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Comment by ycui1986 | Hacker News Reader

ycui1986

My personal opinion is that the eye development is an adaptive process. During the eye development, the body has a feedback system that make sure the eyeball size matches the lens focusing capability so that the eye can focus to infinity. However, nothing can tell the feedback process what infinity is, thus I guess, the eye will assuming the most commonly archived far side focusing condition is the "infinity". Well, in modern days, people spend so much time in door and in front of computers, the body believe that is likely the infinity focusing condition, and thus the feedback system grow the eyeball bigger to make that the "infinity focusing" condition.

Obviously, this is a personal opinion, there is no science to back it up.

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This tracks for me. As a kid I spent lots of time randomly staring up close at the smallest of details I could, deliberately shifting my focus and gaze on magic eye books, and frequently staring far off into the distance to see how far away I could still make out things like individual leaves on trees. I'd even do it indoors, curious to see how dirty/clear/distorting the window glass was, or see how far across the room I could make out details like felt tufting or smaller brickwork or mortar texturing.

If I'm honest I still do most of this from time to time, just less magic eye books and a lot less impulsively thanks to years of learning to keep my ADHD under control, oh and drugs help too.

This sort of fits into what I said here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30412140 talking about ADHD. The adaptive process of someone who is more neurotypical will not include a heavy dose of random distracted looking around the room. ADHD may skew the scale on the feedback process by adding in a lot more further focusing events. Even randomly focusing across a classroom is probably beneficial.

I did the same. I also didn't have a computer.

Still ended up with severe myopia and a less severe astigmatism... Just like my dad who never used a computer and was an outdoor sportsman.

I upvoted, because it is an extremely interesting theory, which could potentially explain vision problems. But unfortunately it is simply does not fit real world data: a lot of kids around 6yo start loosing ability to focus on stuff right in front of them (like a book) despite both reading quite a bit, and spending significant time outside.

Now add in the fact that wearing minus lenses for close works restarts this process of hormesis, and you begin to realize that the entire optical industry ends up worsening a problem that they conveniently offer a "solution" to. Any minus lenses you purchase need to come with a big warning that they should not be used for distances closer than the focal plane.

You will never see that happening. A $100 billion industry exists solely because of it. I feel sad whenever I see kids doing near work with glasses.

The kafka-esque part is that they're well aware of the issue, because many of the lens companies (hoya, zeiss) have come up with "myopia control glasses" which are basically just minus lenses but with reduced power on the periphery, which they'll gladly sell you for added markup. It's no surprise that these are better than full-on minus lenses for close work, but you know what would be even better? Telling children to remove their glasses when using the computer or reading. But that doesn't bring in any profit.

Special scorn should be directed towards those that prescribe glasses for young kids for something as low as 0.25 diapers. And those that prescribe unequal power two both eyes rather than advising patching to equate both eyes.

This is exactly what I think is the reason. We are adapting for environment that we are in every day. Monitor, phone screen, tablet, books... There is less and less time we spend looking into "infinity".

Put more simply, kids in prehistoric times would almost always be looking at things further away than books and screens.

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