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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: 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: paulfchristiano 15 May 2016 02:51:16AM 4 points [-]

OK, this literature review wins the $500. If you want to PM me with a payment mechanism it's yours (I'll follow-up if you don't).

If you want to state your reservation price for the certificate I might be willing to buy it, but I expect we won't be able to make that work out.

I would likely subsidize the inclusion of CO2 data in your personal monitoring, if you commit to publishing the relevant data and if you aren't going to monitor CO2 anyway.

Comment author: gwern 15 May 2016 10:21:52PM *  2 points [-]

OK, this literature review wins the $500. If you want to PM me with a payment mechanism it's yours (I'll follow-up if you don't).

Far be it from me to turn down free money. You can send it in Bitcoin to 1CkXM7sGSgMPKJ6RnpeaNDHyvVEzCHq2rY or via Paypal to gwern0@gmail.com. If neither of those works for you, email me with what would.

I am probably going to get a Netatmo. On closer inspection the Foobot is not as impressive as I thought as it does not have a CO2 sensor.

EDIT: thanks. I've ordered a Netatmo. EDITEDIT: arrived and configured. Seems to work.

Comment author: gwern 01 July 2016 11:22:06PM *  1 point [-]

Example data export: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/2016-06-23-netatmo.csv I am currently running a CO2/sleep experiment after noting alarmingly high CO2 levels in the morning.