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paulfchristiano 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: 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: 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.

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