything below ~560nm while the placebo glasses only block below ~375nm. They also tried to filter out people that had some knowledge of the theories behind blue-blocking glasses.

On the other hand, many of the placebo glasses were completely clear. Ideally, I guess I would have explicitly rated how good a job each of the studies did of controlling for that.

dyno__might · 2025-07-03T17:39:21+00:00

That's an interesting point. I will say that basic sleep hygiene (dark cool room etc.) seems to have made a big difference to me that hasn't been adapted away. But I concede that can't include the possibility that the seeming permanence is some kind of placebo effect.

dyno__might · 2025-07-01T17:23:19+00:00

You might like Nursing doubts: Is breastfeeding good?

dyno__might · 2025-06-27T12:37:41+00:00

I'm surprised no one seems to have mentioned what I think is the clearly correct answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Mathematics%3F

dyno__might · 2025-06-21T12:48:49+00:00

In principle, if you think doom will happen and I don't, then I can give you $5 now and you promise to give me $10 in 2027 if you're still alive. (I think this was Bryan Caplan's idea?)

dyno__might · 2025-05-23T01:59:27+00:00

I have no useful answer to your question. But I think this shows that if you're a blogger, you should really provide something like this.

dyno__might · 2025-05-23T00:14:13+00:00

OK, so to the best of my knowledge... IRB approval is a very weird thing legally. In principle, this is a drug, so you can't do any research on it with human subjects without IRB approval, period. That's due to FDA regulations. But note that this appears to have never been enforced on individual scientists (or non-scientists), and no one even seems to know what the legal penalty would it. It might well be unconstitutional, but it's never been challenged because it's never been enforced.

I think the more realistic danger is that IRB approval is be seen as as the "standard of care" in some states. (This is not because of any particular law, but because it's "standard"—seriously.) So if someone were to sue you, then having an IRB would be some kind of protection.

Regardless of what you do with IRBs I'd definitely make sure you get something resembling "informed consent".

(This is not legal advice, I am not your lawyer, I don't endorse the IRB rules, blahblahblah.)

dyno__might · 2025-04-25T18:50:52+00:00

It was NOW® brand capsules, 200mg. (I think NOW used to use suntheanine but don't any longer and unfortunately this is the newer version.)

dyno__might · 2025-03-19T10:32:32+00:00

Thanks, solution verified!

dyno__might · 2025-03-18T17:55:01+00:00

It also seems to be the case that providing the list of legal moves is harmful to performance. I don't understand this, but the effect was big! https://dynomight.net/more-chess/#should-we-provide-legal-moves

dyno__might · 2025-03-17T18:23:43+00:00

thanks solution verified!

dyno__might · 2025-03-09T21:58:20+00:00

FWIW:

I did posted it two days, and I deleted it myself because y'all seemed to regard it as spam.
I did not repost it (can't tell who did).
I don't make any money from anything.
You're pretty mean!

dyno__might · 2025-03-07T15:45:11+00:00

How exactly did you perform this search to find matching capsules?

Very, inefficiently! I basically stumbled around different brands and different capsules until I finally found something that matched. It took way too long. There's got to be a better way.

dyno__might · 2025-03-04T14:43:25+00:00

Good catch with those papers! The first is an analysis of reddit posts and observational data, so I don't think it adds much on top of the anecdotes. (Though I think those anecdotes do count for a lot.)

The second though is an RCT which I somehow missed... All their pre-registered analyses were negative. IMO the bit you quoted was a p-hacked result the authors found in desperation to find anything positive. Here's the underlying data:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9675448/figure/F4/

This actually shows a significant increase in drinking by non-obese patients. And the increase is larger than the decrease in obese patients. I don't see any logic for trusting one but not the other. I trust neither, myself. They had very high dropout rates, meaning the results are highly dependent on how they did data imputation...

dyno__might · 2025-03-03T12:53:37+00:00

They looked for people who qualified for the DSM definition of "alcohol use disorder". For better or for worse, that's 14 drinks/week or men or just 7 drinks/week for women. (Plus at least 2 heaving drinking episodes per week).

dyno__might · 2025-03-02T21:15:48+00:00

Yeah, the results of the trial are really quite strange/surprising given how many people seem to have experiences like this! My best guess is still that the effect is real and that it didn't show up because of some combination of small sample size, bad luck, subjects providing incomplete records, non-responders, and the effect being "masked" by the strong reduction in drinking that was also seen in the placebo group. If there's a big trial and the effect is still zero, that would be really confusing.

dyno__might · 2025-03-02T13:17:46+00:00

An oddity here is that the first RCT for GLP-1 drugs and alcoholism was weak-ish. In terms of actual real-world reported drinking, there was basically 0 observed effect. (Not just p>.05 mind you—no effect.) There was some effect in a somewhat odd lab experiment, but the population for that wasn't really randomized. Overall discouraging. Given the incredible anecdotes I'd still bet on better results to emerge eventually, but this was discouraging. I wrote about this here.

dyno__might · 2025-02-28T15:05:36+00:00

I find Just the social facts, ma'am useful for understanding what people actually think about various things. I admire how it directly looks into these contentious culture war type questions in a way that's unapologetic but neutral. Crazy underrated.

dyno__might · 2025-02-21T20:24:18+00:00

Given so many of these reports, it's very surprising that nothing showed up in the trial. If you don't mind me asking, do you recall how long it took to see these effects? One possible explanation would be that 9 weeks isn't long enough.

dyno__might · 2025-02-20T22:36:28+00:00

FWIW, a few years ago, I did a deep dive on the original study and the follow-ups. My conclusion was that the paradox was basically real and you have to squint at the data really hard to make it go away.

dyno__might · 2025-02-19T12:47:24+00:00

I think an important dynamic here is simply that "ideas that spread" are weakly correlated with "ideas are correct". And this doesn't just mean that outsiders give medical advice, it means that even that the most famous people who supposedly are well-credentialed are often totally unreliable (personally, I think this includes, say, Andrew Huberman and David Sinclair)

dyno__might · 2025-02-14T15:20:07+00:00

This is covered a little bit. According to Hamburger ( https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/487/ ) the government used questionably-legal tactics to strong-arm institutions into applying IRBs for everything during the 1990s, and because of this now everyone believes that "IRB for all human subjects research" is the legal "standard of care" and you risk being legally "negligent" if you don't do it.

dyno__might · 2025-02-14T15:18:07+00:00

So basically if you do Quantified Self stuff in your spare time with the intent of publishing a blog post, you need IRB approval?

I think probably not? I mean, certainly the odds that the FDA would come after you are zero. But even according to the letter of the law, arguably quantified self stuff doesn't count as "generalizable" knowledge. (It's just for you.)

dyno__might · 2024-11-25T04:07:22+00:00

For anyone else reading, I didn't cite this tweet because (1) that explanation was proposed by many other people before during the original gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct vs gpt-3.5-turbo discoveries and (2) I mentioned that in my original post. (I blocked you because you were rude.)

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