2w ago

Guilty as charged

80 comments

But just to be clear, I believe it.
I just don't do it.
- Science isn't the boss of me. Just my body, mind, and pretty much everything else.
  
  reactance theory informs us that whenever a person tells us what to do and how to do it, we respond with defensive defiance because we want to maximize our personal freedom and decision-making.
  http://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/do-the-right-thing/201407/giving-people-advice-rarely-works-does?amp
  Just cos I know it's good advice doesn't make me want to do it, and if I don't want to do it, I can't, that's just science.

I woke up, opened Lemmy, and this was the first post I saw lmao
- Same, is this a sign?
  
  No one's gonna drag you up, to get into the light where you belong.

Wasn't it confirmed recently to be total nonsense and nothing to do with circadian rhythms? Compared to the sun a phone puts out very little light and the circadian rhythm only respond to slow changes in light, not on and off in a short time.
It's more about your phone keeping your mind active instead of relaxing and going to sleep. But if you already can't sleep because your mind is churning on something, a bit of distraction might actually help. It's very personal and not a clear cut rule on who has trouble sleeping from phone use or when to put down the phone.
So it isn't like using your phone before sleeping will never have an effect on how well you get to sleep. But it has nothing to do with blue light or circadian rhythms.
- I think what was proven wrong was the significance of the color of light. The original study had people using iPads at like maximum brightness.
  
  The migraine afterwards would probably keep me awake, too.
  
  For context, what generation of iPad? The difference in the maximum screen brightness of a 1st gen iPad and a current gen iPad is nearly tenfold
- Probably also varies depending on the type of content people are checking while on their phone. I can stay awake forever playing Balatro while reading usually knocks me out real quick.
  
  Just one more run...
- The whole "blue light" thing is the new "wifi is going to give you cancer".
  
  tbh almost every time I see a system settings panel or a program that lets you reduce blue light on a schedule, it's always accompanied with a description that sounds like "reducing blue light may help you sleep better". I don't think there are many people touting it as some sort of scientific neurological thing, it's just that many users have a personal preference for reduced blue light at nighttime, and the developers want to accommodate that preference. Not everything has to be backed up by scientific research, sometimes people just like things.
- Couldn't find the study confirming this. Can you link to it, please?
  
  I think there are multiple, I read an article recently where it was stated by an expert. But checking back now they don't link any sources except the name of the expert, which seems to be a respected expert in the field, but that means nothing in the end.
  This is one of the papers I could find within 2 mins, but I think there have been multiple papers on this.
  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01791-7
  There has also been a lot of criticism on the original study that said blue light from phones was the issue, so there are probably a lot of response papers to be found about that.
- Some years ago I started reading in bed before going to sleep. Pretty much always, I'm reading a book on my tablet. Now I find that the habit/routine of it helps me go to sleep.
  The exception is when the book is so engrossing that I have a hard time putting it down and end up staying awake longer than I should.
- The best thing I found to help me sleep well was getting my adhd diagnosis and meds. It's so much easier to sleep when the voices in your head shut the fuck up

- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7010281/
  
  Hmm, interesting. Somewhat compelling, but:
  it's a rather small (n=38) Chinese pilot study
  the effect on the sleep latency is sizable (a latency decrease from 31±14 to 18±12 minutes, effect size of 0.85), but there's no effect on actual sleep duration.
  the sleep measurements were subjective (sleep diaries, not actigraphy)
  I'm also a bit concerned why it's the only study with this methodology in this later meta-analysis - all of the other "behavioral intervention" studies in it experiment with stuff like "extended time-in-bed". In other words, there seems to not have been any followup or replication of this study.

Pedantic rant, but I hate people saying they "believe" in science. Science is not a matter of belief. It's the realm of the empirical.
Leave belief to religion and knowledge to science. Mixing the two turns out bad every time.
- I quite like that expression. It seems accurate to me, since, as it was pointed out by another commenter replying to you, people do not, in fact, check the experiments themselves, ensure that proper methodology was used, etc. They simply believe what the people in authority positions are telling them, so the word believe is quite accurate - you do not actually know the reasons why certain beliefs, theories are accepted by the scientific community, you just take their word for it.
  Furthermore, any scientist does the same thing to the body research that was developed before him, otherwise, every scientist would have to start over.
- I think people are more talking about believing in scientific institutions to ensure credibility and good faith research. Not necessarily that an individual institution is credible, but more the scientific community as a whole can be relied on.
  Science is absolute, however the way we interpret and understand it isn't flawless and at the end of the day some level of belief has to be put into the fallible people behind it.
  
  If science, as it is practised is flawed, by your own admission, what do you mean when you say that it is absolute?
- First, no, not all science is empirical. You can't empirically test historical hypotheses, and some psychological ot sociological theses would be very much immoral to test.
  Second, whether we accept some results (or any other information) as "knowledge" is an epistemological issue: What do we classify as knowledge? When can we be sure that it's not just an assumption sustained by bias? What burden of proof applies where? Can some assumption be useful even if it doesn't rise to the level of knowledge (yet)?
  Third, the post says "I believe science", meaning: I trust their results. That is a subjective thing and beyond any empirical or epistemological scope. No matter how sure you may be that a given thesis is knowledge rather than just speculation, whether someone else shares that conviction is a separate question not fully dependent on yours.
  You can call that ignorance, but that doesn't make a difference either way: If I don't believe you in the first place, calling me ignorant doesn't have any more weight either.
  Hence: "I believe that science confers knowledge" is a valid assertion and fundamental premise for working with scientific results in the first place. Whether or not you'd phrase it that way, "Science is not a matter of belief" is a matter of belief too.
  That said, I believe in the importance of tempering assumptions with evidence, empirical or otherwise, in order to constantly test and refine our understanding of the patterns and principles that govern the physical world and our social behaviour within it. I believe that we may not have all the answers, that some things may be fundamentally unanswerable, and that raising assumptions to the level of fundamental truths (like beliefs about the afterlife) is intellectually dishonest. I believe that it is better to say "We don't know" when that is true, and that we should acknowledge this limit to our knowledge (which doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to push it).
  In short: I believe in science.
  
  You made my exact point at the end.
  "We don't know" is not a statement of faith or belief.
  I don't know how how my phone works. That doesn't mean I believe in Android or Samsung. Humanity doesn't understand why the expansion of the universe is accelerating, but that doesn't make the reason for the acceleration a matter of faith. It's simply a gap in knowledge.
  Knowledge is the realm of fact. Belief is the realm of the unknowable, not the unknown.
- I have always seen the word “believe” to just mean you are convinced of something, or at least for some reason you think it is more likely than not. How much that belief relies on faith or evidence will vary based on the subject.
  If I tell somebody I “believe in” science, it’s because I have spent decades observing the results of actually measuring and studying the world around us. It’s kind of a philosophical statement and not a factual one though, because the “belief” is that it’s the best way forward.
  I also don’t think the word “believe” suggests certainty, because when it comes down to it I don’t think I am really 100% confident in anything. Not that it makes a practical difference in real life.
- Knowledge is often defined as "justified true belief."
  Flat Earthers have the science. The science is justified and true. But they refuse to believe it.
  Philosophy has considered those two pretty intertwined for a rather long time.
  
  Science isn't something you can have, it's a method of getting information. Flat earthers don't use the method so instead they apply other methods, and those can give them different, empirically wrong results.
- But you do have to believe though. If you are just a brain in a jar, then all your empirical evidences are just illusions. At the very least you have to have faith that that's not the case.
  
  At the very least you have to have faith that that's not the case.
  Nah, I don’t think I do.
  I openly admit that I am not 100% confident of not being a brain in a jar, or being part of a simulation, or being in the matrix, or being the only mind that exists (i.e. solipsism). But that uncertainty doesn’t really affect me day to day.
  Whether I am “really” a bit of code in a ridiculous alien computer, or an ethereal spirit waiting to return to heaven, or just an emergent biological process built out of energy packets in quantum fields, it’s not going to change any of my decisions or actions today. And honestly, the actual probability of each being true doesn’t matter either (and it would just be a guess).
  I try to take actions that improve my quality of life. My experience leads me to think/believe that other humans probably experience life like I do, so I like to help them out when I can.
  If I’m helping other pieces of code enjoy existence rather than helping fellow physical biological beings enjoy existence, I don’t see a reason to change anything I’m doing.
  Likewise, I assume that the physical processes around me will keep working consistently, that the sun will rise tomorrow, and that the changes I make in the world today will persist into the future. I have no way to prove to you or myself that those things are true. I don’t have 100% confidence in my own mind that they are true. But that doesn’t change my plans for today.
  
  Not knowing the answer to something isn't a belief problem, it's an ignorance problem.
  For millenia we were ignorant regarding the relationship between the sun and the earth. That didn't make cosmology a belief system. We were just wrong.
  Faith is not the source of science.

After waking up? I’ve never heard this. My brain turns right back off if I don’t put a screen in front of my face. Have I been doing this wrong all this time???
- I wake up to electronic birds coming out of my magic rectangle, i gaze upon it as the tiny sun fills my shell with life for yet another day.

I used to read in bed every night. Kept me up late if it was a good story. I read ebooks or Lemmy or even watch some videos in bed now. I generally find myself going to sleep at a decent time. Having a phone seems to not really have affected me and I still get adequate sleep.
However, I've spoken with people that have sensed one stray photon leaking around a curtain and they can’t sleep.
Just hits people differently, I guess.
- Same here! Kindle or my phone never bothered me getting to sleep

Me, who uses my phone before and after bed, with no issues getting or staying asleep: lol
- Curious if you use dark mode, reduced brightness, or the feature that shifts away from blue light at night. I use all those and I think that's why my phone use doesn't seem to affect my sleep. In fact, I often fall asleep mid-scroll.
  
  Dark mode and reduced brightness 24/7, and I don't think I use a blue light filter, but the black and white night mode comes on when I charge my phone at night. But I'm also looking at regular monitors until about 10 min before I go lay down, so idk.
- Me, who can't sleep regardless of whether I use my phone before/after bed: :(

I sleep so much better after I started doing this. Seriously, try it out for like a week/month and you'll never go back, I swear
- Can confirm. I used to have sleep issues (like anyone else in the 21st century). Now I love jumping into bed because I go out like a rock

Wait, morning phone bad too?
- It's bad for me, but not for that reason.
  It's bad for me because I piss a whole hour or two of my morning away doomscrolling. That makes me late to work. So I end up staying later to make up lost time, I get home late, and then I wonder why I have no time at the end of the day to do anything...
  I'm doing it right now, in fact. I will stop.
  
  Same. Gotta get it under control. I’m definitely unmedicated ADD
  
  Perfect description of what I do most days. 😬
- Aside from this meme (which I hadn't heard before), I had heard and just confirmed with a quick Google search that studies say it causes our brains to kind of wake up too quickly rather than the natural sleep-wake progression, which can lead to anxiety. Which I guess can also cause sleep disruption later.

First thing I see having opened lemmy in bed. Good call. See you later folks!

Oh I believe Science when it says stuff like that.
I'm not saying I'll do what they tell me to, but I believe them.

I read about this as part of my work. I've found that it's more to do with the intensity and closeness of the screen relative to your eyes, i.e. the amount of brightness that reaches your eyes. Even bright red light can keep you awake for a bit longer.
It's also got more to do with your quality of sleep rather than whether or not you get to sleep.

Science is about finding the rules that govern the universe... And then trying to break them.

Working 3rd shift has cultivated my circadian arrhythmia so I can sleep whenever I want unless I need to.

Enough of your borax pointdexter!

The joke is one science, I've never had a good rhythm to begin with! Insomniac my whole life, and we didn't have smartphones when I was young (I'm old).
- Ya mean on not one science right?
  Sorry for being that dick, but it'd irritate me in your position not being let know.

Scientism is bad for you
Edit: To all the downvoters, I'm not dissing Science. Science is a wonderous method for finding the truth of the universe. However Scientism is the logical fallacy that all there is to know is known by science already and can only be known by science. Or in essence, treating Science as an infalliable religion, when even scientists will not do that if they value their jobs.
- Hey my doc says I got one of them in my eye

People that are happy and energetic all the time: It's easy! Just eat healthy, exercise, and get plenty of sleep.
Me: No.

Is this why my entire life is dissolving into bullshit and I'm failing to function on a daily basis?

I believe in science. I believe that the study show that (because I haven't read them). I believe that I will continue using my phone because even with good efforts my body is still killing itself happily.
So, fuck you body. Dopamine rectangle goes brrrrrr.