Blue light filter is actually bad for you, new study shows

[Kisai]

12 hours ago, WereCatf said:

I've learned already a long time ago that most studies that claim some common thing is bad for you or some other common thing is good for you are bunk and only exist to create trends that can be monetized. If a study survives, say, 20 years without having been debunked then sure, it's probably fine, but most of these "studies" get debunked in just a few years.

Not really.

 

What happens is that one health study comes out that has it's goals pre-stated, and thus they look to prove the goals rather than create a study to test something that "may also disprove" that same goal. 

 

For example. If I wanted to prove sugar is bad for you, all I have to do is feed someone a food that doesn't normally contain sugar, a sugar loaded version and allow the target to overeat it. Now if I restrict their calories to the same that they would normally have (let's say if we boost the sugar, but make the end calories the same) we end up with a different result, and all we've really proven is that sugar doesn't signal the body to stop eating sooner, rather than it being bad. When they feed sugar and artificial sweeteners to lab rats, they do so to the point the rats form tumors, because it's the equivalent of living off candy until you're sick, for your entire life. Does it not make sense that tumors naturally form at some point?

 

This is why when "THING BAD" comes out, you have to actually read the study performed, because in many cases, the study was looking specifically to prove "THING BAD" and not "we found that THING might be BAD if X and Y are always true."

 

A lot of journalists suck at reading studies, because they want to be the first to report on the study, and thus google and other search engines may in fact show the worst interpretation of the study.

 

Like to go one further, many tests to prove that something (eg smoking, alcohol, drugs, etc) have a safe limit do so by exposing animals to limits that no human would be exposed to over their entire lifetime, let alone a rat, dog or pig until the animal dies. Then it's extrapolated out. Hence "no safe level of lead" is a standard because lead doesn't kill you, it just impairs body tissue, they can not prove at what point lead starts to cause harm, because the damage is culminative. There's no safe level of caffeine, alcohol or nicotine either, because those are addictions, and people can become addicted to poison with as little as one exposure, or they may never become addicted to it without significant exposure at an early age.

 

It's the same problem with any study involving food really. Ultimately one study comes out to prove "THING BAD", resulting in a bunch of fad diets, and then a second one comes out a few years later proving the first study wasn't done carefully enough, or when they did a much broader study, "THING BAD" turned out to only be the case in one smaller sample, the sample group used in the first study. Yet, there can be lasting damage like in the "Vaccines cause THING BAD", that is now having severe consequences due to people still citing the debunked study rather than any proven science.

 

[Taja]

11 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Interesting.  I think it will take some time for this to fully play out.  After all, the original idea that blue light should be reduced at night* wasn't just made up, that too was based in studies, so who's right?

Thats the thing. I hate when a "new study shows that global warming is fake!" - well yeah, you can always have bad studies. I tend to believe the ones that are well documented and more respected, and have been around for long so most scientists agree on it.

In this case I have no idea if the notion that blue light is bad was based on a single poor study, or if this new study is the one that has little to no value.

[TechyBen]

37 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Not really.

 

What happens is that one health study comes out that has it's goals pre-stated, and thus they look to prove the goals rather than create a study to test something that "may also disprove" that same goal. 

 

For example. If I wanted to prove sugar is bad for you, all I have to do is feed someone a food that doesn't normally contain sugar, a sugar loaded version and allow the target to overeat it. Now if I restrict their calories to the same that they would normally have (let's say if we boost the sugar, but make the end calories the same) we end up with a different result, and all we've really proven is that sugar doesn't signal the body to stop eating sooner, rather than it being bad. When they feed sugar and artificial sweeteners to lab rats, they do so to the point the rats form tumors, because it's the equivalent of living off candy until you're sick, for your entire life. Does it not make sense that tumors naturally form at some point?

 

This is why when "THING BAD" comes out, you have to actually read the study performed, because in many cases, the study was looking specifically to prove "THING BAD" and not "we found that THING might be BAD if X and Y are always true."

 

A lot of journalists suck at reading studies, because they want to be the first to report on the study, and thus google and other search engines may in fact show the worst interpretation of the study.

 

Like to go one further, many tests to prove that something (eg smoking, alcohol, drugs, etc) have a safe limit do so by exposing animals to limits that no human would be exposed to over their entire lifetime, let alone a rat, dog or pig until the animal dies. Then it's extrapolated out. Hence "no safe level of lead" is a standard because lead doesn't kill you, it just impairs body tissue, they can not prove at what point lead starts to cause harm, because the damage is culminative. There's no safe level of caffeine, alcohol or nicotine either, because those are addictions, and people can become addicted to poison with as little as one exposure, or they may never become addicted to it without significant exposure at an early age.

 

It's the same problem with any study involving food really. Ultimately one study comes out to prove "THING BAD", resulting in a bunch of fad diets, and then a second one comes out a few years later proving the first study wasn't done carefully enough, or when they did a much broader study, "THING BAD" turned out to only be the case in one smaller sample, the sample group used in the first study. Yet, there can be lasting damage like in the "Vaccines cause THING BAD", that is now having severe consequences due to people still citing the debunked study rather than any proven science.

 

Just to point out, lead does have bad results though. It's just hard to know at which point. Unlike say caffeine, where few are suggesting small amounts are always bad. It's more a "better safe than sorry" with lead, as give the industry/people and inch, and they'd take a poisonous mile!

[DrMacintosh]

14 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

So turn off Blue Light filter in Windows, uninstall Flux, turn is off on your phone, as clearly all this is useless.

Regardless of what the study suggests, Night shift makes my displays easier to stare at for long periods of time at night. Suggesting that my comfort is useless is a bit pretentious. 

[Brooksie359]

14 hours ago, WereCatf said:

Could just as well be placebo. My mum swears every single "natural supplement" or special creme she uses does the same thing, even though there are no studies to prove any such stuff actually does anything and many of those products she has sworn are totally awesome and help her and I should also gobble up on them have turned out to be not much more than a bit of sugar and flour and then quietly withdrawn from the market.

No I totally agree with them. It might not even be the fact that blue light was removed so much so as the brightness lessening but that is a different argument. I have found that blue light filters fixed the huge eye strain issues I was having and it was a huge difference and I would find it hard to believe that a placebo could make the pain in my eye go away. 

[Kisai]

2 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

Just to point out, lead does have bad results though. It's just hard to know at which point. Unlike say caffeine, where few are suggesting small amounts are always bad. It's more a "better safe than sorry" with lead, as give the industry/people and inch, and they'd take a poisonous mile!

You know how Lead was proven to be harmful?

 

Nothing growing for like 10 square miles around a lead smelter.

http://www.ehatlas.ca/lead/teaching-tools/case-study-trail-bc

https://web.archive.org/web/20170404191512/http://www.ehatlas.ca/lead/teaching-tools/case-study-trail-bc

 

Quote

Beginning in 1975, childhood lead poisoning, lead contamination, and other undesirable effects of smelting activities, including the appearance of the plants and the noise and odour they generate, became a cause of concern for the community.

 

Everyone that was born, grew up, lived in, worked at/in Trail BC has lead exposure.

https://www.trailtimes.ca/news/lead-exposure-on-downward-trend-in-trail/

Quote

This is evidenced by the latest results from the Trail Area Health and Environment Committee (THEC), based on September 2017 blood tests from 146 children aged six to 36 months.

The average blood lead level was 4.0 micrograms per deciliter (ug/dl), the lowest recorded to date.

 

This study is from 1983:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6870357

Quote

The average PbB values found (41, 33, and 16 micrograms/dl, respectively) reflected exposure level. In the highest exposure group, male smokers had significantly higher PbB concentrations than nonsmokers (44 vs. 37 micrograms/dl). For exposed males, average number of "days off work ill" increased with increasing PbB range and significant correlations were found between PbB values and five biologically plausible health symptoms.

So that's almost a 10x level of lead exposure between a plant worker in 1983 and a child in the same city today. In 1987 children had 3 times the lead in their blood what they have now. Also, as a quick reminder, Lead was gradually removed from gasoline in 1975 and finally removed for sale in the US 1996, but for Canada it was 1990.

 

Now, notice I focused on Trail here, and not say, the "lead in water"

https://globalnews.ca/news/6132624/vancouver-drinking-water-lead/

Quote

Posted November 5, 2019 7:01 pm

Updated November 5, 2019 8:17 pm

Editor’s note: This article was updated at 7:34 p.m. PT on Nov. 5, 2019 to note that the lead levels found in Flint were significantly higher than those found in Vancouver.

Notice how the editors jumped the gun?

 

Quote

Lead levels of 7.46 ppb were detected in water samples from the 75-year-old home Trula O’Haire rents in the South Vancouver neighbourhood of Sunset.

Quote

Lead levels dropped to 0.58 ppb in samples taken from O’Haire’s tap after the water had run for 45 seconds and then again to 0.51 ppb in samples taken after the water had been running for two minutes.

 

One school in flint (wikipedia) showed 100ppb, where they considered ppb of 7 to be clean enough. The EPA threshold of15ppb is where the line in the sand is drawn and action should be taken.

 

So, compare the water in Vancouver BC with 7.46ppb is considered bad, while the water in Flint with 7ppb was considered good enough. 

 

Now someone wanting to make a correlation here between lead in water and lead in the air, would have to do more work. Yes, there was a significant drop in lead in the air after 1990/1996, but ultimately that lead in the air had to land somewhere, likely in precipitated out into watersheds. So erosion will disturb it and occasionally result in lead into the drinking water. For all intents that's no different than mercury from burning coal. 

 

Anyway, reframe this again with the blue light.

 

Every CRT, LCD and Lightbulb (be it incandescent, FL/CFL, LED) emits blue light, that's how it gets a "white" color. Incandescent light's we were generally sold had a "warm" color temperature because they had less blue light, and people usually preferred this warm color. When you reduce the blue light in LCD monitor that has blue light reduction, it makes it "look warm", because the white shifts to a slight yellow color. It's not a new thing at all.

 

https://9to5mac.com/2019/12/17/blue-light-night-shift-study/

 

What's new is that LED-backlit LCD's/OLED screens are much brighter than before, remember the thing about staring into the sun? So the retina damage being a thing, might really only be because of how intense the blue light is. The sleep patterns a in recent study suggests it's the amount of light, not the color. So your sleep is disturbed more if you actually use "night/dark mode" settings because your body doesn't see as much white light rather than the blue light filtering.

[Curufinwe_wins]

Side note... as an actual internationally published scientist... I cannot sufficiently express my frustration with using the word "shows" on the conclusions of a single study.

 

And more generally.... taking any one properly done scientific study (thus with well defined scope of applicability) as definitive or more abhorrently... authoritative in nature.

 

Studies are by and large indicative, and nothing more or less. And that's even for fields such as physics where control and reproducibility expectations and standards are orders of magnitude higher than anything involving full organisms. (Because end of the day, living things are massively messy entropy generators.)

 

@GoodBytes

[STRMfrmXMN]

I have unbelievable eye strain for that one day I reinstall Windows and play video games late at night and later realize I forgot to install f.lux. I always have f.lux on the most aggressively orange setting and it's done wonders for my sleep. My eyes are prone to overproducing tears, so I'm not sure if that has something to do it, but I have whatever the opposite of dry eyes are.

 

Also, weren't apps like f.lux and things like Gunnar glasses created because there was decent evidence to show that blue light kept you up later?

[vanished]

9 hours ago, mr moose said:

Snip

Fair enough, I can definitely see where you're coming from, and I definitely agree that there can often be bad interpretations based on too little and that it's a problem.  It can be dismissal of those results, as you mentioned, or the opposite as mentioned above by curufinwe.  Basically my attitude towards this study at the moment is exactly what I said in my first post - I'm interested, and I think we should wait and see how this develops.  Maybe this will be debunked.  Maybe this is actually hitting on a truth everyone else has thus far missed.  I definitely don't have the expertise to judge how valid this is, and I know it, so for now I'm going to keep it in mind and avoid jumping to either extreme.

[JZStudios]

17 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

carrots are bad for you, lettuces are bad for you

When the fuck did that happen?

 

17 hours ago, givingtnt said:

  C O N F U S E D   E Y E   S T R A I N 

I just like that there's 3 perfectly sync gifs of the same thing.

 

16 hours ago, Caroline said:

If you rotated 360° you'd still be in front of the monitor.

I thought that too, but then you turn off the monitor and walk away, so it still works out.

[bcredeur97]

I never bought the blue light is bad for you mojo, but I do think filtering out blue light makes things easier to look at in a dark room.

But also as @GoodBytes pointed out in a comment, phones minimum brightness is still too bright... and that's the root cause of the problem really.

[Curufinwe_wins]

4 minutes ago, bcredeur97 said:

I never bought the blue light is bad for you mojo, but I do think filtering out blue light makes things easier to look at in a dark room.

But also as @GoodBytes pointed out in a comment, phones minimum brightness is still too bright... and that's the root cause of the problem really.

No comment on Apple's devices... but on every S/Note series in the last 3 years, you can get it dark enough at minimum to be almost unreadable even in a pitch black room. I have my note 10+ on like 5% brightness at min iirc.

 

Of course, that isn't default, even if it is remembered based on ambients... so if other people don't change theirs they won't get the same experience.

[mr moose]

6 hours ago, yian88 said:

I cant bother reading the article but based on this:

 

"...found that blue light filter doesn't help you sleep at night, doesn't play with your internal clock, nor is blue light (unsurprisingly) is bad for you. The study has found that actually, we respond more to red/yellow light."

 

The whole study is pointless, blue light filter is made to reduce blue light ammount in order to not burn your retina which is sensible to blue light and can affect our vision long term and to reduce eye strain, our eyes evolved in natural warm light, they dont play well with artifical white(blue) light.

Blue filter was not made to help you sleep or anything else.

And it actually helps me a lot, i keep my laptop and phone almost always on reduced blue light and it massively reduces eye strain, i wake up with less or no eye strain the second day, i remember before  blue filter used to be a thing i always had red bleedy eyes after a late night on my PC or phone, now those days are gone, i rarely have to use eye drops for irritation nowdays.

 

This proves to me many of these studies are done for other reasons behind, like nitpicking on something that works somewhat to make it controversial and gain reputation. But thats just me. Too many annoying "studies", just make up your own mind, blue filter is not placebo it helps me and i notice the difference in eye strain immediately in dark or low light rooms.

 

Are you really trying to say that a study showing blue light isn't bad for you is a stupid study because you believe it is?   Individual experiences do not trump research, individual research does not trump the scientific consensus. 

 

This is how relevant evidence is valued for factual analysis of anything.

 

You'll notice that personal experience, anecdotal experience and isolated cases are not even mentioned in most of them,  there is a reason for that.

[Curufinwe_wins]

49 minutes ago, mr moose said:

 

Are you really trying to say that a study showing blue light isn't bad for you is a stupid study because you believe it is?   Individual experiences do not trump research, individual research does not trump the scientific consensus. 

 

This is how relevant evidence is valued for factual analysis of anything.

 

You'll notice that personal experience, anecdotal experience and isolated cases are not even mentioned in most of them,  there is a reason for that.

It should also be noted that at least one time in mammalian evolutionary history, effectively the entire clade was nocturnal and that is one of many reasons mammalian eyesight is by some measures really shitty compared to say... birds...

 

So the entire premise of warm yellow light as being 'the ancestral environment' is not even necessarily sensible. Hell, primates are some of the few trichromate placental mammals in general, and that's because one of two cones retained from the 4 of basal tetropods mutated into the now-mostly-distinct red-green cones have today. Also related to why red-green color blindness is so relatively common in humans, and near universal in other placental mammals. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichromacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_color_vision

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_color_vision_in_primates

 

(I've read some paywalled science journals on the subjects, but the above gives a primer regardless.)

 

 

JUST TO BE CLEAR.

 

Quote

Side note... as an actual internationally published scientist... I cannot sufficiently express my frustration with using the word "shows" on the conclusions of a single study.

 

And more generally.... taking any one properly done scientific study (thus with well defined scope of applicability) as definitive or more abhorrently... authoritative in nature.

 

Studies are by and large indicative, and nothing more or less. And that's even for fields such as physics where control and reproducibility expectations and standards are orders of magnitude higher than anything involving full organisms. (Because end of the day, living things are massively messy entropy generators.)

I am not ready to say case closed on blue-light-filters being hogwash. Just because they are ancestral and key and almost certainly not 'bad because humans evolved in warm light' doesn't mean that the blue opsin can't be particularly effective at triggering side-effects that diminish sleep quality. But I do urge caution in interpreting many of these rather messy studies in any definitive light (even compared to protein/DNA analysis which is much more straightforward.)

[mr moose]

34 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

It should also be noted that at least one time in mammalian evolutionary history, effectively the entire clade was nocturnal and that is one of many reasons mammalian eyesight is by some measures really shitty compared to say... birds...

 

So the entire premise of warm yellow light as being 'the ancestral environment' is not even necessarily sensible. Hell, primates are some of the few trichromate placental mammals in general, and that's because one of two cones retained from the 4 of basal tetropods mutated into the now-mostly-distinct red-green cones have today. Also related to why red-green color blindness is so relatively common in humans, and near universal in other placental mammals. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichromacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_color_vision

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_color_vision_in_primates

 

(I've read some paywalled science journals on the subjects, but the above gives a primer regardless.)

 

 

JUST TO BE CLEAR.

 

I am not ready to say case closed on blue-light-filters being hogwash. Just because they are ancestral and key and almost certainly not 'bad because humans evolved in warm light' doesn't mean that the blue opsin can't be particularly effective at triggering side-effects that diminish sleep quality. But I do urge caution in interpreting many of these rather messy studies in any definitive light (even compared to protein/DNA analysis which is much more straightforward.)

I am not even entering the debate one way or the other,  I am just saying people shouldn't be so naive to enthusiastically and with absolution enter a debate/discussion they lack the education and understanding of.  As I said earlier in the thread, I have a sensory processing disorder where I have to wear sunglasses nearly all the time. And whilst blue light makes no difference to me, that doesn't mean this study is BS anymore than it means it is on the money.  

[Dabombinable]

22 hours ago, Arika S said:

i think people are misinterpreting the results of this study, it's not saying that blue light doesn't cause eye strain, it's saying that the whole "blue light before bed makes you more awake/messes with your body clock" is false.

For me, eyestrain is only a factor when under fluro lighting, or LED lighting that uses a poor quality AC-DC converter. Whether I'm reading books, watching TV or on my computer.

 

As for light messing with my body clock, no matter what I do I always sleep for 7 hours, or wake up +10/-10 minutes of 6AM. Even if I only got to bed at 3 in the morning. 

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

For me, eyestrain is only a factor when under fluro lighting, or LED lighting that uses a poor quality AC-DC converter. Whether I'm reading books, watching TV or on my computer.

So flickering lights then.  Fluorescents and LEDs  both flash on and off faster than the ever age human eye can follow so it seems like continuous light.  It’s not though.  Makes me wonder if you’re also a fan of extremely high refresh rates.

Edited December 19, 2019 by Bombastinator
Ihateautocorrect

[Dabombinable]

5 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

So flickering lights then.  Fluorescents and LEDs  both flash on and off faster than the ever age human eye can follow so it seems like continuous light.  It’s not though.  Makes me wonder if you’re also a fan of extremely high refresh rates.

I can discern a 50 and 60Hz flicker with some LED lights (normally the cheap ones) and all fluro lights, just like with CRT (though they also have a 50-60Hz whine as well - my Mum can't hear it but I and my friends can). As for high refresh rate, well yeah I prefer it. But I'm stuck at;

• 60Hz on my 1200 fluro litscreen
• 75Hz (overclocked) with my 1080p and 1366x768 screens
• 85Hz with my ancient 1024x768 fluro lit LCD  monitor/TV

Also the eye can't see more than cinematic 24Hz _/s

[Bombastinator]

5 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

I can discern a 50 and 60Hz flicker with some LED lights (normally the cheap ones) and all fluro lights, just like with CRT (though they also have a 50-60Hz whine as well - my Mum can't hear it but I and my friends can). As for high refresh rate, well yeah I prefer it. But I'm stuck at;

• 60Hz on my 1200 fluro litscreen
• 75Hz (overclocked) with my 1080p and 1366x768 screens
• 85Hz with my ancient 1024x768 fluro lit LCD  monitor/TV

Also the eye can't see more than cinematic 24Hz _/s

Heh.  I can’t either.  Ears of youth.  You’ll lose the ability too one day.

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, Caroline said:

(My Thesis) Don't fight guys but know blue-ish 4000K+ bulbs were created by large companies to squeeze you like an old lemon while you work in an office for them for more hours so they can have greater profits.

Possibly.  Executives are just as susceptible to pseudoscience as anyone else though look at what happened to Steve Jobs with the whole cancer thing.

[mr moose]

18 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

I can discern a 50 and 60Hz flicker with some LED lights (normally the cheap ones) and all fluro lights, just like with CRT (though they also have a 50-60Hz whine as well - my Mum can't hear it but I and my friends can). As for high refresh rate, well yeah I prefer it. But I'm stuck at;

• 60Hz on my 1200 fluro litscreen
• 75Hz (overclocked) with my 1080p and 1366x768 screens
• 85Hz with my ancient 1024x768 fluro lit LCD  monitor/TV

Also the eye can't see more than cinematic 24Hz _/s

What you can hear on the CRT that your mum can't is more likely to be the flyback transformer, it operates at 15Khz,  which for most people is very hard to hear after 50. 

 

 

https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/

 

dial that into 15Khz and you'll recognize it straight away.

 

Also if you dial in 50Hz but it sounds too low try 100Hz, as usually that is the frequency we hear in appliances that run on DC but have crappy power supplies (like PSUs for backlight LEDS).

 

 

 

 

 

[Flying Sausages]

Next month: Bluelight filter is good for your eyes

 

Seriously, I can't trust this type of research study anymore. 50% researchers say it is bad while 50% researchers says it is good. As matter of fact, I can't trust scientist anymore.

[Blademaster91]

7 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Fair enough, I can definitely see where you're coming from, and I definitely agree that there can often be bad interpretations based on too little and that it's a problem.  It can be dismissal of those results, as you mentioned, or the opposite as mentioned above by curufinwe.  Basically my attitude towards this study at the moment is exactly what I said in my first post - I'm interested, and I think we should wait and see how this develops.  Maybe this will be debunked.  Maybe this is actually hitting on a truth everyone else has thus far missed.  I definitely don't have the expertise to judge how valid this is, and I know it, so for now I'm going to keep it in mind and avoid jumping to either extreme.

I agree with you, I'd like to see this studied further, but it does remind me of studies that go back and forth on foods, scientists say whole grain is bad for you then it's good for you, i'm not sure what to trust. Although if the blue light filters or glasses work I think people should keep using it, not sure if it's just a placebo but using a blue light filter on my desktop and phone does seem to help with eye strain.

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, Blademaster91 said:

I agree with you, I'd like to see this studied further, but it does remind me of studies that go back and forth on foods, scientists say whole grain is bad for you then it's good for you, i'm not sure what to trust. Although if the blue light filters or glasses work I think people should keep using it, not sure if it's just a placebo but using a blue light filter on my desktop and phone does seem to help with eye strain.

The thing is it’s not scientists saying it.  It’s marketers interpreting what scientists said to their advantage.  The trick is to find out what the scientists actually did say.  For instance: The latest study says “this stuff doesn’t work with mice”.  Not useless.  I’m not a mouse though.  The earlier studies are possibly worse.  

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, Blademaster91 said:

I agree with you, I'd like to see this studied further, but it does remind me of studies that go back and forth on foods, scientists say whole grain is bad for you then it's good for you, i'm not sure what to trust. Although if the blue light filters or glasses work I think people should keep using it, not sure if it's just a placebo but using a blue light filter on my desktop and phone does seem to help with eye strain.

 

 

As far as I am concerned,  if the scientific consensus doesn't change then it's because we have either discovered all there is to discover (not sure I am at ease with that),  or the truth is beyond our means right now.  Either way any change in consensus just means they have discovered more now than they knew before.    And when it comes to food,  going with the best evidence we have is better than random judging if something is good/bad for you based on lack of confidence in science.