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No one cared about my spreadsheets

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Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#91

Post by donohoe »

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…

You could just look at the data in the spreadsheet instead of speculating?

I kinda think this is exactly part of the point he is making.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#92

Post by chasil »

taeric wrote: post #88
chasil wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several years ago, I wrote against a local option sales tax for schools with some uncomfortable data. This particular referendum was lost, but the next prevailed. We do not allocate money to education intelligently. As an aside, the comparison engine provided by the Federal Education Budget Project appears to have been taken down. [My Illinois town's] Schools have again placed a sales tax increase before the voters f…

I'm at a loss for how trimming budget can ever really lead to increased performance. "Do better" is not a plan. And if you are behind, as in most areas of life, things are more expensive to catch up. I'm not aware of any case where this is not the way of things. Such that, in large, I would expect areas that have poor families to, in fact, be more expensive to educate than areas with well off families. Many of the ki…

Our high school scores for English and math were 30.1% and 25.9%.

We had Iowa towns that were in the 90%s.

No, I cannot compare them, you are right, these people were exactly where they should have been.

Is this sentiment perhaps a bit biased, especially for what I am paying.

(Yes, I live in one of the most affordable places in the U.S.)

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#93

Post by mizzao »

karl11 wrote: post #63

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.

I once spent a long time building a pretty detailed pro forma model to raise money for a brick and mortar business in a spreadsheet. It was beautifully formatted, comprehensive, and appeared convincing. I patted myself on the back for training myself as an investment banker in 3 months.

I showed it to an i-banker friend that I respected. He barely glanced at the spreadsheet, but offered one thing:

"It's not about how detailed your model is; the most important thing is what your assumptions are."

I was floored. No one cares about spreadsheets for a tech startup, but it turns out even when you're trying to get a brick & mortar, cashflow business off the ground, still no one cares about spreadsheets.

That's probably what folks are reacting to here: the author is ultimately making an point by taking a set of assumptions and using those to derive the point. It seems like the argument is about the assumptions, not the calculations.

In case anyone's curious, here's the model in question. It was for a ping pong social club with food & beverage in NYC:

Base model: https://www.dropbox.com/s/m8amviwttxsq09b/The%20Push%20BK%20...

Sensitivity analysis: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vcw1un7usubb5vb/Sensitivity%20Anal...

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#94

Post by cool_dude85 »

fddhjjj wrote: post #74
BurningFrog wrote: post #15

> 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. I'm biased since I don't know spreadsheets at all, but I think Python code would have been far more reviewable.

There are dozens of examples in the wild of python code getting reviewed, corrected, and enhanced. I’m not a spreadsheet expert. Does that even happen for spreadsheets?

The most high-profile story is some grad students at UMass getting ahold of the spreadsheets powering the calculations in a high-profile economics paper by Reinhart and Rogoff about national debt levels, and finding elementary errors that destroyed the work.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#95

Post by taeric »

chasil wrote: post #92
taeric wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at a loss for how trimming budget can ever really lead to increased performance. "Do better" is not a plan. And if you are behind, as in most areas of life, things are more expensive to catch up. I'm not aware of any case where this is not the way of things. Such that, in large, I would expect areas that have poor families to, in fact, be more expensive to educate than areas with well off families. Many of the ki…

Our high school scores for English and math were 30.1% and 25.9%. We had Iowa towns that were in the 90%s. No, I cannot compare them, you are right, these people were exactly where they should have been. Is this sentiment perhaps a bit biased, especially for what I am paying. (Yes, I live in one of the most affordable places in the U.S.)

I'm not even sure what you are suggesting, to be honest. My point was that if you want scores to improve, you will have to pay more. Pretty much period. You don't get improvement, at any level, for free. Certainly not by cutting funding.

Keeping the same level of funding will at best tread water. Likely, the area will fall, though. And I certainly wouldn't be comfortable pushing that outcome.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#96

Post by baldeagle »

chasil wrote: post #87
Jill_the_Pill wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comparison is meaningless without knowing the needs of the two districts. Are the students in the thriftier district from wealthier households, for example, needing less support from school? Are there more ESL speakers in the costlier district? More students requiring special education? Are the buildings older, requiring more expensive upkeep? Some expenses don't break down to per-student or per-teacher. It's nic…

My district does have an influx of people from Africa, I will admit. I rented one of my houses to such a family, but that is a story for another time. ...I will say also that our 8th grade scores put the other districts to shame (among the highest levels in the area), but the high school was our downfall.

like this generation migrated from Africa? Cause that seems awful close to saying that folks that had many systems tilted against them for a long time aren't up to par with folks that had systems working for them. As a higher post pointed out, catching up takes more resources than coasting on the hand downs from systems of generations past.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#97

Post by Demiurge »

burrows wrote: post #70
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?

What if it were a recipe for a functional fusion reactor?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#98

Post by smnrchrds »

chasil wrote: post #80
joebob42 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a certain level I might agree. On the other hand, I think it's a reasonable point that if we disagree with him, go find the parameter he's chosen wrongly or forgotten, since it must exist somewhere if he's wrong. On the third hand, that's probably unfairly much to ask of your audience, since it requires auditing work that took a year.

Several years ago, I wrote against a local option sales tax for schools with some uncomfortable data. This particular referendum was lost, but the next prevailed. We do not allocate money to education intelligently. As an aside, the comparison engine provided by the Federal Education Budget Project appears to have been taken down. [My Illinois town's] Schools have again placed a sales tax increase before the voters f…

> In Iowa, the average 2013 teacher salary is $33,226. The Illinois average, however, is $37,166, which is above the national average of $36,141. Illinois teachers are (more than) fairly compensated.

Where are you getting these numbers? According to BLS, median pay for elementary and high school teachers are respectively $60,660 and $62,870 per year.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/kinde...

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/high-...

EDIT: There is actually more granular information available as well. Fewer than 10% of elementary school teachers earn less than 40k per year. Probably fewer than 5% earn as much as or less than the 36k number you quoted for national average.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes252021.htm#nat

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#99

Post by Aransentin »

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-…

This is all in line with the author's point. Having an education does demonstrate that you have soft skills like punctuality, conscientiousness, etc. Being able to filter on those criteria is valuable to the employer and that employee alike.

The question is just how much of education is testing for skills that were there all along, and how much is actually taught. Caplan says that all evidence points to that it's almost all A, and very little B. If true, spending several years and very large amounts of money just for one person to get ahead in a zero-sum game is not very beneficial to society as a whole.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#100

Post by chasil »

baldeagle wrote: post #96
chasil wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My district does have an influx of people from Africa, I will admit. I rented one of my houses to such a family, but that is a story for another time. ...I will say also that our 8th grade scores put the other districts to shame (among the highest levels in the area), but the high school was our downfall.

like this generation migrated from Africa? Cause that seems awful close to saying that folks that had many systems tilted against them for a long time aren't up to par with folks that had systems working for them. As a higher post pointed out, catching up takes more resources than coasting on the hand downs from systems of generations past.

My relationship with them lasted many years, lasted through the pandemic, and they left angry.

I am selling the house that I rented to them, and putting it into stocks.

I don't know if this makes me a bad person, but I did want something better out of the experience at some point. That's past.

I would not recommend rental property, but most of you know this by now. Nothing like being young and foolish.

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