401–410 of 413 posts
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You can have an opinion about everything, but others are not obliged to like it and/or give you a platform for it. Baseless opinions are not interesting to read, and if there is a base for it, then that would be worth posting. Also, not sure why you're afraid of troll responses given that your comment is literally trolling (merriam webster, definition 2c).
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You can have an opinion about everything, but others are not obliged to like it and/or give you a platform for it. Baseless opinions are not interesting to read, and if there is a base for it, then that would be worth posting. Also, not sure why you're afraid of troll responses given that your comment is literally trolling (merriam webster, definition 2c).
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> 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 typical student spent 40 hours a week in class or studying.98 Since the early 1960s, effort collapsed across the board. “Full-time” college students average 27 hours of academic work per week—and only 14 hours of studying. (...) ? So your sentence doe…
I believe the author meant "old.class + old.study = 40" vs "new.class + new.study = 27" (where new.study = 14). It took me a re-read to come to that conclusion.
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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.
Sure! You're 100% correct! But two quick points here: 1) I wasn't advocating necessarily for a degree, but specifically in rebuttal to the idea that non-STEM majors aren't useful in STEM areas, and 2) One of the benefits of a college degree is that you now have a physical piece of paper that says "I started and finished a 4+ year-long project that proves I can do all of those things," whereas folks without a degree d…
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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.)
How much evidence you'd demand to change your mind depends on whether your prior was 50%, 90% or 99.999999999%. You shouldn't need more evidence to change back to 50/50 than it took to get you to your current beliefs - otherwise you'd have two equal cases and prefer the one you heard earlier for no reason other than that you heard it first.
Plus it seems despite his many spreadsheets his model is not able to do causal inference, which means his tables are very verbose narrations or appendices to his arguments in prose, and not a decisive proof.
> to change your mind
Unless one is in a state of 100% confirmation bias then ideally every little piece of evidence counts. Sure, we are not perfect walking-talking sentient infinite resolution mathematical distributions, so in practice we simply discard a lot incoming information, as we have meta-(meta?)-heuristics that we depend on. (Eg. if our friends and family and the news and even random blogs claim X we start to take it seriously, but still, if it doesn't really affect us our attention won't bother. And so on.)
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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.)
I'm not claiming it's a fallacy, my dude. I'm claiming it's a trick. Since the prior is uninformed, it's obvious this isn't "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" since both claims are extraordinary. It’s just that one is political desirous. Ain’t fooling nobody with the attempt at rational cover.
Caplan shouldn't be surprised at the reception of his work, because people have this prior.
Of course as you say high priests of rationality examine their own biases as they reach for the book, and by the time they flip it to read the recommendations on the back they are already empty vessels for unadulterated pure non-chill-filtered high-octane data and nothing else. But most people working in public policy are just lowly humans. :/
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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…
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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.
But we aren't.
The author has described his method in words. My contention is that the method he described does not pass the bar for good science. If my contention is correct, then it simply does not matter what is or is not in his spreadsheets.
Here's an analogy: If I told you that I determined the safest car on the road by measuring the distance to the moon, and that I had very very good spreadsheets for measuring the distance to the moon, would you really bother to check my spreadsheets?
I don't think you would. I think you would (correctly) say, "Hey, that's a really dumb way to figure out the safest car on the road and I'm not going to bother to check your math."
Now, I don't think that the author has done something quite that orthogonal to his stated goal, but I also don't think it's close enough that I want to bother checking his math.
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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 educa…
Abolish police and military, and suddenly you'll have plenty of funds for your UBI or whatever cool system you'd like to invest in. Also worth noting: money is just a meaningless abstraction designed by the rich to extract value from the poor (without money, the rich and the poor don't even exist). If you're really concerned about welfare of people, abolition of money and private property is a question worth raising…
Money makes it possible for me to exchange my time, effort, and expertise for good produced using someone else's time, effort, and expertise. Without money or something that is so similar as to deserve the same name that is not practical except for the very rich and powerful.
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As far as I can tell scandinava has all the alternate uses you mention and more, plus the education. But, your point still stands; what they dont have is an ability to push a button and wipe out the human race within 15 minutes, and fleets of stealth bombers flying low over every sporting event (support the troops you commie). All while the population struggles to figure out how many points their team will have if th…
They also have a 40-50% tax on the middle class and a 20% VAT on goods. That's what they are trading for this.
No we don't. The maximum marginal tax rate is 40% and a person of average income pays under 30% of that income in tax.
See https://www.smartepenger.no/skatt/653-skatteprosenter-pa-lon...