Comment by throw0101a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw0101a | Hacker News Reader

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> […] the promise of leaving the clocks on DST all year around.

Which goes against the current scientific/medical consensus on the issue:

> As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently.

* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...

American Academy of Sleep Medicine (with 36 footnotes if you want to dig further):

> It is the position of the AASM that the U.S. should eliminate seasonal time changes in favor of a national, fixed, year-round time. Current evidence best supports the adoption of year-round standard time, which aligns best with human circadian biology and provides distinct benefits for public health and safety.

* https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780

* https://doi.org/10.5664/jcsm.8780

See my comment from a few days ago for more references:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416581

Based on the first link:

"Less than 200 years ago, humans organized their daily routines by the sun clock ... which was in synchrony with their body clock. Now, most of us ... use electric light at night... these new conditions challenge our health and can cause safety problems, [and] ... become even worse under Daylight Saving Time (DST)".

It seems like most people would agree that living in synchrony to the solar day is better for us, but I would think that DST would help with that when the sun starts to rise around 6AM and many people aren't awake yet.

Why would eliminating DST help?

> For example, New York’s social clock closely matches the sun clock in winter during Standard Time: when the social clock says it is noon, it is very close to midday, the sun’s highest point in the sky. During DST, however, New York’s social clock shows noon when it is only 1100 h by the sun clock. People who have to get up at 0600 h by the sun clock in winter have to get up at 0500 h by the sun clock under DST, despite the social clock showing 0600 h. Essentially, they have to go to work in 1 time zone further to the east. This means that people in Chicago have to work during the office hours of New York, and people in Berlin have the office hours of St. Petersburg. Instead of seeing DST as working according to one time zone to the east, one can also think of it as people’s body clocks being pushed further west within their time zone (or social clock). Since the body clock follows the sun clock, these changes can affect our health.

* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...

> Although DST has always been a political issue, we need to discuss the biology associated with these decisions because the circadian clock plays a crucial role in how the outcome of these discussions potentially impacts our health and performance. Here, we give the necessary background to understand how the circadian clock, the social clock, the sun clock, time zones, and DST interact.

* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...

Personally I do not have time/desire to crawl down this specific rabbit hole, so I'm just going to go by what the Abstracts and Conclusions say. Feel free to follow the various citations in these links if you want more details.

> Personally I do not have time/desire to crawl down this specific rabbit hole

It seems weird to say this when you've posted dozens of times on this topic with many, many links and quotes to the arguments that support your position. Are you not at all curious about whether the abstracts and conclusions are actually true?

Because I've collected a link here and a link there over the course of ~2 years: which basically is four time changes. There's always a smattering of news reports that link to various places each time that happens. From last fall:

* https://twitter.com/ChronobioCanada/status/13161222923180687...

So the end result may be 'large', but it's only a modest amount of effort that snowballs.

> Are you not at all curious about whether the abstracts and conclusions are actually true?

No more curious than going into the guts of an IPCC report to see if the abstracts and conclusions about climate change are true. In the post-Gutenberg world it's hard to be an expert in everything, so we have to trust others to get the details right in other fields: on this topic I'm willing to delegate.

It still seems weird. You’re repeating the conclusions forcefully and often as if they’re true. You’re taking more time to post than it would take to read the entire position paper in detail and check all the references. This is clearly a topic you care about, but you’re pretending and framing it as though it’s something you can’t be bothered to investigate, after investigating. You’ve mentioned IPCC twice in comments to me, but you’ve never posted quotes from IPCC abstracts or conclusions to Hacker News. Since you're actively participating in SRBR's advocacy, I’m confused about your story.

Have you checked on SRBR's position paper citations yet? We've talked several times about how quite a few citations they use to justify claiming that DST has negative health effects are coming from research that does not study DST, and how the position paper is just speculating that DST outcomes might share the same results. Except they don't admit they're speculating, they claim it's "strong" evidence.

Are you not yet convinced that the position paper is making stronger claims than the research they cite can support?

Nope.

Every time DST comes up people say "I like daylight when I leave the office". Which is fine. And I like not having to wear a mask… but I do it anyway because I don't want to spend the energy reading the papers, so I'll just trust the experts.

My province passed some DST legislation last fall—put forward by some random legislator without any consultations AFAICT—and the experts weighed in after the fact:

* https://twitter.com/ChronobioCanada/status/13161222923180687...

On this topic I'm willing to delegate things out to others. I just pass along the my 'research' in case someone may choose to nerd out.

And given that it appears that most sleep and chronobiology societies, in multiple countries, come to the same conclusion/position, seems that there's a strong leaning in one direction in the research.

You’re comparing daylight to not spreading a disease? Really?

It’s disingenuous to compare disease research for which there is volumes of direct evidence to daylight research for which is very little research, and the research is indirect - which the SRBR plainly admits, when you read beyond the abstract. This is one way they’re misleading you, by leaving the uncertainty out of the abstracts and conclusions. You’re doing yourself a disservice if care about this at all and you’re really not reading past the abstract. And I know you care about this a little.

How do you arrive at the claim “most” societies agree with SRBR? I’ve seen two of them, SRBR and AASM. Do you have a survey of all the societies that have studied DST? Most scientists agree that the appeal to authority argument is a fallacy.

If you wish to spend your time scouring journals for opposing views go right ahead. Here's a (non-exhaustive) list of groups that probably study this issue:

* https://srbr.org/about-us/other-societies/

It's probably a good place to start.

Thank you for the list, I will do a little poking around just for our conversation 8 months from now. ;)

The very first publication I found in 2 minutes following links randomly, from the starting place you provided says:

“Repeatedly, [Social Jet Lag] has been found to be a risk factor for higher body mass index (BMI) or even obesity, depressive symptoms, and for behaviour that is hazardous to health, such as smoking and poor dietary habits (for a review see [15]). The effects found by Borisenkov et al. (2017) [14] correspond to a statistically small to medium effect size (r = 0.2).

Roenneberg, Winnebeck, et al. [8] however recently claimed that this effect was “biologically large”. While that may be true, such a claim is unjustified so long as we lack information about the practical meaningfulness of differences in SJL on an interval scale” [1] (emphasis mine)

This is exactly what I’ve been saying. The health claims of DST are being exaggerated. I don’t have any problem with their conclusion that perennial Standard Time seems to have “higher” support than perennial Daylight Savings, based on the available and indirect evidence, but SRBR and others calling it conclusive and “strong” is not something that either the science nor most scientists agree with. Your claim that there’s strong consensus isn’t true.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2624-5175/2/1/3/htm

> Your claim that there’s strong consensus isn’t true.

Are there any chronobiology or sleep societies that are advocating either (a) leaving the twice-yearly time jump as it is or (b) switching to year-round DST?

> Scientists around the world support this initiative to adopt Standard Time, and statements have been issued by the U.S.-based Society for Research on Biological Rhythms, the European Biological Rhythms Society, and the European Sleep Research Society. As Canadian biological rhythm researchers supporting evidence-based policy, we strongly recommend a switch to permanent Standard Time.

* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-turn-back-th...

* https://archive.is/f441n (in case of paywall)

The main regions that do DST are US, Canada, and EU (30-50˚ latitude):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_by_countr...

And all of the societies that cover these areas say (AFAICT) go to year-round Standard Time.

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