alt Hacker NewsI’m not saying this isn’t a legitimate concern but this really seems to have exploded amongst the tech community as the next obsession.
I see this pop up on X every few weeks. Is the concern about this really based on actual science? Is there empirical data proving people are less productive or are damaging themselves as a result of heightened CO2 levels? And I don’t mean observational epidemiology studies.
Replies
Anecdotal, but I'm convinced it screws up sleep quality. I'd just accepted for the longest time that waking up groggy with a slight headache and tired was the norm until I put a CO2 monitor in my room. With the door closed, it climbed up to 1500ppm in under an hour.
I'm certain many people are sleeping in similar conditions without realising and ventilating their rooms properly or leaving the door open.
I feel like it exploded after the cheap integrated sensors came on market that were easy to DIY with. It's nerd catnip, it makes you feel like you're discovering some hidden truth and makes it very tempting to blame the readings for all sorts of things. I don't even know how to trust the calibration on these things.
It kind of reminds me of the old joke where a drunk is looking for his keys under a street lamp even though he dropped them in a dark corner of the parking lot.
We assume sometimes that everybody experiences this in the same way, but a lot of people might be super-sensitive to it, and others completely immune. It is quite possible that the ones obsessing about it are the sensitive ones, because they feel it much more.
That is also my impression. CO2 build up provides a neat opportunity to carry around sensors, track something, display graphs and formulate quantifiable sets of rules. And also is a (more or less) interesting topic to discuss with others. Seems highly appealing to a large part of the crowd here. Personally, I only observed that some people are obsessed about having always one or more windows open but I never personally experienced any non-obvious problems with CO2 buildup. At some point the air is just smellably getting thick and then you just air out. Wouldn't need sensors for that.
It's peak HN meme material because 1) it (allegedly) affects your intelligence which everyone here values highly 2) you can measure it, it's a number 3) requires tech to measure it
So perfect for HN, you can obsess over numbers and tech and how to measure it endlessly and overhype the significance to trick yourself into thinking you're doing something useful.
You get to have your cake and eat it, no wonder everyone loves this topic.
(Also if you're a doomer type you can link this in with rising atmospheric co2 levels for extra points)
I agree it seems like a concern fad. I talked about it once with my brilliant MIT-educated 20 year Navy submariner brother-in-law and he didn't commit one way or the other but did say submarines have CO2 in the low thousands.
You'd think (hope) if there was a big effect here on performance, the relatively cheap/easy solution of maintaining lower CO2 would be standard. I know people think of the military as dumb grunts who you don't want to think, but he was one of the four department chiefs onboard (Weapons, Nav, I forget the others) and they have pretty substantial responsibility to make decisions on their own.
Any affect from CO2 specifically seems weak. Clean air in broadly good though, and high CO2 is a good proxy for stale air. So I’m always supportive of people caring and paying attention to their air.
Along the way they’ll either learn about or accidentally mitigate other ills like radon, nitrous oxide from stoves, diesel particulate’s impact on test scores, etc.
The article links into two controlled experiments.
how can you detect without a study if CO2 meters are basically nowhere?
I’ve lived in Australia and France and I’ve always attributed the taller size of Australians to the excellent state of their ventilation in buildings. Vents (and rooms themselves) are systematically bigger than in France, and if you live in a healthy environment, with meat, lots out outdoors during teen age, and correctly ventilated classrooms during their 20 best years, it makes no secret to me that they grew bigger.
Meanwhile in France we heat classrooms by stacking 35 kids in a confined space. It saves on heating, plus condensation that makes windows opaque helps pupils concentrate on the blackboard, as teachers said during my childhood.
I mean try it for yourself... open a window a bit unless you live in a hellhole.
Also go for a walk, unless you live in a hellhole.
[dead]
IMO it's something where an intervention is often cheap enough that it's worth it even without great evidence.
But also bear in mind that regardless of "are we operating at max effectiveness", OSHA sets a legal limit of 5000ppm in a workplace, and that's about _safety_.
This article is talking about keeping levels below 1000 which is a very high standard IMO (still arguably justified given the studies mentioned). But if you are in a poorly ventilated home office you could easily hit 3000. At that point you are closer to "illegal in the US" than "earth's atmosphere".
So yeah even if you are unconvinced about micro-optimising your CO2 levels there's a very long established argument in favour of at least paying _some_ attention to it.