Comment by rcoveson

The data have nothing to do with the hypothetical where the air filters process 10% of the air in the room. They also have nothing to do with the air filters in the thought experiment, which are simplified, ideal filters that have the exact characteristics we say they do. Nobody is applying the numbers in question to any "chaotic system", because this is just a simple framing designed to illustrate exactly one, utterly banal point: If you don't process most of the air, it doesn't matter how efficient you are. In fact, that's all the section should have been. That one sentence. No numbers (it doesn't need them), and very little detail. Just, "if you don't process most of the air, the efficiency doesn't matter". You can't disagree with that conditional statment. You can argue that the premise is flawed, or irrelevant, or unrealistic to the point of uselessness, but you can't argue with the totally boringly obvious statement that if you aren't processing 90% of the air at all, then your efficiency doesn't matter. It's not more controversial than saying that "if your air filters are turned off, their efficiency doesn't matter."