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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
