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No one cared about my spreadsheets

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Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#331

Post by qqqwerty »

sjy wrote: post #310
periheli0n wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no way around the idea that education, like everything else, costs resources, time and money, that can be spent on other things. It's a totally valid thing to wonder whether it's the best use of that money there is. Judging the benefit of education only on the financial bottomline is bound to underestimate its real value. For example, a democracy can only function if citizens are able to process complex in…

The effects of education on democratic participation, workforce participation and public health are all explicitly assessed in Caplan’s book, particularly chapter 6. This comment tends to prove the point he makes in the article: “Quantitative social science is barely relevant in the real world … If you’re lucky, researchers default to common sense. Otherwise, they go with their ideology and status-quo bias, using the…

I am digging through his book and it reads to me like a healthy dose of ideology littered with references to sociology papers that would likely not survive replication.

Additionally, I am reading a back and forth between Bryan and Noah Smith[1]. The main thing that stands out, is that after putting forth such a quantitative focused text on the topic, Bryan seems to resort to an idealogical back and forth with Noah. If you are going to put all this effort into building an excel model that makes your case, why are you not using that as your first line of defense?

Quite frankly, I don't think either Noah or Bryan really make convincing arguments. But that is because the debate between "human capital" and "signaling" is such a squishy topic, and no amount of data analysis or philosophical reasoning is really going to change the debate any time soon.

[1] http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/12/sheepskin-effects...

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#332

Post by pclmulqdq »

blitzar wrote: post #304
edanm wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#333

Post by sanp »

edanm wrote: post #281
kwhitefoot wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 help for the homeless, Not everywhere. Next to no homeless people here in Scandinavia yet education is universally available at almost no cost to the student. The US is richer both in absolute terms and per capita so lack of money is presumably not the reason for the diffe…

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…

Then we need to do a quantitative analysis of those other options as well before we decide to spend on them vs. education.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#334

Post by edanm »

sanp wrote: post #333
edanm wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Then we need to do a quantitative analysis of those other options as well before we decide to spend on them vs. education.

Obviously. That's what Bryan Caplan did.

This whole thread is in response to Bryan Caplan complaining that no one is actually engaging with the quantitative analysis he did in the form of a spreadsheet.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#335

Post by rendall »

This reminds me of the debunking of the Losada ratio, which was purportedly the precise ratio of positive to negative emotions you should experience to be mentally and emotionally healthy: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/19/mathematics-...

No one had previously even bothered to check the numbers before it became a fundamental tenet of the field.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#336

Post by randomsilence »

periheli0n wrote: post #303
randomsilence wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you need educated people for a democracy. That's why the old generation dedicates enough funds to educate the next generation. Regarding the value of education. If it has a value, why can't it have a monetary value? At one point in your life, you have shifted the majority of your time from learning to making money. You can only make that decision rationally if you have put a monetary value on your education…

My point is that the monetary value one could put on education is bound to neglect the real value of education. How do you express the value of education for a functioning democracy in monetary terms for an individual? How to express the monetary benefit of being able to make better life choices as a result of education?

Fair point. So what's your evaluation of the real value of education?

I don't see how I can answer your questions in a short comment because they depend very much on individual circumstances. E.g. nowadays you have to be able to read to make informed decisions. But with the rise of text to speech synthesis, and information available as videos and memes, there is no need to receive a formal education to be informed.

Then again, how valuable is analytical and critical thinking? That depends on the democracy. If people live in an established democracy with established institutions, they just have to choose the outcome, i.e. where the government is going to spend money. Then no further education is needed.

In general, the value of education follows supply and demand and depends on the environment. If you were the only educated person among cavemen, then your education is worth the world because you can make all the difference. On the other hand, if you are the proverbial philosophy major working at a fast food restaurant, what's the value of that education?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#337

Post by periheli0n »

roenxi wrote: post #325
periheli0n wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no way around the idea that education, like everything else, costs resources, time and money, that can be spent on other things. It's a totally valid thing to wonder whether it's the best use of that money there is. Judging the benefit of education only on the financial bottomline is bound to underestimate its real value. For example, a democracy can only function if citizens are able to process complex in…

Judging the benefits of anything only on the financial bottom line is risky. Many extremely valuable things are valuable because they are cheap to the point of irrelevancy. Which is why it is a valid question to ask whether the resources are worth it. > For example, a democracy can only function if citizens are able to process complex information to base their voting decisions on. It has worked pretty well for the la…

> It has worked pretty well for the last 2,500 years with voters possessing extremely questionable education.

Early democracies often restricted the right to vote to specific parts of the population.

Also if anything has become clear in the last 5 years it’s that educated people are much less likely to be deceived by false populist promises.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#338

Post by Scarblac »

periheli0n wrote: post #293
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…

> There is no way around the idea that education, like everything else, costs resources, time and money, that can be spent on other things. It's a totally valid thing to wonder whether it's the best use of that money there is. Judging the benefit of education only on the financial bottomline is bound to underestimate its real value. For example, a democracy can only function if citizens are able to process complex in…

> Judging the benefit of education only on the financial bottomline is bound to underestimate its real value.

In the article he mentions that he gets this type of criticism on his book, despite the fact that he spent chapters on these exact kind of questions. Painstakingly including those things is what the whole thing is about.

And now he gets the criticism despite putting that in the article!

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#339

Post by trelane »

GaylordTuring wrote: post #314
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.

If it's publish or perish, double checking numbers of a paper will help you do the latter much more than the former.

As will, incidentally, spending too much time on any software you need to develop. Like, say, unit tests or ensuring it's maintainable. Or maintaining it at all, really.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#340

Post by southerntofu »

edanm wrote: post #329
southerntofu wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Abolish police and then what? Who will enforce any kinds of laws? Or do we just revert to having nothing? Abolish the military and leave every country at the mercy of any invader that comes along? I can certainly understand the idea of not spending as much money on the military, but ho…

> Who will enforce any kinds of laws?

Maybe you and me, and our neighbors, as a community. Why would we concentrate police powers in the hand of a specialized militia answering only to the psychopaths in government? Cops are never here when we need them to protect actual people, but they always show up and mess everything up when things were getting better.

Laws are written in a social context. You can break laws without harming anyone, in which case nobody in your neighborhood may mind (and maybe some people would like to repel that law at the next general assembly). If some people think you are harming others, then there are many ways to try and find an arrangement to the situation and repair any wrongdoing (see also: reparative/transformative justice).

Of course, some extreme cases require use of violence to control a person who's physically endangering others. Why would we make a job out of it, though? Concentrating those powers and responsibilities into a finite set of hands sounds like a fragile system that can be abused.

See also: past HN threads about the positive outcomes of not involving police for mental episodes, accounts/studies of indigenous systems of justice (such as in Chiapas), and academic research on the abolition of prisons (Angela Davis, Gwenola Ricordeau).

> how can anyone that has heard of any amount of history take seriously the idea that a country like the US can just abolish its military without it being in catastrophic danger?

The US is the catastrophic danger to many countries (Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, etc). By dismantling the US military industrial complex, we'd be doing a lot to promote peace and stability across the entire globe. The USA is still by far the largest military in the world and has helped countless coup d'État and assassinations. If only those, the war files released by Wikileaks and the recent debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan should be good examples of the military producing the exact opposite of its stated goals.

> If the abstraction of money didn't exist, what would happen exactly?

It depends on a wide variety of social/cultural factors. There's not a one-size-fits-all way of life, and each community may adopt different approaches to property and commercial exchanges. But in my opinion and experience taking away the abstraction allows us to focus on actual concrete problems.

For example, think about housing: by reasoning in terms of money, you reach the conclusion that we need more investment in new housing. By thinking without money, you can notice empty dwellings outnumber homeless people > 10-to-1, so the question becomes: if we have enough housing for everyone, why would we let people be homeless?

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