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Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)

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Re: Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)

#91

Post by jval43 »

mmooss wrote: post #83
Aurornis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you need to think critically (and skeptically) to avoid assigning value to things that don't have it, but you must find value. This isn’t critical thinking. This is toxic positivity. It’s okay to admit that some studies don’t have value to add. If you don’t accept this, you’re going to be tricked by a lot of people trying to get your attention with bad data. Being able (and willing!) to filter out bad sources, even…

lol > some studies It's almost every study on HN, not some studies, which you'd understand if you read my comment.

Yes because most studies that end on up HN are there because they were reported on somewhere as news.

This usually happens in usually these cases:

1. when a paper is extremely good and it's results are groundbreaking, or

2. when a study itself claims it has groundbreaking results, or

3. when it's a regular study that's gotten some great marketing/promotion e.g. by their university.

The case of 1. is extremely rare, and even when everyone believed the results and they were peer reviewed by a reputable paper like Science, some of them turned out to be academic fraud that was later retracted.

Most studies that pop up on HN are of types 2. and 3. That's just because otherwise they would not get news attention.

But most studies in general are in category 4: the ones an academic or professional would read going about their daily business / research. These range from terrible, to OK, to really great, but 99% never make the news.

As a (former) academic, I've read lots of papers and like in real life it's usually the people (papers) that get attention who scream the loudest. There are some gems too of course, and it's right to not ignore anything.

But in my personal experience and over time, I've been very right to be very sceptical once a result turns up in the news because of the 3 ways it can get there.

This is amplified even more so with papers that base their results / outcome purely on statistics, such as most experimental studies done. These derive their results from the statistics (sample size, experiment design, etc) so their power and the probability of their result being correct (what the authors say) it directly coupled.

Re: Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)

#92

Post by jval43 »

mmooss wrote: post #39
bawolff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science succeeds when people lean towards the side of cynicism instead of optimism. Scientific research should be read critically.

Critical thinking and skepticism are good, but much of what happens on HN is not that. Thinking critically includes, most of all, finding value - you need to think critically (and skeptically) to avoid assigning value to things that don't have it, but you must find value. The goal is to build knowledge - just like the study author needs to find knowledge among flawed data, you must find knowledge among flawed studies…

Science is a long game, it's not about sales where you need to sell right now. Extreme results will be attempted to be replicated, which in turn costs a lot of funding. That is money and time, sometimes a whole persons career.

This money and time is taken directly away from funding other, potentially more worthy or more likely to be correct studies.

There is no point of looking at every (flawed) study in the most positive way, unless you have unlimited time and money to pursue every avenue of research.

Often (not always), the studies that are most heavily promoted among the news and in business or politics are really not the best research and other, less visible but more solid research gets ignored in favor of whats popular or what has had good marketing.

This is very frustrating for people doing solid good research, because every so often someone else will come along with wild, exaggerated claims and very little data to back it up, and then gets funding for it.

It takes literal years away from good science just because someone markets and speaks well.

Which is fine in business, but in science this is not something "the market" can or will correct for well, simply because the timespans are so long.

Re: Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)

#93

Post by jancsika »

Aurornis wrote: post #80
AngryData wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also think there is a bias of schools spending extra money and effort towards student improvements if they are willing to go so far as allocate funding for air filtration systems. A better method would be to just give some schools air filtration for free and see if things help without any other major changes. To me its like looking at schools that buy newer buses and trying to show new buses improve test scor…

> A better method would be to just give some schools air filtration for free and see if things help without any other major changes. This is what the study looked at. The problem was that it wasn’t randomized within schools or across teachers. They also looked at a very limited time window. They also note that some teachers weren’t using the air filters. They also found that the VOCs they were trying to filter weren’…

> They also looked at a very limited time window. They also note that some teachers weren’t using the air filters.

To correct and clarify:

They also looked at a very limited time window. They also note that-- after this very limited time window-- some teachers stopped using the air filters. In the words of the authors, this made long-run results "difficult to interpret."

Re: Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)

#94

Post by 4gotunameagain »

jedc wrote: post #50
amluto wrote: post #41

I wish there was more data on the effects of gasses in the air on people. We seem to know: - Elevated CO2 in rooms impairs cognitive performance. - Elevated CO2 in submarines, at levels far higher than you would see in a normal room does not appear to impact cognitive performance. - Installing carbon filters (what this study actually looked at) might improve classroom performance. - People don’t like stuffy rooms. Al…

(Former submariner here.) Elevated CO2 in submarines absolutely impairs performance. One example: there was a guy on my boat who got migraines when CO2 got too high - he was useless. Luckily the fix is simple - just turn on another CO2 scrubber. There's nothing special about a submarine that makes CO2 somehow different than anywhere else.

What if you're low on sorbent and can't turn on another scrubber ?

I wonder if sorbent quantity correlates with performance

Re: Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)

#95

Post by mmooss »

jval43 wrote: post #92
mmooss wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Critical thinking and skepticism are good, but much of what happens on HN is not that. Thinking critically includes, most of all, finding value - you need to think critically (and skeptically) to avoid assigning value to things that don't have it, but you must find value. The goal is to build knowledge - just like the study author needs to find knowledge among flawed data, you must find knowledge among flawed studies…

Science is a long game, it's not about sales where you need to sell right now. Extreme results will be attempted to be replicated, which in turn costs a lot of funding. That is money and time, sometimes a whole persons career. This money and time is taken directly away from funding other, potentially more worthy or more likely to be correct studies. There is no point of looking at every (flawed) study in the most pos…

> There is no point of looking at every (flawed) study in the most positive way

This line epitomizes the nonsense in the discussion. I didn't say every study, you can't know it's flawed without seriously examining it, and I didn't say in the most positive way at all.

By using these exaggerations, you damage any serious discussion - you give people nothing to respond to except your emotional state.

What I said was, the point is to build knowledge, and so the way to examine research is to find the valuable knowledge - which includes evaluating the accuracy, etc. of that knowledge. There's no other point to it - we're not awarding tenure here, so there's point in keeping some overall score. We just want to learn what we can.

Re: Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)

#97

Post by ajb »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #33
xattt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, schools able to implement air filtration and fresh air exchanges systems are likely those flush with cash and supportive parents.

only ycombinator would have a hard time with the concept of 'open the window' and instead expect a capital installment of $2B to retrofit classrooms

In many areas the source of air pollution is outside. Opening windows helps with house dust and mold spores, but not with particulates from diesel, tyres or with pollen.
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