No one cared about my spreadsheets • Hacker News Board

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#61

Post by burrows » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:31 AM UTC

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…

> Maybe unwarranted, but that also makes me less willing to accept his ideas. Who knows what evidence, lead, etc. was met with the same laziness?

I think you can only say that you’ve chosen not to engage with this these arguments, not that you’ve rejected them as that would require engaging with them.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#62

Post by lucb1e » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:33 AM UTC

Fomite wrote: post #30

hirundo wrote: post #5

Bryan's boss weighed in on this today: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/no... He says the education researchers who might audit this don't because Bryan is an outsider in that field.

Honestly, as a researcher in another field who on occasion gets asked to "audit" people's thoughts, it's a return on investment problem. Doing something carefully enough to actually be worthwhile is (especially for someone's wall of madness spreadsheet) many hours of work. There's no real outcome where it's helpful for the auditor. They don't get paid. No one got tenure checking over someone's Rogue Outsider Spreadsh…

> People doing economic analysis should understand incentives.

For all we know it's just game theory. By doing X (pretending to be surprised, posting about how nobody cares about the math), the other party might do Y in response (someone is triggered enough and does go through the work). It might not add up economically, but that might be lost from sight. Or maybe it does add up now that publicity is in the mix.

(I don't necessarily believe that the author is truly being deceptive, but neither would I argue they must necessarily have understood one economic area because of work in another; if I'm understanding your point correctly.)

For what it's worth, I did not know this, so your comment was helpful to me at least. I did not realize it matters whether you're "in the field" or not, thinking that good contributions are welcomed equally as being good contributions.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#63

Post by karl11 » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:33 AM UTC

I love the irony in all the comments here criticizing his spreadsheets and arguments by people who have clearly not read the book or looked at the spreadsheets.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#64

Post by skybrian » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:34 AM UTC

Jemaclus wrote: post #35

lamacase wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have read the book. He says that engineering degrees are basically the one exception. They're like trade schools. Also, e.g. a social science degree is useful if you're going to be a social science professor/academic, but otherwise none of the skills or knowledge are transferable. He also says that having any degree is "worth it" to an individual, monetarily. It's just not worth it to society to require everyone to…

> otherwise none of the skills or knowledge are transferable. While I understand the source of this statement and why people often say this, I'm not entirely sure I agree with this, at least anecdotally. For example, I have a degree in Theater. Which, on the surface, doesn't transfer well to, say, software engineering or law or accounting or teaching or social work. But is that really true? To pick a popular theatre-…

I'm wondering how much acting experience you can get without an expensive college degree though? Would amateur productions take a volunteer?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#65

Post by csdvrx » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:35 AM UTC

Jemaclus wrote: post #35

lamacase wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have read the book. He says that engineering degrees are basically the one exception. They're like trade schools. Also, e.g. a social science degree is useful if you're going to be a social science professor/academic, but otherwise none of the skills or knowledge are transferable. He also says that having any degree is "worth it" to an individual, monetarily. It's just not worth it to society to require everyone to…

> otherwise none of the skills or knowledge are transferable. While I understand the source of this statement and why people often say this, I'm not entirely sure I agree with this, at least anecdotally. For example, I have a degree in Theater. Which, on the surface, doesn't transfer well to, say, software engineering or law or accounting or teaching or social work. But is that really true? To pick a popular theatre-…

I had a bias against art degrees, but the one person I work with and who's had the most impact has... a theater degree, plus another art degree I forgot. Or maybe philosophy? I thought he was just an exception.

With your surprising and well written example, I realize he's not an exception. There's great value there. And I now fully agree with you.

> And so from that perspective, someone who walks in with a theater or really any kind of arts or social science degree and a modicum of Python under their belt is a very, very attractive hire to me. I can teach you our framework of choice and how to run tests and how to use Jira, but I don't have time to teach you how to learn or how to communicate or how to take direction.

You fully changed my mind.

Being able to multiply matrices by hand is nice, but there's software for that. Soft skills or a rigorous thought process is very hard to find.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#66

Post by analog31 » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:35 AM UTC

Honestly I haven't read the book or checked the spreadsheets, but neither of them answer the question: Are the findings true? Are they of value?

To make an analogy, we don't go back to Maxwell's writings or his calculations to figure out if his electromagnetic theory is true (within its domain of applicability). If no other scientific work were ever connected to Maxwell's, we still wouldn't know if it's true, or at least, his equations would merely be amusing factoids. His equations gained truth and value, along with a list of limitations, through their predictive power and track record.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#67

Post by molszanski » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:35 AM UTC

Don’t know the guy or his work and don’t care.

But his statement is true.

Numbers, research, facts and logic rarely change opinions or drive policies. It is a miracle when they do

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#68

Post by pram » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:37 AM UTC

brimble wrote: post #58

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'v…

Not really. If you put it all together Caplan's world would be a United States with a population of 5 trillion uneducated people. This would propel us to unimagined and unprecedented wealth somehow.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#69

Post by Brian_K_White » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:40 AM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #37

VictorPath wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He also says that having any degree is "worth it" to an individual, monetarily. It's just not worth it to society to require everyone to have education they don't use. Half of Finnish people between 35 and 44 have a degree, whereas only 7% of people in that age range from South Africa do, so South Africa must be much better off than Finland.

Fascinating to think that all you have to do is get 43 out of 100 people in South Africa degrees and it will be Finland.

Perhaps it would be. I don't find it at all silly to guess that if a critical percentage of everyone were made to confront more ideas and and generally be made more aware and thoughtful, that the eventual result is more civilized behavior between members.

I certainly don't think it helps the situation to use the historical and current state of thimgs as some excuse not to bother trying. You can't create better civilization be decree or force. It can only happen when enough percentage of the population does it for themselves, and they don't when they are ignorant or bubbled.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#70

Post by burrows » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:41 AM UTC

Demiurge wrote: post #32

This is a great example of how money and market does not encompass all of life. I didn't read the book, regrettably, so I'm not sure if that's besides the point, but the value of education is a sum of many values for the society as whole that seems a bit hard to put a numerical value on in a spreadsheet. I think the reductionism is kind of obvious.

For every dollar you put in this box, I’ll put ten cents into a scholarship fund for poor children in your country then burn the dollar. How many dollars do you put into the box?

What if it were 300 cents instead?