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No one cared about my spreadsheets

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Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#51

Post by jdminhbg »

lozenge wrote: post #47
civilized wrote: post #6

Just my dumb opinion here, but... there's something extremely implausible on its face about the idea that a sufficiently complex spreadsheet could calculate the difference in value generated from kids going to school versus kids not going to school. If people could be convinced that this was something more than a castle in the sky, maybe it would get more attention. I imagine a bunch of academics put their fingers to…

If the spreadsheet showed education was a net positive, would Caplan accept this and rewrite the book, or would he go looking for more factors and adjustments that could "correct" its result. If he can't accept a spreadsheet showing a positive impact of education, why would the world accept a spreadsheet showing a negative impact of education.

> If the spreadsheet showed education was a net positive, would Caplan accept this and rewrite the book

Caplan is definitely the type of person who would either rewrite on not write the book in that case.

But this an implausible question anyway, because it’s not like you get this far into a project without an idea of what the evidence is telling you, waiting to press a button and out if it’s actually Good or Bad.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#52

Post by renewiltord »

Interestingly, while it's entirely possible that the spreadsheets, through their abstruseness, hide incorrectness; current policy recommendations just try things by assuming outcomes. The conclusion is pre-determined, so evidence isn't really acquired.

Of course we must spend more on educating everyone. So anything that says that we shouldn't is wrong on its face. Of course of course.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#53

Post by erulabs »

lucb1e wrote: post #34
Legion wrote: post #23

This reminds me of people online who construct gigantic walls of bad faith argument text and insist that it's up to everyone else to "debate them" and spend hours deconstructing their argument. Just possibly, dude, your argument isn't worth anyone else's time to debunk.

> Just possibly, dude, your argument isn't worth anyone else's time to debunk. Wow, that's one of the most dismissive remarks I've seen here in quite a while. It also does not seem like you could possibly believe it yourself. Education is a huge chunk of everyone's life, of course it's important to know the upsides and downsides. The returns are one aspect (I haven't read the book, it honestly sounds depressing, but…

You quoted the wrong part if you’re after the dismissiveness. Declaring someone’s argument is in “bad faith” is unimpeachable. You can counter “no, I genuinely believe this” - but that’s just more bad faith argument! It’s an iron-jawed and unconquerable tool to deploy against any argument you do not want to engage with.

Now - are there arguments not worth engaging with? Absolutely.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#54

Post by nickff »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #45
nickff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " His spreadsheets don't answer many questions I might have about such systemic changes, for example, would the reduction in college graduates reduce our nation's economic competitiveness? If it did, how would that effect overall quality of life for average Americans? I don't find compelling answers to these questions in his spreadsheets." His book talked about those things; the spreadsheets are just him 'showing h…

Probably because any attempt to even reduce the topic to a spreadsheet is a case of "not even wrong". When someone says that they proved that say, studying art doesn't matter, with math, you don't bother arguing with their math.

>"Probably because any attempt to even reduce the topic to a spreadsheet is a case of "not even wrong"."

But he didn't reduce it to a spreadsheet, he wrote a very thorough book.

>"When someone says that they proved that say, studying art doesn't matter, with math, you don't bother arguing with their math."

I am not sure what you think Caplan says. His book is mostly about the signalling and human capital models of education. The vast majority of post-secondary students say they attend post-secondary education in order to increase their future earnings, so Caplan calculates the financial impact of various degrees, and then figures out how much is attributable to the various factors.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#55

Post by lucb1e »

epgui wrote: post #14

I bet a spreadsheet that thoroughly analyzed the profitability of going out for a run every day would also find a negative ROI.

Might just be me, but I genuinely wish there was reliable data on everything like this. I'd love to know that someone did a proper study, found that it's not damaging to the knees if you're between BMI such-and-such and run between x and y kilometers every day, that it has health benefits a, b and c, but that of course you have to invest time amount z which one might use also for swimming which then has another value. Then you can just weigh what you enjoy more against the benefits.

Lots of people do things they know is bad for them, more data hasn't stopped anyone from making their own decision, while I do see the potential benefits.

The argument you're making seems to just dismiss the idea without substantiating why it's not important to try and factor in all the factors to reach a conclusion.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#56

Post by heavyset_go »

torbTurret wrote: post #36

“ Several programmer friends advised me to learn a new programming language like Python to do everything automatically, but I’m 98% sure that would have taken even longer – and introduced numerous additional errors into the results. I did plenty of programming in my youth, and I know my limitations.” This screams stubbornness and a lack of willingness to push past a small barrier to me. Maybe unwarranted, but that al…

Learning a new programming language when you aren't a professional programmer isn't a small barrier.

The best tools to use are the tools you know. Would you rather they had spent an inordinate amount of time putting together a hacky script that doesn't work/barely works? I believe if they did that, the comments section here would be picking their code apart for not using industry standard design patterns and for being worse than a new intern's code.

Spreadsheets can accomplish the same thing and are more accessible to most people than a script full of one letter variables and no modules.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#58

Post by brimble »

pram wrote: post #40

I’ve read a few of his books, this and the “open borders” one. I think the problem is it’s kind of “preaching to the choir” for people who are already ideologically aligned. As in, the solutions he advocates, despite being backed up with lots of numbers, are not actually convincing anyone who wasn’t already receptive. So it just gets dismissed as “not even wrong” unfairly or not.

The "open borders" book was recommended to me by a friend, but I passed after reading in a summary that my uninformed intuition about the bad economic effects of the policy on at least some large-ish fraction of existing citizens of rich countries was considered correct by Caplan, that he was relying on some kind of compensation to make these folks whole, in a world in which this plan was made reality. Seeing as we've rarely done a good job of this in the past, that sure looked like a great way to convince me open borders were not a good idea, from the perspective of most people already living in rich countries.

Does it make a good argument that doesn't rely on that kind of thing, or did I make the right call?

(Weinersmith's part, though I probably hold positions very similar to him on most issues, just looked... not even near the edge of being compelling, from what I could tell in the couple summaries I looked at)

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#59

Post by Brian_K_White »

zwieback wrote: post #7

Has anyone here read the book? I have a hard time imagining that a technical education (e.g. engineering, physics, forestry, chemistry) would be worthless if someone wants to work in that field. Social sciences however... but of course I'm biased there.

What are the quanta of having some % of all societies members be some % more thoughtful people than they would have been had they never had to face ideas in school?

It's not something that can be reduced to metrics except possibly on the scale of entire countries over timespans of multiple generations, and even then the effects are probably not seperable from countless other factors because there are no two or more otherwise identical countries to act as the controls.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#60

Post by [deleted] »

nickff wrote: post #42
Hermitian909 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, in part, Caplan has made a fairly classic error in attempting to figure out the optimal strategy for an individual within an existing system, where small numbers of individuals deviating generally doesn't matter, and then using those results to make a policy recommendation about how to change the system en masse in a way that will radically change the system. His spreadsheets don't answer many questions I mi…

> " His spreadsheets don't answer many questions I might have about such systemic changes, for example, would the reduction in college graduates reduce our nation's economic competitiveness? If it did, how would that effect overall quality of life for average Americans? I don't find compelling answers to these questions in his spreadsheets." His book talked about those things; the spreadsheets are just him 'showing h…

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