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No one cared about my spreadsheets

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Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#151

Post by urthor »

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.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#152

Post by _y5hn »

henrikschroder wrote: post #141
xyzzyz wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read his book, like it was already suggested to you a couple of times, you'd know what he says about "care-free student life". This way, you would be able to address his actual positions, instead of arguing against a version of Caplan you've conjured in your mind, based on a single blog post and a few HN comments.

So what does he say about care-free student life?

Do your own homework?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#153

Post by overgrownzygote »

lelandbatey wrote: post #73

Well, if you're going to throw down the gauntlet like that Mr. Caplan, how can I resist! I began by actually looking at this authors spreadsheets, then looking at their claims, and ultimately, I downloaded a copy of their book[0] to review what that book says. So here's the info: The fundamental claim of the book is that currently, the "western education model" is not (really) about skill accumulation or increasing t…

Figured someone who has read the book might see this and be able to answer a question — to what extent is Caplan’s critique of the U.S.-model of widespread-ish resource-intensive higher education tied and the credentialing problem it “solves,” and how much is a critique of higher education in toto?

I can certainly get on board with the former, and if that’s Caplan’s argument, I might have to add his book to my reading list.

Edit: I get that the two critiques I described are difficult to separate in practice, but maybe this will clarify for anyone who might be willing to share their read or Caplan’s argument: it’s the difference between “university is more or less fine, but people should have to pay their own way” vs. “we need to find ways to reduce the real costs of education and/or better socialize the benefits, so that more people have access to education because education is itself a worthy goal”

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#154

Post by jmeister »

henrikschroder wrote: post #139
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.

For what it's worth, after spending a little bit of time looking at his intro and conclusions, it appears to me that he is actually not arguing in bad faith. His assumption is that the purpose of an education is to raise your future earnings potential, and that the higher your salary is, the better for society you are. I'm sure his numbers and spreadsheets are correct. But if you think this is a good argument, a wort…

Policy arguments are based entirely on economic considerations. I don’t remember anyone bringing up parties while discussing student loans or charter schools.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#155

Post by diatone »

nickff wrote: post #13
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.

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?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#156

Post by mvhvv »

chasil wrote: post #102
taeric wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even sure what you are suggesting, to be honest. My point was that if you want scores to improve, you will have to pay more. Pretty much period. You don't get improvement, at any level, for free. Certainly not by cutting funding. Keeping the same level of funding will at best tread water. Likely, the area will fall, though. And I certainly wouldn't be comfortable pushing that outcome.

Management talent makes more happen for less. That's what we expect, as industrial management moved our industry offshore. Education has no right of excusal. Perform.

I agree that capital allocation and management are real and valuable skills, but it doesn't require any significant amount of talent to move industry offshore. It's simply shopping around for the cheapest price that meets requirements and writing up a contract.

Ignoring any potential ethical concerns, offshoring only tends to work financially for short-term tasks that don't require long-term understanding of past work. You mentioned in your previous comment that your department is struggling to find engineers that are willing to stick around long-term to work on your legacy systems. How do you square those two ideas?

Are you suggesting that education should be shifted offshore? Or that lower budgets would attract more talented managers?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#157

Post by piyh »

mvhvv wrote: post #131

With a grain of salt, as someone who has not read the spreadsheets (and has no interest in doing so). The author just seems to misunderstand the relativity of ideology. In particular they bemoan their critics as "..go[ing] with their ideology and status-quo bias, using the latest prestigious papers as fig leaves", but they don't acknowledge that their own findings obviously require some major ideological assumptions…

I found a wife at college. Don't know how you fit that into the spreadsheet model.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#158

Post by tomrod »

tryptophan wrote: post #125
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…

That comparison doesnt even make any sense. Brownian motion is fully random and doesn't have an underlying direction like the stock markets do(up).

What is the fundamental driver of shares listed on the stock market increasing in real (not nominal) value?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#159

Post by librarianscott »

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…

Um, there actually are peer-reviewed studies which address things like running and health. For example, "The Influence of Running on Lower Limb Cartilage: A Systematic Review and Meta‐analysis," Sports Medicine (2022) 52:55–74 [1]

One conclusion is "Results suggest that cartilage recovers well from a single running bout and adapts to repeated exposure. Given that moderate evidence indicates that running does not lead to new lesions, future trials should focus on clinical populations, such as those with osteoarthritis."

My understanding is the evidence for walking is much stronger than running given the assumption that an "active lifestyle" is a goal, rather than just living longer.

[1]: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-021-01533-7

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#160

Post by IIAOPSW »

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…

This is just judging the tool as a roundabout ad hominid. I bet if he did the exact same calculation in a jupyter notebook, and exported his results as a pdf and did the type setting with LaTeX, you wouldn't handwave away the very premise as intractable. There's no limits to the computational complexity of a spreadsheet. Turing completeness is obviously there (just make a cellular automata). Even requiring the "code" to be not-esoteric, spreadsheets are no more crippled than a given scripting language.
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