LED lighting undermines visual performance unless supplemented by wider spectra

There is a 15-30% difference between the groups at baseline (fig 8c-9c, 8d-9d), about the same magnitude as the claimed effect of the experimental condition.

I think the result would be much stronger if these baselines were comparable, so they show they have accounted for other variables like time of day and light history. I am also skeptical of any effect in the retina lasting 6 weeks, with no fading.

Consider that people are often exposed to much more infrared light outdoors, so "worked under a relatively dim incandescent lamp" is not a particularly novel stimulus. Imagine that any of these people spent time outdoors during the six weeks - thousands of times more infrared light there.

Just to point to anybody that comes here directly, the article has no relation at all with perceived illumination, color fidelity, or anything else people complain about leds.

It's an interesting niche topic that you may want your working place to notice if you work indoors.

Very interesting. I've always thought that there was something a bit "off" about LED torches and car headlamps; the brightness is there, but something about the light just doesn't seem to illuminate as well as an old dim incandescent or even fluorescent tube.

Someone please tell the Australian government now that we've essentially banned other forms of lighting. (except fluorescent)

I've been using incandescent more often. All my vanity lights are 40w appliance bulbs now. The difference at night is remarkable. The LED is just too much even at 2700k. I still prefer LED for high power situations like br30/40 can lights.

No mention of CRI which seems kind of odd. LEDs for lighting are increasingly graded by how natural their emission spectrum is. Older lights are quite bad, newer ones sacrifice a tiny bit of performance for more uniform spectrum.

Why is it that right now there is still on the frontpage of an "article being found flawed after 6k citations " ( https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/01/22/aking/ ) but this random article coming out of nowhere makes the front page on the same day?

People really should get it and stop sharing newly published papers to the general public. The value of one single academic paper is exactly 0. Even a handful of such articles still has 0 value to the general public. This is only of interest to other academics (or labs, countries, etc.) who may have the power to reproduce it in a controlled environment.

Be very skeptical of correlations like this that have dubious or poorly understood causation. Be even more skeptical if they are about day-to-day stuff that would likely have large swaths of people able to reproduce something like it on huge scales yet they haven't. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I have incandescent light bulbs at home I have to pretty much smuggle from China. It's amazing how we're replaying the asbestos playbook a century later. Only this time it's government mandated.