One or two research groups have published work on carbon dioxide and cognition. The state of the published literature is confusing.
Here is one paper on the topic. The authors investigate a proprietary cognitive benchmark, and experimentally manipulate carbon dioxide levels (without affecting other measures of air quality). They find implausibly large effects from increased carbon dioxide concentrations.
If the reported effects are real and the suggested interpretation is correct, I think it would be a big deal. To put this in perspective, carbon dioxide concentrations in my room vary between 500 and 1500 ppm depending on whether I open the windows. The experiment reports on cognitive effects for moving from 600 and 1000 ppm, and finds significant effects compared to interindividual differences.
I haven't spent much time looking into this (maybe 30 minutes, and another 30 minutes to write this post). I expect that if we spent some time looking into indoor CO2 we could have a much better sense of what was going on, by some combination of better literature review, discussion with experts, looking into the benchmark they used, and just generally thinking about it.
So, here's a proposal:
- If someone looks into this and writes a post that improves our collective understanding of the issue, I will be willing to buy part of an associated certificate of impact, at a price of around $100*N, where N is my own totally made up estimate of how many hours of my own time it would take to produce a similarly useful writeup. I'd buy up to 50% of the certificate at that price.
- Whether or not they want to sell me some of the certificate, on May 1 I'll give a $500 prize to the author of the best publicly-available analysis of the issue. If the best analysis draws heavily on someone else's work, I'll use my discretion: I may split the prize arbitrarily, and may give it to the earlier post even if it is not quite as excellent.
Some clarifications:
- The metric for quality is "how useful it is to Paul." I hope that's a useful proxy for how useful it is in general, but no guarantees. I am generally a pretty skeptical person. I would care a lot about even a modest but well-established effect on performance.
- These don't need to be new analyses, either for the prize or the purchase.
- I reserve the right to resolve all ambiguities arbitrarily, and in the end to do whatever I feel like. But I promise I am generally a nice guy.
- I posted this 2 weeks ago on the EA forum and haven't had serious takers yet.
Using fixed-effects for each person helps model such heterogeneity, but still nothing comes out. I don't see why you would dismiss them so readily. It's just that the old-wives-tales are wrong yet again.
If you really believe that weather relationships could be so obscure and complicated and individual that there are no meaningful average effects, that casts a lot of doubt on the claim that there's a consistent average effect from CO2 and all the background studies about ventilation and air quality as well.
Feddersen et al model very particular heterogeneity, to wit the usual demographic and econometric data:
That's not going to help ferret out idiosyncratic reaction to weather.
I don't have any old wives to listen to :-) The source is my personal experience and the experience of people I know who don't seem to have any reason to lie about it.
I didn't say that. I said that not seeing average effects does not rule out individual-level effects and that at the anecdotal level I do see these effects.
And there is no reason to generalise to everything. I am sure that "bad air" which is bad enough to produce consistent measurable average effects exists and is not very hard to construct or find.