No one cared about my spreadsheets • Hacker News Board

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#371

Post by tsimionescu » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 6:44 PM UTC

ALittleLight wrote: post #205

tsimionescu wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone said they came up with a spreadsheet that quantitatively proves that Homer's Odyssey is a worse piece of art than the Mona Lisa, would you go through their quantitative analysis, or simply dismiss their argument on the face of it? Education's value to society and the individual is inherently unquantifiable with today's tools. Maybe someday we will have a mathematical model of the human mind and a theory of…

Are you saying you wouldn't take a look at this spreadsheet? I definitely would. Though I don't think it's possible it would certainly be interesting to see someone try, and if it failed to be interesting I could entertain myself by writing a comment explaining how they had failed. You say that education's value is "unquantifiable" but that's not quite even wrong. The question isn't "What is the ineffable value of ed…

The discussion of how much money to spend on education should not be done based on some expected value of education. It should instead be done by polling various interested parties on how they feel about current the current education system, what resources they are missing (if any), what types of spending are not producing useful results etc.

You don't have to quantify the expected value in order to decide on costs - this is only done as a reductionist homo economicus type model.

For a more direct example, when deciding to go watch a movie, do you do some computation of how much your net worth will increase by virtue of seeing the movie, and compare that to the ticket price? Or are you simply acting on practically unquantifiable subjective feelings of enjoyment about the movie, and comparing the price to entirely different goods (e.g. you probably wouldn't go if the ticket price is 10000$, because you can buy other things you feel are much more enjoyable/important with that kind of money).

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#372

Post by henrikschroder » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 6:55 PM UTC

periheli0n wrote: post #337

roenxi wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging the benefits of anything only on the financial bottom line is risky. Many extremely valuable things are valuable because they are cheap to the point of irrelevancy. Which is why it is a valid question to ask whether the resources are worth it. > For example, a democracy can only function if citizens are able to process complex information to base their voting decisions on. It has worked pretty well for the la…

> It has worked pretty well for the last 2,500 years with voters possessing extremely questionable education. Early democracies often restricted the right to vote to specific parts of the population. Also if anything has become clear in the last 5 years it’s that educated people are much less likely to be deceived by false populist promises.

The last two years have shown that the educated portion of the population was just as easily deceived by false populist promises, and just as easily provoked into channelling their frustrations onto an undeserving scapegoat.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#373

Post by labcomputer » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

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.

Ha. It's a trick to point out that there are well-known, easy-to-understand, rigorous models to measure this kind of this, which the author has declined to use?

Why bother with spreadsheets at all then? If the author is going to do a bunch of arithmetic to convince us that some conclusion is correct, shouldn't we ask that he actually perform relevant and useful arithmetic?

1 + 3 = 4 See? I just proved that we should spend eleventy brazillion dollars on K12 education next year.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#374

Post by whatshisface » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:19 PM UTC

labcomputer wrote: post #373

renewiltord wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ha. It's a trick to point out that there are well-known, easy-to-understand, rigorous models to measure this kind of this, which the author has declined to use? Why bother with spreadsheets at all then? If the author is going to do a bunch of arithmetic to convince us that some conclusion is correct, shouldn't we ask that he actually perform relevant and useful arithmetic? 1 + 3 = 4 See? I just proved that we should…

>shouldn't we ask that he actually perform relevant and useful arithmetic?

This is a great point, but has anyone looked at the spreadsheet yet to see for themselves? I think we're proving him right so far, haha.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#375

Post by librarianscott » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:27 PM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #209

librarianscott wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 corr…

Your assessment that the claim is "post-high-school education doesn't promote future earnings" shows that you have wholly not understood (and perhaps not even tried to understand) what Caplan has actually claimed. With such a foundational mischaracterization, your critique of the appropriateness of his data, assumptions and calculations is without merit. If you don't feel like reading the book, you can read the slide…

Hacker News is more about having a discussion of, usually, tangentially topics to the link someone has posted. But if you wish to discuss some of Caplan's theories such as "“Conventional education mostly helps students by raising their status,” let's analyze that... (1) the post-secondary education in various countries differs a lot, (2) there are countries where "status" means a full bureaucracy class, other countries where it means ability to get a license such as a veterinary license, other countries where status means certain religious or tribal affiliations, or countries like the U.S. where status means graduating from certain colleges but not others (3) most studies conclude that education increases the macroeconomic productivity of an economy whether or not it raises individual statuses, (4) there are actually advantages to government raising the statuses of more individuals in some countries (such as having a stable middle class that isn't reactionary to politicians), etc.

But, if you read my earlier point, arguing these things through a book and spreadsheets is what think-tanks do, not what scientists do.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#376

Post by isitmadeofglass » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:30 PM UTC

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…

> The benefits of having a significant, as large as possible, portion of everyone being at least somewhat educated on a wide range of basic ideas (not facts so much) isn't quantifiable.

True. So you support the policy of giving every citizen 2 billion$ and 40 years to dedicate to nothing but studies. Since obviously society as a whole will necessarily benefit much more than that cost right? Or can we agree that any resonable estimate of the benefit to society of education will at least put it less than that level? If so, then you do believe it is qanrifiable, you just don’t like the conclusion of his estimate of the value because you want it to be higher than he calculate it being.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#377

Post by oehpr » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:34 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #188

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…

Doesn't asking that Caplan spend one second longer on his calculations automatically rule out everything else that anyone has ever said about the subject? That's the most interesting part of this for me - nobody's saying "you're missing some important factors, and let's add them." People are saying, "I don't know that you included all the factors, so I am going to go back to reading opinion columnists for whom 'facto…

And you know what? Just like with my hobbyist friend, I thought the spreadsheet they made were a valuable contribution! I thought it was BETTER than just guessing. Heck I know it was because so many mods in starsector bring in unintentionally broken equipment and make the game easy. Using their spreadsheet on those mods showed clear heuristics that indicated what in practice seemed to be true.

But my hobbyist friend lacked what I think is important here. The humility to see that the piles of multiplication for the handwavey guesses that they are. Caplan's spreadsheets, to me, made his argument more persuasive. But still not that persuasive. My priors already have education being a net benefit as highly probable, and I'll update, but not much.

This seems rational to me.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#378

Post by isitmadeofglass » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:34 PM UTC

csours wrote: post #46

robbedpeter wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you'd lose that bet. Running, even just a little, results in such clear improvements to general health and lowering of all cause mortality that the spreadsheet creator would have to work really hard to push the effects into the negative, and anything you did to frame running as a negative would be trivially dismissed.

People who can run every day are much healthier than people who can't run every day. People who continue to be able to run every day beyond middle age are exceptionally healthy compared to their peers. It's really hard to disentangle the cause from the effect. Between that and running injuries, car/bike accidents, skin cancer, etc, it probably wouldn't be tooo hard to show that running is not worth it. Mind you, I'm…

> It's really hard to disentangle the cause from the effect.

I have to laugh. No it’s not. It’s not like healthy people just from the fact that they are healthy have some odd quirk of occasionally randomly tripping into a 30min run without any say in the matter.

Regular running causes an improvement in health.

Improved health does not cause regular running.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#379

Post by tsimionescu » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:36 PM UTC

edanm wrote: post #236

tsimionescu wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone said they came up with a spreadsheet that quantitatively proves that Homer's Odyssey is a worse piece of art than the Mona Lisa, would you go through their quantitative analysis, or simply dismiss their argument on the face of it? Education's value to society and the individual is inherently unquantifiable with today's tools. Maybe someday we will have a mathematical model of the human mind and a theory of…

> Education's value to society and the individual is inherently unquantifiable with today's tools. Why? What makes it inherently unquantifiable? More importantly, we live in the real world, in which we need to make actual decisions, which cost money and time. Both policy decisions, like: should we encourage higher education? Should we subsidize it? Extend schooling to 15 grades instead of 12? Etc. But also personal d…

> Why? What makes it inherently unquantifiable?

The fact that we are nowhere near being able to mathematically model individual and societal human behavior at a level that could help us come up with such a quantity. To do so, we would need to have a model which can predict how someone's behavior would change by reading and understanding a particular book, or how much value a new ideology could bring to society times the probability of someone could come up with a new ideology by getting an education. We would need to deeply understand the human mind at the same level we understand the behavior of gases at least.

As to how we can then decide how much to spend on education, the answer is somewhat simple: you poll people's opinions of where education is lacking, where it is strong, what kind of resources could help improve it, how important they feel this improvement is. Then you come up with some qualitative goals ("all children should be able to read and write by grade 4"), and then invest money needed to achieve these goals.

What you don't do is try to come up with some bullshit a priori monetary value (an education will increase people's salary by this much, times the tax rate, times the number of people => this is how much we should invest), as if you were running an investment bank and not a democratic society.

And note that the first example is exactly how people make most decisions in the real world. You use your (currently) unquantifiable subjective preferences to set a goal for something, try to estimate how much it would cost, and then at best you do some computation of "what else could I do with this money/time" and decide based on that whether you should spend the money.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#380

Post by isitmadeofglass » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:51 PM UTC

qqqwerty wrote: post #346

rrherr wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think the term "negative signal" muddies the water here. Caplan is walking on a bit of a tightrope. He is arguing that colleges provide minimal education benefits, and that its primary value is in the signaling provided by the degree. But if Caplan is correct, why would someone drop out in their senior year? If the only real benefit is the degree, and if the degree comes with a lifetime of increased wages, surely a…

> But if Caplan is correct, why would someone drop out in their senior year?

That doesn’t matter. We don’t have to walk the hypothetical parts along with one person. If your value increases linearly with education and there is no signaling effect, you could drop out 10min before graduation, and your salary would end up being the same as someone who went the last 10min and got the diploma.

Obviously that’s not the case. And some signaling is present, because people who do half a masters degree don’t end up making significantly more than those who stopped after the bachelors and got a job, because half a masters worth of learned experience isn’t even worth a fraction of half of the work of having the diploma.