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The cognitive costs of air pollution

patrickcollison.com

101–110 of 300 posts

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#101

So does this mean we can now expect populist politicians to crank up PM2.5 emitters at a massive scale prior to elections?

No need. Some people gleefully accept and partake in air pollution.

Out in the countryside where my parents live in Texas, people are even proud that they burn their trash as if they're sticking it to some sort of treehugger group rather than to the inner lining of their (and all their neighbors' and loved ones') lungs.

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#102
post #71
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ has a bad rap (rightfully so, thus no disagreement there). In the cited works they use tests that in the past were called IQ tests - though here all are called cognitive-scores. Why wouldn't IQ tests be great for studying short term cognitive effects? I would trust their values for these type of studies the most: how does lack of sleep, being drunk, after exercise, etc affect your ability to solve abstract problem…

> Why wouldn't IQ tests be great for studying short term cognitive effects? IQ testing is designed to test for intelligent behaviour, which is largely based on long-term neurological development. The connections in the brain, densities of neurons, and long-term potentiations don't change greatly on a short-term basis. Measures which fluctuate based on spot-performance factors are typically deemed unreliable for the p…

I believe that IQ tests (at least the majority of those that I took or seen) are mostly built as abstract problem-solving tasks, similar to those needed to be productive in modern society. Not sure how one would even measure the "intelligent behavior" that you mention.

In addition, to me, it sounds that you are arguing that a test on which you do worse when tired, sleepy, hungry etc. is not an appropriate test because it fluctuates depending on your state of mind. I don't get that.

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#103

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH of Rails fame) gave a great talk on this recently, though he focused more on indoor air quality and its cognitive impact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRqh8oLY7Ik

My takeaway from this: If you live in new construction (owner, or renter), buy new furniture in the spring/fall when you can leave the windows open. Same for paint.

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#104

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 an Awair and two Foobots, they're basically completely unreliable and the software for them is pretty bad.

I've been tempted to get the purple sensors because at least the purple map seems reliable (so maybe their stuff is better?).

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#106
I don't know you, but in every lecture in college that was done in a room with no air flow, I got distracted every five minutes or so. If the proportion of C02 had a cognitive effect that I could feel, then I wouldn't be surprised if other kinds of contaminants do the same.

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#107
post #90

Plug: if you care about this topic and are interested in working on this problem, we're hiring at Aclima. We've got contracts with the major air quality regulators in California, and are looking to scale. Ping me at igor@aclima.io

Do you work with https://plumelabs.com ?

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#108

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.

Any idea how good the Awair monitors are? I recall a report saying they were just so-so but Awair recently updated them to be more accurate.

I personally use an IQAir Air Visual which is highly rated and meant to be very accurate as far as consumer grade stuff goes. It's solid, reliable and the iOS app has been great.

That said after installing piHole I noticed it making 17000 DNS requests a day to a non-existent host: https://imgur.com/tPgwGoK

Explains why the DNS Resolver on my router (pfSense) kept crashing at least.

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#109

From the original source: > Stock market returns are lower on polluted days. I don't want to dismiss the entire article, but I think this points to possibility that there is some bad statistics going on here. I don't see how daily stock returns are proof of, or even related to, cognitive ability on a daily basis. This is exactly the type of finding you'd expect with p-hacking.

To clarify, the paper studied "air quality in the vicinity of Wall Street".

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#110

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.

Do you act on this information? Is there really much you can do to mitigate the effects?
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