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No one cared about my spreadsheets

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Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#211

Post by ALittleLight »

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.

But people are criticizing his result. His complaint is not "Nobody read my book or looked at my spreadsheets" but instead "People are disagreeing with my conclusions, but not my logic." If his case wasn't worth arguing about then people wouldn't be arguing with him. Given that they are arguing it's interesting to note that they aren't doing it by arguing quantitatively.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#212

Post by sundarurfriend »

mizzao wrote: post #93
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…

> the author is ultimately making an point by taking a set of assumptions

And here the discussion is mostly based on people's assumptions about those assumptions.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#213

Post by nyokodo »

catothedev wrote: post #203
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…

Making a DCF analysis for education is going to be extremely murky. That said, since it was done in spreadsheet, it would be easy for a relatively non-technical person to tweak the numbers to refute the author's argument (sidenote: only in the world of hacker news would people think python is more accessible). I think the lack of interest in reviewing the spreadsheet reflects how people with education department degr…

> ROI is not a relevant concept for education investment

If there is no return or even return sought then it can’t be called an investment. It’s just spending on part-time prison for kids.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#214

Post by urthor »

xyzzyz wrote: post #170
urthor wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's more of a case that bad science was made, rather than "this type of science is bad."

Toyota and GM have had widespread vehicle recalls in recent types. I wouldn't put that down to "4 wheeled transportation devices being intrinsically bad."

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#215

Post by Nitramp »

krisoft wrote: post #71
lucb1e wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

Here is a good example: a Japanese mathematician claims he proved the abc conjecture, with an enormous, complex, and totally novel approach. After it was ignored for a long time due to this, it took other mathematicians months of efforts to go through it. And they finally found that not only was the proof incorrect, at least some also think the approach is fundamentally misguided.

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=11723

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#216

Post by lelanthran »

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-…

> But is that really true? To pick a popular theatre-related discipline, consider what an actor does:

> - They show up on time (to scenes, to rehearsal, to performances)

> - They can memorize vast amounts of material in a relatively short period of time verbatim

> - They work well with others

> - They work well individually

> - They can take direction

> - They can take constructive criticism

> - They meet deadlines under pressure (the show must go on!)

> - They can put themselves in other people's shoes (Method acting, ftw)

> - They know how to do research (how does a 1940s soldier talk, dress, walk, act?)

> - They are comfortable speaking in front of groups

> - They can speak clearly and enunciate appropriately (especially good in a remote world with fuzzy tech!)

> I don't really care what industry you're in, those are desirable qualities for ANY hiring manager!

Of those 11 skills, 9 are skills you'd need for any engineering postgrad degree, and 7 are skills you'd get in any engineering undergrad degree. From the hiring managers PoV, with the engineering graduate you also get a lot of other nice skills, like problem-solving complex problems, understanding complicated systems, etc.

> I would be THRILLED if candidates metaphorically walked through the door with evidence of those skill sets under their belt!

They do - that's what the postgrad engineering degrees are - evidence of possessing those skills you mentioned, and using them.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#217

Post by joshuamorton »

sbierwagen wrote: post #197
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…

>would the reduction in college graduates reduce our nation's economic competitiveness? Google had 20k FTEs in 2008, 135k FTEs in 2020: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-ti... In those 12 years, Google did not launch a single new product that they didn't shut down a year later. 115 thousand people, most of them college graduates, did nothing useful for more than a decade. Their primary accompl…

> In those 12 years, Google did not launch a single new product that they didn't shut down a year later. 115 thousand people, most of them college graduates, did nothing useful for more than a decade. Their primary accomplishment was to inflate house prices in tech hubs.

This is just like...obviously false. Google photos (initially part of G+, but spun off into its own thing) as a sort of obvious product example. Not to mention any one of hundreds of products in the cloud org, or like an entire hardware business.

It's also kind of silly to imply (as you are) that launching a new product is the only useful thing. I'd expect iterating on and improving existing products to also be valuable? Like so much of the startup focus is on execution over ideas, but I guess not here.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#218

Post by watwut »

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-…

While I think that a lot of you learned can be transferrable, many of your points weaken your argument. Things like "they show up on time", "they work well with others", "they can take direction". I mean, common, almost anything you do has these.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#219

Post by sbierwagen »

themacguffinman wrote: post #207
sbierwagen wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>would the reduction in college graduates reduce our nation's economic competitiveness? Google had 20k FTEs in 2008, 135k FTEs in 2020: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-ti... In those 12 years, Google did not launch a single new product that they didn't shut down a year later. 115 thousand people, most of them college graduates, did nothing useful for more than a decade. Their primary accompl…

Haha you're so right, I can't think of anything at all. * closes Chrome tab on my Android phone, opens another website hosted on Google Cloud Platform *

>chrome

Copy of Safari.

>android

Copy of iOS

>GCP

Copy of AWS.

Cloning an existing product needed, at the absolute most, a staff of a hundred each. If you want to be wildly excessive, add 900 useless middle managers and developer relations people.

Then what were the other 112,000 full time Google employees doing? What one hundred and twelve business critical new products were they engaged in?

"Nothing"? Then why did they need to have college degrees?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#220

Post by watwut »

torbTurret wrote: post #41
Jemaclus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-…

A fifteen year old cashier at Target can make the same value claim, minus the four year time investment and student debt. Which I think is the author’s point.

Not really, because of the memory, ability to talk publicly and research things. But OP burried those under many absurdly crappy points.
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