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No one cared about my spreadsheets

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Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#201

Post by mdoms »

mvhvv wrote: post #178
butwhywhyoh wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are providing zero evidence that there is any value to your experience about reading a clever comment comparing Brownian motion and the stock market. Not even qualitatively. You are already an incredibly rare person who would equate such things, so I think it's very odd that you think this concept could apply to the general population. The cherry on top is you haven't even read the book or looked at the spreadshe…

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.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#202

Post by lelanthran »

mvhvv wrote: post #138
ekianjo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Caplan is right it should be a personal choice not subsidized by government

It's entirely possible for Caplan to be correct about his material analysis, and that still not be the right conclusion. If the government doesn't subsidise education, then anything that doesn't promise a return is financially debilitating. Personal choice can't exist when your ability to eat and pay rent rely upon you making a specific decision. If you don't believe that humanities education has any kind of broader…

> It's entirely possible for Caplan to be correct about his material analysis, and that still not be the right conclusion.

How do the critics know that it is not the right conclusion? Where are their numbers that support their conclusion.

Look, I understand research is hard and that it may occasionally result in an incorrect conclusion from the data that was gathered. It happens.

But it is not logically consistent to call the conclusion wrong when there is no data to support that position.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#203

Post by catothedev »

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…

Making a DCF analysis for education is going to be extremely murky.

That said, since it was done in spreadsheet, it would be easy for a relatively non-technical person to tweak the numbers to refute the author's argument (sidenote: only in the world of hacker news would people think python is more accessible).

I think the lack of interest in reviewing the spreadsheet reflects how people with education department degrees protect their jobs and win public policy arguments: they prefer to argue that ROI is not a relevant concept for education investment (even if it is at the core of virtually every other type of investment analysis).

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#204

Post by lelanthran »

henrikschroder wrote: post #173
xyzzyz wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [S]chool inculcates many attitudes that, regardless of their moral worth, impede on-the-job success. If you’re preparing kids for their adult roles, a year of work experience instills more suitable discipline and socialization than a year of school. > 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…

> > What are students doing with their extra free time? Having fun. Instead of being socialized for lives of boring work in hierarchical organizations, they’re being socialized for lives of play and self-expression. If you think this is a bad thing, you are well and truly lost.

> > What are students doing with their extra free time? Having fun. Instead of being socialized for lives of boring work in hierarchical organizations, they’re being socialized for lives of play and self-expression.

> If you think this is a bad thing, you are well and truly lost.

Well, you were claiming that the book/study did not take this into account so GP posted evidence that the book/study does indeed address your concerns.

Whether it is a bad thing or not is irrelevant to the concern you expressed, to wit - that the socialisation and play is not addressed by the study.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#205

Post by ALittleLight »

tsimionescu wrote: post #187
donohoe wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just look at the data in the spreadsheet instead of speculating? I kinda think this is exactly part of the point he is making.

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 education?" But rather, "How much should we be spending on education?" and that is perfectly quantifiable. Indeed, we spend some quantity of money on education currently - should we spend more or less?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#206

Post by voiper1 »

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…

Your first line sounds very similar to one of his paragraphs:

>Don’t get me wrong; The Case Against Education drew plenty of criticism. Almost none of it, however, was quantitative. Some critics appealed to common sense: “Education can’t be anywhere near as wasteful as Caplan claims.”

"There's no point in looking at it, because it can't be calculated."

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#207

Post by themacguffinman »

sbierwagen wrote: post #197
Hermitian909 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, in part, Caplan has made a fairly classic error in attempting to figure out the optimal strategy for an individual within an existing system, where small numbers of individuals deviating generally doesn't matter, and then using those results to make a policy recommendation about how to change the system en masse in a way that will radically change the system. His spreadsheets don't answer many questions I mi…

>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*

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#208

Post by failuser »

sbierwagen wrote: post #197
Hermitian909 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, in part, Caplan has made a fairly classic error in attempting to figure out the optimal strategy for an individual within an existing system, where small numbers of individuals deviating generally doesn't matter, and then using those results to make a policy recommendation about how to change the system en masse in a way that will radically change the system. His spreadsheets don't answer many questions I mi…

>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…

This is rich. If Google refused to grow it would have become another Yahoo. Chrome was launched in 2008 and was barely usable. Do you think it could have remained anywhere near dominant in ads, search and lot more if it stayed at 20k people?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#209

Post by IIAOPSW »

librarianscott wrote: post #176
IIAOPSW wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

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 show linked in the blog. You would only need to go as far as page 1 to see he was not disputing future earnings potential. Here's the money quote:

"Key feature of the signaling model: At the margin, signaling raises pay but not productivity, so social returnPolicy implication: Even selfishly lucrative education may be socially wasteful rent-seeking.

If ignoring signaling is sole flaw in existing return to education literature, true social return roughly equals mainstream social return*(1-signaling share)"

Really he's just saying something we all kind of know. Diploma's are more often than not a ticket to ride in a certain class of society, not an education technology that increases productivity. So why is there government support and subsidy for something that has private, but not much public benefit?

http://www.bcaplan.com/returns.pdf

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#210

Post by arpanetus »

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…

Have you seen the data as well to judge like that?

(just being curious)

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