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The cognitive costs of air pollution

patrickcollison.com

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Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#171

Post by olivermarks »

Scipio_Afri wrote: post #133
javagram wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well to their point, there is more wood, brush or other similar types of burning in rural areas. Especially wood in the US as it is the source of heating homes in rural areas. Bonfires, etc are also more likely. Whether or not that translates into more risk for your exposure to small particles is probably related to where you are (e.g. are you inside the house while the wood is burning, probably, so you are close to…

Wondering where the optimum place for humans to live is, assuming around healthy agricultural practices (away from BigAg) without to much wood smoke pollution

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#172

Post by dmos62 »

licebmi__at__ wrote: post #87
dmos62 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would like to agree with you as I also think trying to find a pragmatic solution is easier than thinking in abstract terms like good/bad, but ultimately waste just takes us to questions about what is being wasted, and wasteful to who. It's a no brainer than relocating to somewhere to avoid emissions can be seen as wasteful for some industries. Besides, framing waste in purely monetary terms, just means that we need…

I'd argue that talking about waste exposes the complexity (reality in simpler terms), while ethics or morals obscure it.

When I say waste, I mean the waste in the widest sense: potential, future, life, etc.

For what it's worth, since you mention it, I don't think that capitalism isn't compatible with an ecological society. It's just that if you're gonna replace all values with a price tag, you have to be accurate with your pricing. For example, the price of diesel has to reflect, among other things, the full effect on the environment.

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#173

Post by Psychlist »

danenania wrote: post #143
dmos62 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what _VERY_ polluted means, but you might consider taking up more physical activity. On GCN youtube cycling channel they argued (including interviews with some health professionals) that even if you live in a city with considerable pollution, the positive effects of commuting on a bicycle outweigh the negative effects of air pollution. They were primarily talking about Britain-scale pollution of course.…

Any physical exertion that makes you breathe harder will cause you to take in more pollution, worsening the effects. Even if exercise helps to offset the damage, your best bet in a polluted place would be to do it inside.

There's been studies done specifically on people cycling to work, and IIRC the conclusion was that the overall QALY result was significantly positive. But that does depend on your baseline - for someone who is fit and active anyway the marginal gain might be small, but for the average person the 10+ QALYS you get from being active vastly outweigh the combined (run over + pollution + injury) cost.

https://eos.org/articles/novel-air-pollution-study-gauges-in... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2920084/

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#174

Post by Psychlist »

yissp wrote: post #110
Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #8

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?

For me just running an evaporative cooler roughly halves the counts, but that's from over 100 to about 50 so it's a kinda of a mixed blessing. But since my rented house isn't airtight or even close to it, there's not a lot I can do other than move.

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#176

Post by ajross »

jjeaff wrote: post #98
ajross wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Markets aren't perfectly efficient. Some trades are dumb. People with lower cognitive ability are more likely to place an order and forget to check fundamentals first, forget to check competitor data, or quiet frankly make whopper mistakes like confusing a ticker symbol. Think of the loons you see on /r/wallstreetbets and other spots. They live on a spectrum, and all of us have bad days.

People with impaired cognitive ability are more likely to make dumb mistakes. That seems pretty obvious to me. The only question is whether or not the effect is large enough to measure using a coarse statistic like this, but that's a quantitative argument.

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#177

Post by romwell »

sxates wrote: post #157
WalterBright wrote: post #149

> "Exposure to CO2 and VOCs at levels found in conventional office buildings was associated with lower cognitive scores than those associated with levels of these compounds found in a Green building." – Allen et al 2016. The effect seems to kick in at around 1,000 ppm of CO2. The last time this came up I bought a CO2 meter for my office. I was quite surprised how often it went over 1,000. Outside air runs around 450.…

I did the same thing at my office and brought it into a conference room with 7 other people. We watched the CO2 climb to about 900 and then it started going down. Seems the climate control system is also tracking CO2 and it started pushing fresh air in when the level got too high. A nice surprise that we have systems managing this - I don't know how common that is in offices though.

Could be a correlation with heat: seven people in a tiny room can generate enough heat so that the thermostat kicks in.

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#178

Post by pastor_elm »

WalterBright wrote: post #149

> "Exposure to CO2 and VOCs at levels found in conventional office buildings was associated with lower cognitive scores than those associated with levels of these compounds found in a Green building." – Allen et al 2016. The effect seems to kick in at around 1,000 ppm of CO2. The last time this came up I bought a CO2 meter for my office. I was quite surprised how often it went over 1,000. Outside air runs around 450.…

I see low CO2 spaces becoming the next big thing for the privileged classes as CO2 levels rise. Weworks of the future will be advertising this as a definite selling point. Mansions with scrubbers getting it down to 200ppm

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#179

Post by moultano »

WalterBright wrote: post #149

> "Exposure to CO2 and VOCs at levels found in conventional office buildings was associated with lower cognitive scores than those associated with levels of these compounds found in a Green building." – Allen et al 2016. The effect seems to kick in at around 1,000 ppm of CO2. The last time this came up I bought a CO2 meter for my office. I was quite surprised how often it went over 1,000. Outside air runs around 450.…

I put one in my son's bedroom and was blown away. He's 3, and calls me in to sleep with him sometimes. It's a small room, and we keep the doors closed so his sister doesn't wake him up and I was blown away by how high the CO2 got with both of us in there: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/cek4dm/co%...

Re: The cognitive costs of air pollution

#180

Post by robbiep »

I don’t believe the nature study results presented there. The MMSE is such a basic test that it is almost impossible to score less than full marks unless you are cognitively impaired. I’ve run through it hundreds of times with patients. The other tests are more cognitively demanding. Looking at the Table 1 of that nature study, there appears as if there would be a significant difference in the distribution of ages - couple extra older people in one of the study groups. I think this is a false positive result
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