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Comment by thewakalix | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I read the same article. Do you believe, based on a single word, that the author believes that literally zero people in the entire course of human history have ever suggested “brighter lights” until Yudkowsky came along?

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No one in the parent posts has said anything about "literally zero people".

The OP made a claim ("invented in 2017"), and this very claim is being criticized.

I found perplexing that you interpret the very same words in almost opposite ways.

I cant find it again but I read an article about how brightness goes up with technology and human spend roughly the same proportion of income on light. Kind of disproving the led efficiency is good for the environment argument. Not revolutionary, better to break that pattern.

You contradict yourself.

If humans spend same proportion of income on lumens, and you get more lumens per watt, then you will use less wattage per the same proportion of income. Ergo LEDs are more efficient.

Are you thinking about the cost of the physical lights? Because what is being discussed is the cost of energy.

Watt-hours are energy. If cost of energy is decreasing and you get more lumens per watt with LEDs then the benefits stack, they do not cancel.

If energy price is going down, then even more watts are being bought (since spending is fixed).

Not all those watts are going into lighting. If spending is fixed on lighting but total expenditure is up that means energy is being bought for things other than lighting. Kirchoff's law applied to the grid in toto.

Adds up considering the proliferation of computing devices, particularly cryptomining.

I don't know who any of these people are, but that is exactly what the article says, so why should we not believe that that's what the author believes?

Because it’s far more likely that the author chose slightly wrong words that ended up conflating a specific invention with being the first human “to invent the idea” that “hey, brighter lights would be closer to obviously brighter daylight” only 5 years ago. I’d wager that the author realizes that more than half of adults today had that insight sometime prior to 2017.

Some people read websites the way they would read a math proof. One tiny error and the whole thing comes down. A more charitable reading is often perfectly appropriate.

If you are reading it as a math proof, I am only disputing the claim when the idea was invented.

As I don't bring up the rest of the article's points, I am neither supporting nor refuting them with that particular comment.

Math (or actually, logic) is a bit more resilient than you make it out to be.

The LessWrong community is known for self-citations all over the place and heavy use of jargon created by themselves, and words redefined as terms-of-art. In light of this, if a member claims that one of their prominent figures "invented" something, you better take the claim at face value.

On the flip side, interpreting everything you read through your own lenses of experience and bias instead of assuming that the author meant what they wrote seems fraught with pitfalls.

Use of the word "invention" is usually a red flag. I've certainly done a number of things I never had knowledge of any prior art on, but I never said I "invented" those things.

If I wanted to, I'd probably go and research prior art first before making use of the word.

Also, I'd say that the article author is not referring just to brighter light as the invention, but rather as the use of extremely bright light indoors for different psychological effects.

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