It's Easy to Make Mistakes Without Hands-On | Original
After Yin Wang proposed the myopia reversal method in his blog, there have been some opposing views on this. I happened to read some.
Since 2022, I have been conducting the experiment just as this paper describes.
It is easy for me to know what is right or wrong. It is incorrect to say that heredity is the primary risk factor for myopia. In Todd Becker’s YouTube Video, in the introduction, there is a paragraph:
Myopia, or near-sightedness, is generally assumed to be an irreversible, genetically determined condition that can only be ameliorated with corrective lenses or surgery. Its prevalence is 30-40% in the U.S. and Europe, and more than 50% in some Asian countries, but it is rare in Africa and in pre-industrial cultures. The incidence of myopia correlates with IQ, school achievement, and industrialization, suggesting that an environmental factor is at work—namely, near-work.
From my experience, I can say this is correct. My father has 3 brothers. Three out of the 4 siblings don’t have myopia, while one does. The youngest brother of my father has myopia and has the highest education, probably a bachelor’s degree. They were born in the 1960s and 1970s.
For myself, I started developing myopia when I was in junior high school around 2009. At that time, I probably had around -2.00 diopters. I recall that I stayed up at night and used my Nokia phone while lying in bed with the lights off. After a summer like that, I felt that my eyesight had become poor.
I happen to know some of the authors of opposing views. They also blog or comment. After I conducted a 3-year experiment, and Yin Wang tried so many ways to reverse myopia, the first thought when I see such opposing views on the Internet is that we don’t care. They don’t know how much effort we have made, how we rejected our ideas or started again, how we adjusted our experiments, or how we mulled over all these things.
The author has a good heart in warning us about Yin Wang’s discovery. But really, the author has not yet conducted experiments on it. I agree with a lot of his ideas about startups, as he has a 10-year startup journey. But for myopia itself, most of our efforts in experiments or reading—and most human discoveries or discussions about it—don’t matter. Only a few truths matter.
We are not disrespectful towards the opposing views. Science is science. It doesn’t matter that there are 2 billion people with myopia. And a large number of them use eyeglasses with full prescription that allow them to see a blackboard 5m away, but they use them to look at mobile phones a lot. That’s why their myopia becomes deeper and deeper.
One easy way to know whether what Yin Wang says is true is to just put down your glasses. If your myopia is just 175 or 200 degrees, you can see your mobile phone without needing glasses. And if you are wearing eyeglasses with full prescription, you can put the mobile phone far away, like 80 cm or 1 meter, and you probably can still see the words on the screen.
I can see that one of the big mistakes is that they don’t do hands-on experiments while we do a lot and think about them extensively. They just say what the book says.
In the corporate world, I can see this scenario too. In a team, engineers and leaders may come up with solutions. However, half of them probably don’t work. We need to try the solutions to see what happens. It is just like the tens of thousands of times I thought that code should work but testing failed in my 10 years of software engineering experience.
From the hands-on aspect, we actually can do a lot of filtering. We should hire, communicate, and work with those people who are more hands-on. In the company, those who like hands-on work will probably be better leaders. Steve Jobs once highlighted the importance of highly performant individual contributors.
So when judging the quality or truthfulness of opinions, we can check their hands-on degree. Does the author do a lot of experiments?
And I can see that people who do a lot of hands-on experiments actually don’t hold their opinions too rigidly. I know there is still doubt in reversing myopia. What degree is best for reversing myopia, whether 150 degrees less, or 200 degrees less? I wrote a paper about this, Natural Vision Restoration: The Principle of “Just Barely Clear”.
It is really easy to talk, but harder to perform actual experiments, work out a theory, and then test again, just like writing code.
It’s easy to make mistakes without hands-on experience. After making tons of mistakes, you will realize that compared to the losses or pain that the mistakes cause us, the trouble of doing a lot of hands-on experiments to get to the truth and avoid mistakes is negligible. That said, like in stock investing, one day you will know that compared to the losses or pain that investing mistakes cause us, the trouble of performing hands-on, thorough experimental efforts to invest successfully is negligible.