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No one cared about my spreadsheets

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Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#161

Post by luma »

civilized wrote: post #117
donohoe wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or you could.

The person to which you are responding isn't asking a bunch of questions that, presumably, was answered by the author in the OP. You were.

I'd suggest reading the article again as I think you've missed the critical point: the data points in one direction, and he has provided mountains of it. It doesn't align with what you've been told all of your life, so instead of looking at the data you argue from the basis of ignorance by engaging what you feel to be "common sense". In doing so, you are doing the exact thing the author is writing about.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#163

Post by xyzzyz »

henrikschroder wrote: post #141
xyzzyz wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read his book, like it was already suggested to you a couple of times, you'd know what he says about "care-free student life". This way, you would be able to address his actual positions, instead of arguing against a version of Caplan you've conjured in your mind, based on a single blog post and a few HN comments.

So what does he say about care-free student life?

> [S]chool inculcates many attitudes that, regardless of their moral worth, impede on-the-job success. If you’re preparing kids for their adult roles, a year of work experience instills more suitable discipline and socialization than a year of school.

> The imperfect overlap between the school ethic and the work ethic is especially blatant in modern American colleges. Fifty years ago, college was a full-time job. The typical student spent 40 hours a week in class or studying.98 Since the early 1960s, effort collapsed across the board. “Full-time” college students average 27 hours of academic work per week—and only 14 hours of studying. (...)

> What are students doing with their extra free time? Having fun. Instead of being socialized for lives of boring work in hierarchical organizations, they’re being socialized for lives of play and self-expression. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa frostily remark in their Academically Adrift:

>> If we presume that students are sleeping eight hours a night, which is a generous assumption given their tardiness and at times disheveled appearance in early morning classes, that leaves 85 hours a week for other activities. . . . What is this additional time spent on? It seems to be spent mostly on socializing and recreation.

> A week in modern college is a great way to teach students that life is a picnic:

>> A recent study of University of California undergraduates reported that while students spent thirteen hours a week studying, they also spent twelve hours socializing with friends, eleven hours using computers for fun, six hours watching television, six hours exercising, five hours on hobbies, and three hours on other forms of entertainment.

> Instead of making students conform and submit, college showers students with acceptance. This doesn’t merely fail to prepare students for their future roles; it actively unprepares them. College raises students’ expectations to unrealistic heights, leaving future employers the chore of dragging graduates back down to earth.

His book discusses your other points too, I strongly recommend it.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#164

Post by EdwardDiego »

henrikschroder wrote: post #139
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.

For what it's worth, after spending a little bit of time looking at his intro and conclusions, it appears to me that he is actually not arguing in bad faith. His assumption is that the purpose of an education is to raise your future earnings potential, and that the higher your salary is, the better for society you are. I'm sure his numbers and spreadsheets are correct. But if you think this is a good argument, a wort…

> that the higher your salary is, the better for society you are.

/me looks at teachers, nurses, and truck drivers.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#165

Post by TameAntelope »

butwhywhyoh wrote: post #112
Brian_K_White wrote: post #77

In another HN post recently a commenter said something about the stock market, and they invoked an image of people collecting money from Brownian movement. It struck me that comment was excellent and insightful, and was only possible because both the commenter and myself were once taught something that neither of us uses in our day jobs, and may never have learned through any normal self-driven persuit. The more I he…

You are providing zero evidence that there is any value to your experience about reading a clever comment comparing Brownian motion and the stock market. Not even qualitatively. You are already an incredibly rare person who would equate such things, so I think it's very odd that you think this concept could apply to the general population. The cherry on top is you haven't even read the book or looked at the spreadshe…

The obsession with “evidence “ is killing discourse.

You don’t give “evidence” when drawing a conclusion, you have a set of assumptions and from there there’s usually only one logical way to go.

Imagine asking for “evidence” 1+1 equalled 2. You could be given a “proof” but there’s no “evidence”.

Even if there were some magical set of data that could “prove” something, humans are not and can not be rational creatures; because time is finite, you must cut off data collection somewhere, even though technically the very next bit of information collected could completely change the measured outcome.

Of course the author’s spreadsheets were ignored; of course people cut off their data collection before getting to them. It’s such an absurd notion, the idea of precisely quantifying value of education, that spending time trying to understand what the inputs were to this spreadsheet is a waste if time for… well, anyone.

The set of people with the time and the expertise necessary to evaluate the author’s math on its merits is apparently zero. That isn’t a “bad” thing.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#166

Post by henrikschroder »

_y5hn wrote: post #152
henrikschroder wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what does he say about care-free student life?

Do your own homework?

There appears to be a bunch of people defending Caplan in this discussion, but most of that defence boils down to "read the entire book!"

No, I'm not going to do that. And if you've read the entire book, and think I'm an idiot at this point, you are free to say so and disengage from this discussion.

But the reason I'm so dismissive of his work is that the conclusion is ridiculous and the premise inherently flawed because education has inherently unquantifiable value that cannot be expressed in a spreadsheet. Ever.

And the reason I'm dismissive of the defenders is that no-one seems to be able to come up with a succinct rebuttal to the criticisms fielded by me and others in this discussion other than "read the entire book!"

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#167

Post by I-Robot »

Kalium wrote: post #135
krisoft wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's a natural thing. If you come up with an implausible sounding thing supported by a very complicated argument then most likely you made a mistake. It is very easy to make mistakes and very hard to find them. If you have a 1000 page proof that 2*2 is 5 I won't spend my…

When there's a real possibility of meaningful and useful insights, we might consider taking it seriously. For me, this can be linked in part to the person's experience and credibility. Caplan isn't some interloper with no knowledge of any of the material he touches on ranting on Twitter. The man has a career as an economics researcher specializing in public-sector work and actually teaches economics at a reasonably p…

No post body was provided.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#168

Post by xyzzyz »

henrikschroder wrote: post #147
ekianjo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Caplan is right it should be a personal choice not subsidized by government

That sounds like a utilitarian dystopia. Where I'm from, universities don't charge tuition, but you still get a small allowance as a student, and you can add on to that with a student loan to cover living costs. Loan interest and repayments are the same for everyone and based on your salary, it's all backed by the government, and if you don't pay back your loans before the age of 65, your loan is forgiven. Given all…

> Given all of this, it is much easier to calculate if an education is "worth it" or not than in the US market, because you can look at average salary progression in different fields to do a pretty good estimate of whether or not you'll repay your student loan before retirement.

It's harder than you think. You also need to take into account probability of actually finishing the degree vs dropping out (which depends on your individual ability, preferences, and other aspects), likelihood of actually getting a job in the field after completing a degree (e.g. there are many more people with a diploma in History than there are jobs in that field), job satisfaction (some jobs tend to have much lower or higher job satisfaction than others, which often is not clear to high-schoolers, and which results in wide discrepancies of monetary compensation, to make up for low or high job satisfaction), and other things too.

The entire subject of this conversation, Caplan's spreadsheet, is exactly his attempt to estimate all of that.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#169

Post by 6510 »

henrikschroder wrote: post #147
ekianjo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Caplan is right it should be a personal choice not subsidized by government

That sounds like a utilitarian dystopia. Where I'm from, universities don't charge tuition, but you still get a small allowance as a student, and you can add on to that with a student loan to cover living costs. Loan interest and repayments are the same for everyone and based on your salary, it's all backed by the government, and if you don't pay back your loans before the age of 65, your loan is forgiven. Given all…

I would, with a straight face, suggest everyone is wrong and the real purpose of education should be building better voters.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#170

Post by xyzzyz »

urthor wrote: post #151
thekashifmalik wrote: post #129

This particular excerpt resonated with me: > It’s hard to avoid a disheartening conclusion: Quantitative social science is barely relevant in the real world – and almost every social scientist covertly agrees. The complex math that researchers use is disposable. You deploy it to get a publication, then move on with your career. When it comes time to give policy advice, the math is AWOL. If you’re lucky, researchers d…

I disagree, insofar in that qualitative social science is ineffective. It's effective. Nobody listens. The fallacy of "general management" means that general managers, who have a background in finance and cost/benefit, are not receptive to the idea that deep knowledge is extremely involved in leadership and decision making. Because then they'd be out of a job.

If evidence we obtain from social sciences is so effective, why are they suffering from deep and wide reaching replication crisis?
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