No one cared about my spreadsheets • Hacker News Board

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#171

Post by jsiaajdsdaa » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 5:35 AM UTC

oehpr wrote: post #137

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…

I was just thinking. I remember being part of online community for a game (starsector, if you're interested) and a user had taken it upon themselves to create effectiveness measurements for the weapons in the vanilla game and in mods. To do this, they created a spreadsheet that mapped out damage per second, range, energy cost, points to use... ect. Numbered them all together, and ranked them with each other. Personal…

Isn't most everything in life just piles of multiplication and addition?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#172

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 5:36 AM UTC

8note wrote: post #103

thetallstick wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the speculative estimates that went into Caplan's spreadsheets were essentially made up When Caplan released the spreadsheet and asked people to "check his math" I am pretty sure what he was really asking was for people to test that exact conditional.

Debugging spreadsheets is pretty notoriously difficult for showing that it does the expected thing, let alone figuring out what assumptions have been made and how valid they are

I think the interesting point is that apparently very few people even tried. I don't know how everyone is dancing around that in this thread but that's what Caplan seems fascinated by in this blog post. He's not saying he's right because nobody checked them, or that everyone ought to have. He's fascinated that nobody chose to challenge his conclusions on quantitative grounds. And he gives some anecdotes that suggest that this is because people in the field are not interested in crafting optimal policy -- which does almost by definition require some amount quantitative approaches -- they are interested in publishing.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#173

Post by henrikschroder » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 5:36 AM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #163

henrikschroder wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> > 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.

If you think this is a bad thing, you are well and truly lost.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#174

Post by trialtrial1 » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 5:39 AM UTC

jsiaajdsdaa wrote: post #171

oehpr wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just thinking. I remember being part of online community for a game (starsector, if you're interested) and a user had taken it upon themselves to create effectiveness measurements for the weapons in the vanilla game and in mods. To do this, they created a spreadsheet that mapped out damage per second, range, energy cost, points to use... ect. Numbered them all together, and ranked them with each other. Personal…

Isn't most everything in life just piles of multiplication and addition?

in the same way that most of tennis is hitting a ball back and forth, yeah

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#175

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 5:40 AM UTC

mvhvv wrote: post #131

With a grain of salt, as someone who has not read the spreadsheets (and has no interest in doing so). The author just seems to misunderstand the relativity of ideology. In particular they bemoan their critics as "..go[ing] with their ideology and status-quo bias, using the latest prestigious papers as fig leaves", but they don't acknowledge that their own findings obviously require some major ideological assumptions…

[deleted]

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#176

Post by librarianscott » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 5:42 AM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #160

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…

This is just judging the tool as a roundabout ad hominid. I bet if he did the exact same calculation in a jupyter notebook, and exported his results as a pdf and did the type setting with LaTeX, you wouldn't handwave away the very premise as intractable. There's no limits to the computational complexity of a spreadsheet. Turing completeness is obviously there (just make a cellular automata). Even requiring the "code"…

But in practice, spreadsheets are usually used for "brainstorming" in a research question to pose some possibilities, while jupyter is used for creating an executable paper for an actual scientific discussion.

The danger in both spreadsheets and in computational notebooks is you can include a lot of mathematically true and/or statistically consistent conclusions that are filled with assumptions that haven't been correlated or even agreed to by voters or policymakers.

For anyone making a bold claim like post-high-school education doesn't promote future earnings, their burden is to come up with macroeconomic examples or even models that are consistent. Just writing a book and a spreadsheet doesn't cut it, which is another way to say, they aren't making their claim in an educated way that modern economists use.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#177

Post by DangitBobby » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 5:43 AM UTC

rrherr wrote: post #84

sgdjgkeirj wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good point. Caplan makes a huge deal about the fact that a students that drops out one semester before finishing the degree takes a huge penalty to their salary. This is what he calls the “sheep skin effect”. He claims that because such a student gets almost all of the education, their penalty must correspond to the signaling component. But this is where his math runs against common sense. If you are an emp…

> If you are an employer and see a student that dropped out of college without a very good reason, then that is a very strong negative signal. This is an argument for Caplan’s signaling theory, not against it. You literally said that whether or not a job applicant graduated is a very strong signal to employers.

It provides more than one signal: a signal that you have obtained desireable knowledge and sensibilties from your education, and a signal that you can be relied on to complete something. The fact that the latter overshadows the former in a world where degree bearers are abundant is unsurprising and tells us precisey nothing we didn't already know.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#178

Post by mvhvv » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 5:45 AM UTC

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…

Assumptions and reductions are always required, there is no researcher in the world that reads every book or paper released in their field, and for those that do read voraciously, only a tiny fragment of that is remembered or understood on the grounds that the author intended.

Part of learning is to deciding which parts to ignore. The book is rejected on it's face because its core claim is essentially "I solved a major issue in another field by reducing it down to the one I know", which is a big red-flag for crank claims.

The article's focus on spreadsheets is part of why it's so easy to brush it aside. The author doesn't realise that the fidelity of the spreadsheet is less important than their own ideological assumptions.

It's possible they cover this in detail in the book, but it's not in this article, nor in any description of the book I've encountered. If something appears as crank-science on it's face (and is getting little traction), then why waste your time on it?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#179

Post by henrikschroder » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 5:49 AM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #168

henrikschroder wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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

Yes, but what I'm saying is that I don't care! People don't care! If you make your educational decisions based on optimizing the rat-race and delaying gratification in favour of some future calculated benefit, you're also the kind of person who has no idea what to do with it when you get there!

My counter-argument isn't rational or analytical or quantifiable, it's irrational! Emotional! Caplan might be correct. But boring.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#180

Post by majormajor » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 5:50 AM UTC

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…

> His book talked about those things; the spreadsheets are just him 'showing his work'. I think Caplan is trying to highlight that despite the fact that many challenged his conclusions, almost nobody challenged his logic or calculations.

Hermitian909 said "the spreadsheets are flawed by not including calculations for these additional levels of effect," and that claim seems pretty compelling: the calculations may be perfectly accurate and also perfectly useless because they say nothing about greater societal effects if everyone changed their behavior.

The problem of individual strategy given the current system vs the question of what the system should be is a classic one, and the latter is far more complicated to compute. The "Moneyball"/baseball stats revolution shows a bit of this: as the things that were initially undervalued were no longer undervalued, "smart teams" had to continue changing. The system wasn't static.

You say he talks about those things in his book in addition, but you can't call that "showing his work" if the work shown doesn't include the most relevant parts.