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The cognitive costs of air pollution

patrickcollison.com

91–100 of 300 posts

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#91

So logically living and working in the countryside is optimum for your IQ rather than polluted cities and areas?

The countryside can have some bad environmental problems too (expansion of fracking in the rural Midwest of America, etc).

Does fracking cause much air pollution of the type discussed in the article? I thought the main issue was groundwater and earth quakes , and methane gas release / flaring.

Plus there are many countryside areas with no oil.

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#92

How do you all monitor air quality? I personally have a couple of devices (an Awair and a Flow). They seem to under-report PM2.5 compared to purpleair, airnow, and waqi.

I have a uHoo and it’s been great. The readings are inline with some control sensors I got to test the readings.

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#94

How do you all monitor air quality? I personally have a couple of devices (an Awair and a Flow). They seem to under-report PM2.5 compared to purpleair, airnow, and waqi.

I have a uHoo monitor (yes, it is a dumb name).

https://uhooair.com/

It logs temperature, relative humidity, air pressure, CO2, CO, TVOC, PM2.5, NO2, and ozone. They are about $300. The device itself doesn't have any UI; you need to connect to it via a phone app.

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#95
post #64

I wish the argument against pollution would be the simplest one. Go to a massively unpopulated area and just breath. Feel the difference? Isn't it intoxicating? Who gives a crap if umpires make worse calls? Just fight pollution because it's obvious pollution is bad for humans and the planet. Normally I'm all for extra evidence, but in a situation like this come on. It's basically like immaterial evidence against geno…

I like thinking of it as waste, as opposed to bad. Good-bad is the moral realm. Waste is the realm of practicality. The danger is in causing defensiveness, due to judgment, in people whose open-mindedness would be beneficial. I'm not being apologetic of anyone. It's just that this doesn't have to happen through a dramatic conflict of good v. evil (which probably wouldn't work anyway); there are much better alternativ…

it's just that the amount of waste is way too large for the environment to digest

Solution: everyone must consume less, cut unnecessary things, and there are many in most people lifestyles

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#97
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who works for a quantitative hedge fund, you wouldn't believe how many similar results I see of researchers showing a statistically significant predictor of stock market returns. Almost every single one of them is garbage. Are you able to share any that aren't (or weren't) garbage?

Ones that aren't garbage are valuable! Until the rest of the market adjusts, and then they're garbage.

He could share past insights that are no longer relevant. I obviously don't expect him to give away a stock tip worth millions of dollars.

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#98
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably just a coincidence. Stock markets perform lower on Mondays: https://www.macroption.com/stock-market-performance-volatili... Traffic is probably generally higher on Mondays, though I have only anecdotal evidence.

Heh, a rare example of the "proof of correlation isn't proof of the absence of causation" fallacy. No reason that stock markets couldn't perform worse on Mondays because of the extra traffic pollution.

But it's not like companies provide daily sales performance data to trade on. Markets move on speculation. They aren't actually pegged to company performance.

How would lower cognitive ability make markets move lower on a daily basis? All I can think is higher pollution creating greater pessimism among traders.

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#99
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who works for a quantitative hedge fund, you wouldn't believe how many similar results I see of researchers showing a statistically significant predictor of stock market returns. Almost every single one of them is garbage. Are you able to share any that aren't (or weren't) garbage?

Ones that aren't garbage are valuable! Until the rest of the market adjusts, and then they're garbage.

Exactly, there is no actionable publicly known indicator. Because the moment it becomes known by a large enough group of traders, it becomes useless.

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#100
post #76

I wish the argument against pollution would be the simplest one. Go to a massively unpopulated area and just breath. Feel the difference? Isn't it intoxicating? Who gives a crap if umpires make worse calls? Just fight pollution because it's obvious pollution is bad for humans and the planet. Normally I'm all for extra evidence, but in a situation like this come on. It's basically like immaterial evidence against geno…

We need to quantify how bad pollution is exactly. How many people should be allowed to die because the ICE ambulance can’t reach them or the doctor isn’t able to travel to the hospital or food isn’t able to be delivered for a reasonable price etc.

Want some numbers from our government about pollution?

New coal legislation was pushed through with an intensive study by the EPA....

They said it would kill up to 14,000 people.

1) https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2018-08/documents...

2) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/climate/epa-coal-pollutio...

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