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No one cared about my spreadsheets

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Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#241

Post by barry-cotter »

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.

> I disagree, insofar in that qualitative social science is ineffective.

> It's effective. Nobody listens.

This is exaggerated but in the right direction. Consider A/B testing. We know that works. We know how. It’s been a big deal for well over a decade. And it’s still not standard. There are large, profitable companies that sell direct to consumers that don’t do it who would reliably, predictably get a 10% bump in profits off of doing it.

But it does grow. Selling things on the internet isn’t as competitive as highly liquid, transparent financial markets but people do pick up $100 bills lying on the street eventually.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#243

Post by burrows »

henrikschroder wrote: post #237
burrows wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> education has inherently unquantifiable value that cannot be expressed in a spreadsheet. Ever. Any attempt at modeling any phenomena will fail to capture some aspect of that phenomena. So are you suggesting that all attempts at modeling are inherently flawed and must lead to ridiculous conclusions?

- To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important is that objective? Question 1 rates the poem's perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem's greatness becomes a relatively simple matter. If the poe…

Right. But I didn’t assert that all things can be gainfully modeled.

I suggested that the non-specific incompleteness of a model isn’t a compelling reason not to use the model.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#244

Post by periheli0n »

Isn't the real problem the economisation of education? The desire to express the value of education in monetary terms is really only useful for those running education businesses, like e.g. many of today's universities in the US ans UK.

One side effect of the economisation of education is the desire to quantify and standardise "academic quality". For example, setting minimum pass rates for modules, which ultimately leads to declining assessment standards. Or "value added" as a major criterion for educational success, i.e. how much students improve as opposed to how well they did overall (leading to universities taking on many students who are actually not fit for study, because as long as they graduate, much "value" is added for them).

Education has a value beyond money, and in countries where education is free or low cost (like Germany) it is often organised around providing the student with the opportunity to learn, rather than focusing on graduating as many students as possible. It is in the responsibility of the student to make use of the resources provided, rather than the responsibility of the provider to satisfy a paying customer. Students who graduated from such universities often are more capable of independent thinking in my experience.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#245

Post by edanm »

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…

> 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.

I mean, we make lots of policies around education all the time. Subsidizing or not subsidizing various stages of education. Forcing or not forcing kids to go to school. Etc.

What are we basing these decisions on? The idea that "just a spreadsheet" isn't enough raises the question- what is? What is better than a serious academic doing heavy research on the topic, combining various fields of study, and actually sitting down and quantifying and doing math to get actual results, and then publishing them?

I think this is a more serious way to make policy than most ways it gets done, which mostly consists of people arguing without having research or spreadsheets to back them up, but rather relying on much more on feelings.

> If people could be convinced that this was something more than a castle in the sky, maybe it would get more attention.

The book got a lot of attention. But all the attention, both positive and more commonly negative. But nobody actually challenged the calculations - they used hand-wavy statements for or against it, but didn't acutally bother dealing with the numbers themselves. That's his point.

> I mean jeez, what did he even compare our status quo education system against? Where did the kids go in the counterfactual no-education scenario? Did the kids all go home to an infinite supply of stay-at-home moms? Did they go to extended daycare, all the way up to age 18? What did they do with all that time?

I mean, he wrote an entire book about this. You can read it. It's not like he didn't provide answers for these questions.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#246

Post by GaylordTuring »

diatone wrote: post #155
nickff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caplan’s approach was not particularly novel thinking, it was just thorough. He used existing studies, tools, and paradigms to calculate the returns to different educations.

So in other words, the kind of thing that typically is suited to academic peer review? I don’t want to sound cynical, and this certainly isn’t ideal from a “cultivate a vibe of intellectual humility and curiosity” perspective, but is it a surprise to anyone but the author that laypeople didn’t take to a thorough critique of his work?

Unfortunately, however, peer review in these fields extremely seldom involve someone actually checking the code/all the calculations/the underlying data.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#247

Post by edanm »

periheli0n wrote: post #244

Isn't the real problem the economisation of education? The desire to express the value of education in monetary terms is really only useful for those running education businesses, like e.g. many of today's universities in the US ans UK. One side effect of the economisation of education is the desire to quantify and standardise "academic quality". For example, setting minimum pass rates for modules, which ultimately l…

> Isn't the real problem the economisation of education? The desire to express the value of education in monetary terms is really only useful for those running education businesses, like e.g. many of today's universities in the US ans UK.

I'm a big fan of education.

However, when education is subsidized, you're implicitly making the decision that it's more important to pay for that education than to pay for e.g. more help for the homeless, more money for healthcare, etc.

That might be the correct decision! But it is a decision.

There is no way around the idea that education, like everything else, costs resources, time and money, that can be spent on other things. It's a totally valid thing to wonder whether it's the best use of that money there is.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#248

Post by ajuc »

> A few critics bizarrely claimed that one recent paper had refuted my entire enterprise.

For them your whole enterprise is also "one recent paper". And yours is the one with extraordinary claims.

I only skimmed the spreadsheets and my criticism isn't quantitative so feel free to ignore it. For one thing signaling provides value, so just treating it as useless isn't fair. You can argue it's not worth it at the current prices, but at some price over 0 it would be worth it.

For another thing there's a lot of nonlinear special cases that you throw out of window by looking at aggregates. Scientists and engineers don't grow on trees. For example imagine we save 30 years of education spending but we don't have quantum mechanics and relativity. Are we better off?

Unicorns in education have crazy high potential value and can be used to justify a lot of wasted spending.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#249

Post by edanm »

Havoc wrote: post #10

If you want people to look at your work (of any sort) it has to be at least marginally reader approachable. Novel thinking wrapped in a huge ball of spreadsheets isn’t that. Per authors own words it takes whole day author guided tour to get through it.

He also wrote an entire book on the subject, and gave numerous talks on the subject. It's very easy to hear the main parts of his argument without grasping with spreadsheets.

His point was that, if you take the trouble to disagree with him (you being another academic, a reporter, etc), then you should also actually grapple with the numbers. Which I think is valid.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#250

Post by Someone »

tylermenezes wrote: post #230

I have read his spreadsheets, so here's my critique. (And I will say that, throwing all the spreadsheets out the window, I still agree broadly with many points to some extent.) The input numbers (in meta.xlsx) come from imperfect samples of the real world with non-zero error -- often quite a bit higher than 0 -- which is compounded pretty far in some cases. I don't think any person actually can actually evaluate thes…

There also is (FTA):

“I took the countless papers that start with the standard return estimates and tweak them with one novel complication. Then I merged all the tweaks that seemed convincing to me* to get final policy-relevant numbers”

So, the model was adjusted from tweaks created by one person, and then those tweaks were evaluated by the same person, not on objective criteria, but on what seemed right.

I also guess the author at the start had ideas about the quality of each of the “countless papers that start with the standard return estimates” and used them to pick those he included in the model.

I don’t see how that could ever lead to an objective model, even if the author started this exercise unbiased.

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