No one cared about my spreadsheets • Hacker News Board

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#221

Post by sonofhans » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:08 AM UTC

henrikschroder wrote: post #147

ekianjo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That sounds like a utilitarian dystopia. Where I'm from, universities don't charge tuition, but you still get a small allowance as a student, and you can add on to that with a student loan to cover living costs. Loan interest and repayments are the same for everyone and based on your salary, it's all backed by the government, and if you don't pay back your loans before the age of 65, your loan is forgiven. Given all…

> I am happily paying taxes so that someone else can get an education in ancient Peruvian anthropology with a minor in medieval French poetry for the absolute sheer fucking delight of it.

Oh, I love this. What a droll, dull world without this attitude. Many of our societies are rich beyond imagination; we have more than enough to support all sorts of activities which don’t directly increase someone’s wealth.

It’s one thing about a rich society without a public safety net: people are more jealous and resentful of perceived freeloaders, i.e., anyone not directly employed in the increase of capital.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#222

Post by urthor » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:08 AM 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…

Both you and the author can simultaneously be right though.

The answer is to reduce the cost of education.

The price of education is far cheaper in so many other countries.

America's just a shit hole.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#223

Post by pmontra » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:08 AM UTC

zwieback wrote: post #7

Has anyone here read the book? I have a hard time imagining that a technical education (e.g. engineering, physics, forestry, chemistry) would be worthless if someone wants to work in that field. Social sciences however... but of course I'm biased there.

Technical education is not different. Everybody knows that every kind of education in every field is bad for the world. Demonstration: with absolutely zero education we wouldn't have had roads, guns, world wars, hundred of millions and possibly billions of deaths. So education is bad.

/sarcasm (but not 100%.)

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#224

Post by henrikschroder » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:08 AM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #204

henrikschroder wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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 yo…

> Well, you were claiming that the book/study did not take this into account

No, I did not.

> Whether it is a bad thing or not is irrelevant to the concern you expressed

No, the entire point of me asking about it is because I think it has value to people making educational choices.

> that the socialisation and play is not addressed by the study.

Yes, and the way the study addresses this is batshit insane, unless you are an unfeeling utilitarian robot.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#225

Post by burrows » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:14 AM UTC

henrikschroder wrote: post #166

_y5hn wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do your own homework?

There appears to be a bunch of people defending Caplan in this discussion, but most of that defence boils down to "read the entire book!" No, I'm not going to do that. And if you've read the entire book, and think I'm an idiot at this point, you are free to say so and disengage from this discussion. But the reason I'm so dismissive of his work is that the conclusion is ridiculous and the premise inherently flawed bec…

> education has inherently unquantifiable value that cannot be expressed in a spreadsheet. Ever.

Any attempt at modeling any phenomena will fail to capture some aspect of that phenomena. So are you suggesting that all attempts at modeling are inherently flawed and must lead to ridiculous conclusions?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#226

Post by tgv » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:14 AM UTC

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…

Discussion might have been a bit easier if he'd just listed the assumptions and the model underlying the calculations. But the Amazon blurb of the book shows that the author isn't really interested in that

> Learn why students hunt for easy As and casually forget most of what they learn after the final exam

We know why, ok? And focusing on "the primary function of education" is like focusing on the primary function of cars, and concluding that traffic accidents contribute to the economy. It reads like a libertarian disguised as a utilitarian who dreams of the 19th century.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#227

Post by athrowaway3z » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:16 AM UTC

catothedev wrote: post #203

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 degr…

I think you're to harsh with saying it reflect the state of mind of educational departments, and far to lenient with 'extremely murky'.

Sure, its very likely people don't want to engage with something that is saying they are doing inefficient/useless work.

But the author's premise is literately "I've crunched the numbers and people don't care" on a subject that would be my go-to example for an incalculable ROI. You could make an argument for an individual, but that's not what the education department or society at large is doing.

Just for starters, at a national scale over decades, there are no unbiased units to measure with. Next i'd like to agree on how we deal with the correlation between 'Patents that changed society' and 'Patent authors being generally higher educated'.

Maybe you can argue for a decent proxy for these things, or their irrelevance. But since i only have so much time, I'll assume your excel sheet is correct in how it processes the input, and instead argue on what the input should be in the first place.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#228

Post by failuser » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:17 AM UTC

I’m intrigued, but it may be a while before I look at the book and spreadsheets. But there is definitely a point when education becomes a net loss. Current US education system might be an example. You can make a lot of conclusions from current US economy. E.g. look at Tesla stock. It means something, but it will take decade to learn who is right about what it means.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#229

Post by Der_Einzige » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:18 AM UTC

oehpr wrote: post #137

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…

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…

BTW - Starsector is an excellent, truly amazing game, and the absurd amount of data that a single run can produce also makes it a great candidate for anyone who wants to do Data Science/AI on things in the game.

Basically, Mount and Blade in space but frankly, I think it's a better take on the formula. Excellent modding community (though I'm upset that the Knights Templar and Blackrock mods are still not updated...)

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#230

Post by tylermenezes » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 7:18 AM UTC

I have read his spreadsheets, so here's my critique. (And I will say that, throwing all the spreadsheets out the window, I still agree broadly with many points to some extent.)

The input numbers (in meta.xlsx) come from imperfect samples of the real world with non-zero error -- often quite a bit higher than 0 -- which is compounded pretty far in some cases. I don't think any person actually can actually evaluate these studies, which is a major problem with this entire idea and is a fundamental problem with any overly-quantitative solutions to problems.