Comment by bigmealbigmeal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigmealbigmeal | Hacker News Reader

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> I strongly suspect the amount of light outdoors is NOT really the issue. If you're always focused on things close at hand (as the above mentioned folks on wall street), you never allow the eyes to focus on the far horizon for an appreciable fraction of the time.

Then you need to read more on the matter.

Studies on chicks, tree shrews and rhesus monkeys show that simply increasing the amount of indoor light intensity has a protective effect on myopia. Scientists can induce more myopia in chicks simply by reducing light intensity. See https://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2164963 and https://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2355431

The leading hypothesis is that light stimulates the release of dopamine in the retina, and the dopamine blocks the elongation of the eye during development. One study showed that injecting a dopamine-inhbiting drug into the eyes of chicks abolished the protective effect of bright light, and myopia increased. See https://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2126968

Your particular confidence on this ("strongly suspect") bothers me because it has an influence on others, yet it is totally ignorant of what current scientific findings suggest.

All of the experiments you mentioned happened indoors. How can you have far field (> 100 meters distant) objects inside a laboratory? None of those experiments rule out my hypothesis.

Your hypothesis is that myopia is primarily caused by the lack of focus on far-field objects.

In a lab environment, wherein there is a lack of focus on far-field objects, myopia does not occur when there is sufficient light intensity. On the other hand, it occurs with insufficient light intensity.

If your hypothesis were correct, then myopia would occur regardless of light intensity, because all of the subjects have a lack of focus on far-field objects. But it doesn't. It only occurs with insufficient light intensity.

That's damning.

Does it? This isn’t a scientific journal, nor is this a hard science forum. So the expectations that a layman conform to the standards of a field to have a conversation about a fairly esoteric subject is asinine.

I can’t know the top science in every field, so that bars me from discussion, lest I be slammed for having a thought.

This isn’t just anti-science, it’s ignorant of social interactions, and the conversations that lead to greater understanding. You aren’t nearly as smart as you think you are.

I guess the spirit of what you're saying is that I reacted with excessive condemnation. Yeah, you're right. Truth is important and I don't regret the information I gave out, but I agree that I should have taken it easier.

On that note, I guess it's a little fun that you ending with "you aren’t nearly as smart as you think you are" seems to be participating in the same unnecessary meanness that you just called out. Ahhhh man, aren't we all so brutally human...

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