It's kind of common for people to think that they like something while getting objectively worse results. For example, people learning sequentially feel like they've learned the materials but are outperformed by people who were forced to learn the topic out of sequence.

So I think conclusion such as "people think they prefer it, but actually, information retention is much higher with white background" is quite applicable despite you thinking that's not true.

> How can a study tell me what is comfortable for me?

Unless you are an emigre from Betelgeuse or a particularly intelligent octopus, you have eyes that work in the same way as everyone else's eyes. The biology and physiology of the human eye are well understood. Chocolate is an excellent comparison. Whether you like chocolate is a matter of taste. But you don't get to claim that eating chocolate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner is optimal because you prefer it.

Today I learned that I'm a emigre from Betelgeuse or an octopus.

Seriously, eye doctors are always interested in how I am even able to see. Which I wasn't at some time, until that got fixed by a brilliant professor.

Despite that most of our bodies function more or less the same way, everybody has completely different tastes and preferences in many different things.

And when you add the human brain into any process you now have something much more complex and much less understood, with much more room for say, personal differences.

But something like “easier to read” is also relative. The brightness of a white background is hurtful for me and I dislike it.

So, despite the studies, for me white over black is easier to read. Maybe my performance is bad by using white over black. But it would be even worse with black over white, as I would spend all the time squinting at the screen.

This article is an experiment to see how easily hacker news people can be manipulated. "When I was in the military..." Yep, confirmed.