I linked to the LBNL study in my post. You call the differences “slight,” but I’m not yet convinced. Naively, the effects look big enough to justify the expense of maintaining very low co2 levels (e.g. opening windows + running the heat in winter, changing where I work). What I want to better understand is whether those effects are real, what the actual effect size is for tasks I care about, and so on.
I looked at the study again, the reported effects from 2500ppm also just seem totally implausible. On many of the scales they report drops from e.g. 80th percentile to 30th percentile.
10,000ppm causes heavy breathing and confusion, from 50,000ppm upwards you can die in a couple of hours. I don’t think going from 80th to 30th on complex cognitive tasks is totally implausible with an increase from 600 to 2500ppm.
I don’t understand why you find it so surprising given that (it seems) you had no previous knowledge of the area. Where did your prior come from? I can’t be surprised by the fact the Planck length is 1.61x10^-35 and not 2.5x10^-30 given that I had not idea what it was.
After using a CO2 monitor in my house, I know that my room goes from 400 to 1300 depending on ventilation and is not noticeably stuffy (I can’t reliably tell whether the window is open without looking). Other rooms in the house go above 2000 with windows closed. A difference between 80th and 30th percentile looks like a big difference that would be easily noticed, either introspectively or by someone else.
ETA: for reference, that’s a 500/2400 point drop on the SAT.
Given the range of indoor CO2 levels in buildings, this effect looks like it is extremely economically relevant, so I’d expect to have encountered it before (and would expect people to take it more seriously). So that leads me to expect that my interpretation is wrong.
Thanks for the information about ventilation.
I linked to the LBNL study in my post. You call the differences “slight,” but I’m not yet convinced. Naively, the effects look big enough to justify the expense of maintaining very low co2 levels (e.g. opening windows + running the heat in winter, changing where I work). What I want to better understand is whether those effects are real, what the actual effect size is for tasks I care about, and so on.
I looked at the study again, the reported effects from 2500ppm also just seem totally implausible. On many of the scales they report drops from e.g. 80th percentile to 30th percentile.
10,000ppm causes heavy breathing and confusion, from 50,000ppm upwards you can die in a couple of hours. I don’t think going from 80th to 30th on complex cognitive tasks is totally implausible with an increase from 600 to 2500ppm.
I don’t understand why you find it so surprising given that (it seems) you had no previous knowledge of the area. Where did your prior come from? I can’t be surprised by the fact the Planck length is 1.61x10^-35 and not 2.5x10^-30 given that I had not idea what it was.
After using a CO2 monitor in my house, I know that my room goes from 400 to 1300 depending on ventilation and is not noticeably stuffy (I can’t reliably tell whether the window is open without looking). Other rooms in the house go above 2000 with windows closed. A difference between 80th and 30th percentile looks like a big difference that would be easily noticed, either introspectively or by someone else.
ETA: for reference, that’s a 500/2400 point drop on the SAT.
Given the range of indoor CO2 levels in buildings, this effect looks like it is extremely economically relevant, so I’d expect to have encountered it before (and would expect people to take it more seriously). So that leads me to expect that my interpretation is wrong.