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No one cared about my spreadsheets

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Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#281

Post by edanm »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #269
edanm wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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, Not everywhere. Next to no homeless people here in Scandinavia yet education is universally available at almost no cost to the student. The US is richer both in absolute terms and per capita so lack of money is presumably not the reason for the diffe…

I wasn't saying that it's either education or specifically helping the homeless. I'm saying it's a tradeoff between spending on education, vs. spending on other things. If homelessness isn't a problem, great! There are still other ways to spend the money. Maybe raise the standard of living of the poorest 10% by giving them a UBI. Maybe build nicer gardens. Maybe just have lower taxes!

It's totally possible that education is more important than all other uses for that money. It's likely true to some extent, because that's what the country has effectively decided to do.

But that comparison has to be made, either implicitly or explicitly, because that money is either going to education or to something else. There's literally no way to not make a decision about this topic.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#282

Post by edanm »

m000 wrote: post #258
edanm wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 Ironically, the same people who would complain about free education, would complain 10x over more money for the homeless or healthcare.

> Ironically, the same people who would complain about free education, would complain 10x over more money for the homeless or healthcare.

That's pretty country-dependent, and is a caricature of most serious people. (Unfortunately lots of people actually do fall into that caricature).

E.g. Bryan Caplan is a libertarian, and while I don't think he personally supports a universal basic income, supporting a UBI is a fairly common libertarian position.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#283

Post by bigDinosaur »

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 *

You're already down all three, because Chrome was first released in 2008, and Android was also released in 2008, and GCP was apparently released in 2008 as well. Who knew?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#285

Post by hgomersall »

renewiltord wrote: post #254
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…

> Students who graduated from such universities often are more capable of independent thinking in my experience. Germany: 111 Nobel Laureates University of Columbia: 83 Nobel Laureates The whole country struggled to produce just a little more than one American university. They may think more independently, but it seems that it was so independent as to fail to advance human knowledge much more than a single American u…

As others have pointed out, that comparison is poor. A better one is Nobel laureates per capita: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_l...

There are a good few European countries above the US.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#286

Post by pas »

renewiltord wrote: post #256
labcomputer wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody's saying "you're missing some important factors, and let's add them. Ok, so I’ll say it. Caplan doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. And neither did the people who he asked to check his spreadsheets. What he is trying to do, in an informal hand-waving way, is something known as causal inference. There are formal, robust ways to do causal inference, which Caplan is not using. No amount of checking his arithmeti…

The practice is not the “do good science using the correct methods”. The practice is “call for increased education spending for *waves hands* reasons”. Listen, this is the old Internet trick: people show up demanding rigorous models and evidence when they see something they don’t like, but what they like they demand nothing of.

That's ... not a fallacy. It's simply extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence in action. (Eg. if your Bayesian prior is already edukashion gud, and someone says giv muniez to teacherz, you can say yes, ok, dollar. But if someone says no no, it's a waste of resources you can say okay the burden of proof is on you now, have fun.)

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#287

Post by periheli0n »

renewiltord wrote: post #254
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…

> Students who graduated from such universities often are more capable of independent thinking in my experience. Germany: 111 Nobel Laureates University of Columbia: 83 Nobel Laureates The whole country struggled to produce just a little more than one American university. They may think more independently, but it seems that it was so independent as to fail to advance human knowledge much more than a single American u…

> The whole country struggled to produce just a little more than one American university. They may think more independently, but it seems that it was so independent as to fail to advance human knowledge much more than a single American university.

Has the university produced the Nobel laureates, or are they merely currently based there?

Also, producing Nobel laureates is not the primary goal of education. Independent thinking is a skill that is useful to everyone, in many areas of life.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#288

Post by Brian_K_White »

mdoms wrote: post #201
mvhvv wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 maj…

> Assumptions and reductions are always required, there is no researcher in the world that reads every book or paper released in their field It's good practice to read the ones you're commenting on.

I think you couldn't have really given that comment much thought.

It takes no imagination at all to poke a hole in that.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#289

Post by periheli0n »

randomsilence wrote: post #275
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. The monetary value itself is useful to everybody who makes a decision. A student at least invests their own time into that education. Shouldn't they know how valuable that education…

> The monetary value itself is useful to everybody who makes a decision.

But I think the real value of education can't be expressed in monetary terms alone. Educated people tend to live longer and healthier. They tend to make more rational financial decisions and plan their lives with more foresight.

In a democracy it is essential that the voting population is educated and able of processing complex information, otherwise it stops functioning.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#290

Post by orborde »

jka wrote: post #2

For anyone looking for a statistical analysis auditing challenge: the author links to an article[1] where they made the spreadsheets in question (questioning the return-on-investment from education) public. A collaborative auditing effort could involve some further documentation of what the origin datasources mean, how the sheets process and transform that information, and how to interpret the results produced. [1] -…

The final versions used for the tables/figures in the book are here, I think: http://www.bcaplan.com/returns.htm
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