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Lumifer comments on What is up with carbon dioxide and cognition? An offer - Less Wrong Discussion

24 Post author: paulfchristiano 23 April 2016 05:47PM

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Comment author: gwern 23 April 2016 08:50:17PM *  19 points [-]

It is odd, isn't it? The effect sizes seem ridiculous*, but there's nothing obviously wrong with that study (aside from the sample size). Cochran has blogged about oxygen before as well. To compile some of the relevant papers:

The problem for me is that while it makes sense that since we run on oxygen and the brain uses a lot of oxygen (the whole 'BOLD' thing etc), more oxygen might be better, it has the same issue as Kurzban's blood-glucose/willpower criticism: if the brain needs more oxygen than it's getting, why doesn't one simply breath a little more? While sedentary during these sorts of tasks, you have far more breathing capacity than you should need - you are able to sprint all-out without falling over of asphyxiation, after all. So there's no obvious reason there should be any lack, even more so than for glucose. And shouldn't CO2 levels closely track various aspects of weather? But as far as I know, various attempts to correlate weather and cognitive performance or mood have turned up only tiny effects. In addition, too much oxygen can be bad. So is it too little oxygen or too much nitrogen or too much carbon dioxide...?

Jessica Taylor for lending me a CO2 monitor so that I could see variability in indoor CO2 levels.

What monitor is that? You could try recording CO2 long-term, especially if it's a data logger. Opening windows is something that's easily randomized.

I did some looking and compiling of consumer-oriented devices a while ago: https://forum.quantifiedself.com/t/indoor-air-quality-monitoring-health/799/40 I was not too impressed since nothing hit the sweet spot of accurate CO2 and PPM measurement under $100. The Netatmo looked decent but there are a lot of complaints about accuracy & reliability (checking the most recent Amazon reviews, still a lot of complaints).

I've been thinking maybe I should settle for the Netatmo. I've been working on a structural equation model (SEM) integrating ~100 personal data variables to try to model my productivity (some current sample output), and it would be nice to have even noisy daily C02 variables (as long as I know how noisy and can use it as a latent variable to deal with the measurement error). Correlation-wise, I think backwards causation can be mostly ruled out, and the most obvious confound is weather, which is already in my SEM.

* taken at face value, with reasonable estimates of how much rooms differ from day to day or week to week, CO2 levels would explain a lot or maybe most of variability in IQ tests or cognitive performance!

Comment author: Lumifer 24 April 2016 09:51:28PM 1 point [-]

And shouldn't CO2 levels closely track various aspects of weather?

Shoud they? Weather is basically temperature + precipitation + wind + humidity. Off the top of my head I don't see any reasons why different weather should imply different CO2 concentrations.

Comment author: Vaniver 25 April 2016 04:20:13AM *  3 points [-]

Photosynthesis requires light to occur; weather affects the amount of light. Direction of wind determines the amount of upwind plants, and so on. Here's a link to a week's worth of data from an outdoor CO2 monitor in Utah; it looks to me like the difference is probably imperceptible, even if one buys the effect sizes for the 600 to 1000 ppm study.

Comment author: Lumifer 25 April 2016 04:59:04AM 0 points [-]

Interesting... I expect the main drivers to be the seasonal cycle (outside of the tropics) and the diurnal cycle.

Here is a nice animation of the seasonal cycle which also demonstrates the asymmetry of the Northern and Southern hemispheres...

Comment author: gwern 25 April 2016 05:28:46PM 2 points [-]

I was actually thinking more along the lines of opening windows; you only want your windows open in a fairly narrow band of temperatures, and things like precipitation would also encourage people to seal their houses or apartments or offices up and presumably increase carbon dioxide levels. But yeah, there are probably direct effects from light levels and barometric pressure and other things.

Comment author: Lumifer 25 April 2016 05:41:35PM 0 points [-]

Weather clearly affects people in a lot of ways, do disentangling the CO2 effects will be hard.

Any idea how high will CO2 go in a room in a normal building, say during winter in a well-sealed residential house? Offices and apartments buildings typically have HVAC systems which have standards for air exchange and such, but a single-family house can do whatever it wants to, including turning itself into an airtight box in the name of energy efficiency...

Comment author: gwern 25 April 2016 06:25:31PM 1 point [-]

Weather clearly affects people in a lot of ways, do disentangling the CO2 effects will be hard.

Weather affects people, but as I said, the effects generally seem to be small and not as large as the experiment claims. If there were large weather effects, they could be due to CO2 or other aspects of weather; but since there are not, that implies that all aspects of weather including CO2 are not that important. (Modus ponens, modus tollens, etc.)

Comment author: Lumifer 25 April 2016 06:54:15PM 0 points [-]

the effects generally seem to be small

I don't know about that. Anecdotally, I know some people who say that how well they think/work/feel is noticeably -- to them -- affected by weather, mostly a combination of pressure and humidity. Also anecdotally, the older you get, the more sensitive to weather your body becomes.

Myself, I feel more energetic in high-pressure low-humidity weather than in low-pressure high-humidity, but I haven't tried to quantify it or be rigorous about it.

Comment author: gwern 26 April 2016 12:36:59AM 1 point [-]

Anecdotally, I know some people who say that how well they think/work/feel is noticeably -- to them -- affected by weather, mostly a combination of pressure and humidity. Also anecdotally, the older you get, the more sensitive to weather your body becomes.

People think a lot of mistaken things about their personal psychology. But the weather correlations are still small: 'Does Life Seem Better on a Sunny Day? Examining the Association Between Daily Weather Conditions and Life Satisfaction Judgments', Lucas & Lawless 2013; 'Subjective wellbeing: why weather matters', Feddersen et al 2015. I found the same thing in my data so far. May just be setpoints.

Comment author: Lumifer 26 April 2016 01:43:55AM 0 points [-]

But the weather correlations are still small

The attempt to find weather correlations universal to all humans seems misguided to me. Different people react to weather differently. I get more energy from high and dry, but there are people who get more energy from low and wet, and I know one girl who switched after being pregnant and giving birth. You take a group average and it will come to about zero, but that just masks individual reactions.

Comment author: gwern 27 April 2016 12:06:26AM 0 points [-]

Using fixed-effects for each person helps model such heterogeneity, but still nothing comes out. I don't see why you would dismiss them so readily. It's just that the old-wives-tales are wrong yet again.

If you really believe that weather relationships could be so obscure and complicated and individual that there are no meaningful average effects, that casts a lot of doubt on the claim that there's a consistent average effect from CO2 and all the background studies about ventilation and air quality as well.

Comment author: Lumifer 27 April 2016 01:57:22AM *  0 points [-]

Using fixed-effects for each person helps model such heterogeneity, but still nothing comes out.

Feddersen et al model very particular heterogeneity, to wit the usual demographic and econometric data:

These include age and its square, the number of household dependents aged between 0 and 24 years, and the natural logarithm of nominal household disposable income for the previous financial year in Australian dollars. Dummy variables are also included for disability status, employment status, marital status and education. These controls are typically the most important determinants of self-reported life satisfaction

That's not going to help ferret out idiosyncratic reaction to weather.

It's just that the old-wives-tales are wrong yet again.

I don't have any old wives to listen to :-) The source is my personal experience and the experience of people I know who don't seem to have any reason to lie about it.

If you really believe that weather relationships could be so obscure and complicated and individual that there are no meaningful average effects

I didn't say that. I said that not seeing average effects does not rule out individual-level effects and that at the anecdotal level I do see these effects.

And there is no reason to generalise to everything. I am sure that "bad air" which is bad enough to produce consistent measurable average effects exists and is not very hard to construct or find.

Comment author: paulfchristiano 25 April 2016 06:18:20PM 0 points [-]

It won't be hard if the effects are as large as claimed in the original study. And while we are looking for the total effect, adding more contributions of weather to cognitive performance should make it easier to detect an overall effect (even if each points in a random direction), but that hasn't been true for weather.

Comment author: Lumifer 25 April 2016 06:47:58PM *  0 points [-]

It won't be hard if the effects are as large as claimed in the original study.

The study shows minor effects at 1000 ppm and pronounced effects at 2500 ppm. I don't think changes in weather would drive your CO2 concentration to these levels.

And if you interpret the effect of weather as mostly open vs closed windows, there is a whole bunch of other factors in play like the balance of indoor and outdoor contaminants, etc.

I am sceptical of these results, anyway, they look too big. And the authors mention another study:

Researchers in Hungary have questioned this assumption (Kajtar et al. 2003, 2006). The authors reported that controlled human exposures to CO2 between 2,000 ppm and 5,000 ppm, with ventilation rates unchanged, had subtle adverse impacts on proofreading of text in some trials, but the brief reports in conference proceedings provided limited details.

which implied ("subtle") small effect size.

Comment author: paulfchristiano 26 April 2016 02:04:45AM 0 points [-]

Why do you call the effects at 1000ppm minor? They are easily big enough to measure statistically with a realistic sample size for an observational study, even if the effect of weather on CO2 was only say a 5% change in P(windows open).

Opening my window moves CO2 levels in my room from around 1400 to around 400ppm.

I agree the results look too big.