I had a similar thought, something like varying levels of ambient humidity closer to the washroom. The experiment needs to be repeated in more controlled conditions. Surprised to see the HN crowd taking this obvious pseudoscience at face value.

I'm surprised to see experimentation being dismissed so readily.

Calling for more rigorous experimentation is not a dismissal of experimentation. It's healthy to be critical about experimental methodologies and to call for more rigour before conclusions are drawn.

experiments are not pseudoscience; we teach kids science via science fair projects doing very similar types of experiments.

Pseudoscience is generally when you have an explanation for something but no evidence, and generalize that theory to explain too much

No, experimenting is not pseudoscience, but taking a single flawed experiment communicated anecdotally with no mention of setup or control and then moving into discussion about the "results" as if it was performed in any way reproducibly is pseudoscience. It presents itself as science but when you pick it apart it's actually lacking many mainstays of what we'd call scientific methodology.

It's not necessarily false, it's just less rigorous.

So we can call it light science. Or amateur science?

People shouldn't be discouraged from practicing science.

Or we could call it pseudoscience? I'm not discouraging anyone, in fact I'm encouraging repeating the experiment with more rigour, that is calling you more science.

dude just experimented a bit.

science is when what you call rigour leads from hypothesis closer to fact or not fact.

op just tried a quick and dirty experiment with duck tape and stuff.

get your attitude right, mate.

name three examples that describe the term pseudo-science, to begin with. Psychology doesn't count ^^

There have been several experiments that have showed similar findings, and I looked through half a dozen or so and didn’t find any that showed otherwise. Here’s one that you can browse:

https://www.eurekaselect.com/article/75099

Also possible that the experiment was just poorly designed, and the results poorly interpreted.

Light would vs also need to be controlled. I certainly don’t do so well next to blue leds.