Standard academic disclaimer applies: This isn't my field of study, and I'm sure there are many subtle mistakes in what I just said.
As silly as that all sounds, it's already a million times better than what this guy did. He took the "if a little is ineffective a LOT will be better" approach and built a damn lighthouse in his living room. And if the goal is a DIY project and a blog post, OF COURSE you'll feel better after "your treatment." It's approaching group therapy at that point. There's a lot of this crap on HN lately.
It's not science. And yes, he very well might feel better just be because he did something he believes in. But I don't see why that warrants a response like yours.
The article contains no research or sources except for a single Wikipedia link. It contains much hubris, yet no author's name. It does however contain numerous affiliate links. The article warrants a response like mine because the article is bullshit.
If not, then what is your point? Are you a SAD researcher with training and experience working with SAD? Or are you a SAD sufferer or have first-hand experience with SAD?
If the answer to those questions is no, then you are starting to sound no different from the arrogant ignoramuses who think people with depression should just "get over it".
This is HN and regardless of the scientific soundness of the post, it is a nifty hack. I might even make it. And use the affiliate links to show my appreciation of the person who made and shared the project. What's wrong with that?
Perhaps you should question your assumptions before calling bullshit. What else are you missing out on in life with such an attitude?
If we want to get to the reality where confidence in the efficacy of things is well-founded on rigorous experimentation and analysis, then we need to get there, one step at a time. Instead of tearing people down and saying that their efforts to improve themselves is crap, you could be offering constructive criticism. Even just bring up one question that would have made it a better experiment, so that when a reader here decides to copy him, they can do it better. Maybe they'll even share their personal experience and propagate more experimentation? If enough people do that, maybe collectively we'll one day have the interest and funding to have better studies done.
Would you rather he have not done the build, not shared it with the internet? Maybe he could have been more like the status quo and consumed someone else's product, quietly?
This post and your post yesterday where you argued 2700K screen temperature late in ones day is NOT less straining than 5800K, because if that were true, movie theatres would play all their movies with screens at 2700K... makes me think you're not really interested in people improving their quality of life, you just want to argue.
Enthusiasm is great. Enthusiasm masquerading as medical treatment is not.
It's also known that the body's response is based on light (known to impact melatonin production), and that light treatment in the day might ameliorate whatever effect the dim light or darkness has.
The lights we're talking about can, at best, light a small area around them to a brightness that's 10% daylight. The most extreme lamp he mentioned does 30%, again in a small area. Hardly a lighthouse.
It seems natural to me that if you hypothesize that lack of sunlight contributes to sleepiness or depression in winter months, then you'd want to treat that with something approximating sunlight as best you can, or 100,000 lux.
So we don't know for sure whether this works or how effective it is, but there are good theories behind it to test. Let me put it this way: suppose I put a lamp with 100,000 lumens in your bedroom and activated it shortly before dawn or, just for fun, at midnight. Would you wake up? It's clear that light does something to wake you up, and that it's harder to sleep in bright sunlight in darkness. Well, winter is short and dark for many people.
How do you think all those legitimate scientific journals got started? It's natural to think that because science is currently done with a huge amount of rigor that it was always done with a huge amount of rigor. In truth, the author's approach is still very scientific.
He considered the research he had available to him, reviewed some of the science regarding different lighting technologies, then tried something and observed that it worked. What about that isn't scientific?
Every scientific pursuit started out as a pseudoscience. Even the most rigorous fields like Physics or Medicine were originally people intuiting about a phenomenon with each other. There's nothing unscientific about what the author did, and to me it raises far more interesting questions than a diatribe about a lack of rigor.
Consider that you could have said the same thing about the anti-vax movement. Sharing autism anecdotes for other people to build upon is not getting you closer to proper assessment of the vaccine safety.
That's why we dislike this stuff so much - it's bad science, and you can't build good science from bad science.
It's a cool engineering project though, nothing wrong with discussing it as such.
In informal English there is no accepted equivalent to the third-person pronoun "one", so people reuse the second-person pronoun "you".
The founding history of scientific journals is often amazing, involving legends in the respective fields. Then over decades those journals became "legitimate" by not publishing crap.
> Every scientific pursuit started out as a pseudoscience
I don't think that word means what you think it does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience