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No one cared about my spreadsheets

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Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#311

Post by edanm »

zaarn wrote: post #291
edanm wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't the real problem the economisation of education? The desire to express the value of education in monetary terms is really only useful for those running education businesses, like e.g. many of today's universities in the US ans UK. I'm a big fan of education. However, when education is subsidized, you're implicitly making the decision that it's more important to pay for that education than to pay for e.g. more…

Paying a lot of money into education prevents homelessness! Educated people are more likely to find an income than people who have less knowledge of the world. And it's not only purely educating people, it's also about providing supportive services, such as job finding programs, mental health counseling, etc etc. By spending more on education you may spend less on homeless right now but you can prevent people from be…

> By spending more on education you may spend less on homeless right now but you can prevent people from becoming homeless.

I'm not comparing against education with money for the homeless, specifically. It was just an example that money can be spent on other things we value, and we have to decide what we value more. There's not way around it - you're either spending money on education, or on something else (or just reducing taxes).

Of course if you can show that education causes less homelessness, that makes it an obvious "win". (Though I think that you're not grappling with Bryan Caplan's actual argument.)

> And on top of that, you can also reform how homelessness works in your country. In Germany, having a home is a fundamental right, why is it not in America?

If the assumption is that I'm from the US, I'm not.

But solving homelessnes is kind of besides the point I was making anyway :)

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#312

Post by zaarn »

regularfry wrote: post #294
zaarn wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying a lot of money into education prevents homelessness! Educated people are more likely to find an income than people who have less knowledge of the world. And it's not only purely educating people, it's also about providing supportive services, such as job finding programs, mental health counseling, etc etc. By spending more on education you may spend less on homeless right now but you can prevent people from be…

The same argument applies if you pick a different alternative, though. Money you choose to spend on education (with all its knock-on effects in homelessness, public health, employment, and so on) is money you can't spend on street cleaning, road maintenance, whatever, but also the investment you're making via education in the future homelessness problem is money you can't spend on acute homelessness problems today th…

Then you need to make your spending on these other problems more effective. Give tenants more rights to stay in a home, give people more job security, make mental health programs cheaper and target vulnerable populations. Etc.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#313

Post by bigDinosaur »

themacguffinman wrote: post #301
bigDinosaur wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're already down all three, because Chrome was first released in 2008, and Android was also released in 2008, and GCP was apparently released in 2008 as well. Who knew?

lol so true * taps terminal with a Pixel phone using Google Pay, uploads selfie to Google Photos, plans a trip in Google Flights and saves the itinerary in Google Drive *

And to be fair with GCP, it's not like they released every single offering in 2008, at least I'd assume. Just like how AWS started with I think just a few things like S3 and EC2.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#314

Post by GaylordTuring »

dragonwriter wrote: post #268

> Almost none of it, however, was quantitative. Of course not, almost none of the significant disagreement in the broad public debate on policy is about details of quantitative analysis, it's about value propositions that frame (among other questions) what quantitative analysis is even relevant. If you publish an academic paper with quantitative analysis, academics will tear into the details of analysis (maybe, if th…

> If you publish an academic paper with quantitative analysis, academics will tear into the details of analysis

This is how it should work, but at least in the type of fields that we're talking about here, in practice this doesn't happen. I've published seminal papers in my field which have been cited hundereds of times. Not even the peer reviewers (let alone any reader) double checked my calculations.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#315

Post by usgroup »

> ...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 default to common sense. Otherwise, they go with their ideology and status-quo bias, using the latest prestigious papers as fig leaves. Empirical social science teaches us far more about the world than pure theory. Yet in practice, even empirical researchers barely care what empirical social science really has to teach.

This rings true much more generally unfortunately. My profession is sexy maths. But when the rubber meets the road, decision makers broadlly -- like policy makers narrowly -- will revert to something much simpler.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#316

Post by Brian_K_White »

orangecat wrote: post #146
Brian_K_White wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the quanta of having some % of all societies members be some % more thoughtful people than they would have been had they never had to face ideas in school? It's not something that can be reduced to metrics except possibly on the scale of entire countries over timespans of multiple generations, and even then the effects are probably not seperable from countless other factors because there are no two or more o…

What are the quanta of having some % of all societies members be some % more thoughtful people than they would have been had they never had to face ideas in school? This assumes that "facing ideas" happens in school and not the real world, which is questionable on both sides.

It doesn't. By definition most people don't face things that most people don't face.

A few people learn a few things the hard way, and everyone else ignores their annoying crying.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#317

Post by mvhvv »

mdoms wrote: post #201
mvhvv wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I read the article, and I even read through the presentation linked in the article. I didn't read the book, but I'm also not giving a qualitative review of the book.

I'm talking about why people don't think it's worth engaging with to begin with. It's not that his critics are afraid or incapable of engaging with him, but that he's being dismissed out of hand because (regardless of whether it's true or not) he presents as a crank who doesn't appear to understand the field he's attempting to critique.

There's an infinite supply of cranks in the world, and it's usually good practice to avoid engaging with them.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#318

Post by cycomanic »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #296
cycomanic wrote: post #255

I have not read the book (it's the first time I heard about it), but I'm confused by what the title of the book seems to imply and what people here say about the book. I suspect that much of the discussion here seems to boil down to the same misunderstandings. What sort of education is Caplan talking about? Primary, secondary, tertiary? The title seems to imply all education, but I guess that is not the case? Does he…

Caplan is talking about all education, but he says each kind has different value. In short he believes k-12 is useful as daycare, and college is useful as a signal of how smart and hard working and conformist you are. He believes those benefits are not worth the massive subsidies. Moreover, the signalling thing doesn't work if everyone is pushed to go to college because it turns into a Red Queen's race. He praises vo…

So what is his argument to dismiss the high correlation between many economic indicators and education spending both historically and geographically?

I had a look at the spreadsheets but I don't clearly see what are the factors that go into his calculation of benefit to society calculation except for crime rates. I mean how about R&D necessary to grow the economy, competitive advantages for attracting immigrants, participation in democracy ...

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#319

Post by regularfry »

zaarn wrote: post #312
regularfry wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same argument applies if you pick a different alternative, though. Money you choose to spend on education (with all its knock-on effects in homelessness, public health, employment, and so on) is money you can't spend on street cleaning, road maintenance, whatever, but also the investment you're making via education in the future homelessness problem is money you can't spend on acute homelessness problems today th…

Then you need to make your spending on these other problems more effective. Give tenants more rights to stay in a home, give people more job security, make mental health programs cheaper and target vulnerable populations. Etc.

...and the same argument applies again. It doesn't matter how effective they are, the same logic applies: money you spend on thing A cannot then be used on thing B. That is a choice.

I should add that changing things to make them more effective also costs money.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#320

Post by Lio »

hgomersall wrote: post #285
renewiltord wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Students who graduated from such universities often are more capable of independent thinking in my experience. Germany: 111 Nobel Laureates University of Columbia: 83 Nobel Laureates The whole country struggled to produce just a little more than one American university. They may think more independently, but it seems that it was so independent as to fail to advance human knowledge much more than a single American u…

As others have pointed out, that comparison is poor. A better one is Nobel laureates per capita: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_l... There are a good few European countries above the US.

Do we count all Nobel laureates the same in that list?

i.e. is a Peace Laureate the same value in showing the superiority of a particular university as a Chemistry Laureate or even Literature Laureate?

The list looks very different if you take that into account.

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