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No one cared about my spreadsheets

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Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#381

Post by isitmadeofglass »

analog31 wrote: post #104
sgdjgkeirj wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good point. Caplan makes a huge deal about the fact that a students that drops out one semester before finishing the degree takes a huge penalty to their salary. This is what he calls the “sheep skin effect”. He claims that because such a student gets almost all of the education, their penalty must correspond to the signaling component. But this is where his math runs against common sense. If you are an emp…

Ah, but if Caplan's signaling hypothesis is true, it creates an arbitrage opportunity. I'm thinking hypothetically and in broad terms. Take that N-1 dropout. If that person is worth more to a business than their market wage, then a savvy business person would have a profit motive to hire them for more than their market wage, but less than their known value, resulting in a win for the worker and the employer. A big en…

You’ve just struck gold. This is the business model of a lot of Indian IT consulting businesses. No one cares about a master or bachelors degree when out-sourcing work, as long as the job gets done. But you can significantly lower the pay of such people even when they are way more experienced and better than even master grads.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#382

Post by epgui »

isitmadeofglass wrote: post #378
csours wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's really hard to disentangle the cause from the effect. I have to laugh. No it’s not. It’s not like healthy people just from the fact that they are healthy have some odd quirk of occasionally randomly tripping into a 30min run without any say in the matter. Regular running causes an improvement in health. Improved health does not cause regular running.

I'm a life scientist: it's true that physical exercise has a causal effect on positive health outcomes. However, if you believe demonstrating cause is simple, you don't know enough about science or statistics. It's extremely difficult.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#383

Post by iib »

edanm wrote: post #247
periheli0n wrote: post #244

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. One side effect of the economisation of education is the desire to quantify and standardise "academic quality". For example, setting minimum pass rates for modules, which ultimately l…

> 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…

That may have been true if much of the cost of education was not artificial, like non-free manuals (as in free software) or paying for non-open access journals.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#384

Post by whatshisface »

oehpr wrote: post #377
whatshisface wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't asking that Caplan spend one second longer on his calculations automatically rule out everything else that anyone has ever said about the subject? That's the most interesting part of this for me - nobody's saying "you're missing some important factors, and let's add them." People are saying, "I don't know that you included all the factors, so I am going to go back to reading opinion columnists for whom 'facto…

And you know what? Just like with my hobbyist friend, I thought the spreadsheet they made were a valuable contribution! I thought it was BETTER than just guessing. Heck I know it was because so many mods in starsector bring in unintentionally broken equipment and make the game easy. Using their spreadsheet on those mods showed clear heuristics that indicated what in practice seemed to be true. But my hobbyist friend…

>My priors already have education being a net benefit as highly probable, and I'll update, but not much.

How'd you get those priors?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#385

Post by ALittleLight »

tsimionescu wrote: post #371
ALittleLight wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ed…

The discussion of how much money to spend on education should not be done based on some expected value of education. It should instead be done by polling various interested parties on how they feel about current the current education system, what resources they are missing (if any), what types of spending are not producing useful results etc. You don't have to quantify the expected value in order to decide on costs -…

It's not reasonable to liken the decision making processes of deciding to go see a movie and determining government funding priorities for education.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#386

Post by avgcorrection »

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…

> For example, a democracy can only function if citizens are able to process complex information to base their voting decisions on.

Jason Brennan (another libertarian) wrote the book Against Democracy. So these two books should be policy companions.

Which also goes to show how nefarious this assertion of yours is: all people have to do in order to suppress people’s right to participate in a democracy is to defund education and the civil square. Then people become “not informed enough” to process “complex information” (as if our elected representatives seem capable of that… but whatever).

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#387

Post by avgcorrection »

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…

> Educated people are more likely to find an income than people who have less knowledge of the world.

Oh I see. The previously uneducated Scizophrenic people bootstrap themselves off the street by virtue of having read Homer.

I doubt that education can directly fix homelessness.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#388

Post by Brian_K_White »

renewiltord wrote: post #363
Brian_K_White wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one said that, or anything remotely like that or that implies that. I guess you have a PhD and embody the "exhibit A" counter example eh? Educated yet no better than the uneducated at communication and comprehension. Or let me guess, you only took technical classes. As close to 100% stem as the system would let you. I don't really want to make personal attacks like that but this kind of comment is exactly an examp…

Take a chill pill, my dude. Go out, smell the roses. It’s a beautiful day. Not one to go argue on the Internet.

Then why are you?

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#389

Post by nickff »

majormajor wrote: post #180
nickff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " His spreadsheets don't answer many questions I might have about such systemic changes, for example, would the reduction in college graduates reduce our nation's economic competitiveness? If it did, how would that effect overall quality of life for average Americans? I don't find compelling answers to these questions in his spreadsheets." His book talked about those things; the spreadsheets are just him 'showing h…

> His book talked about those things; the spreadsheets are just him 'showing his work'. I think Caplan is trying to highlight that despite the fact that many challenged his conclusions, almost nobody challenged his logic or calculations. Hermitian909 said "the spreadsheets are flawed by not including calculations for these additional levels of effect," and that claim seems pretty compelling: the calculations may be p…

>"You say he talks about those things in his book in addition, but you can't call that "showing his work" if the work shown doesn't include the most relevant parts."

The spreadsheet and book are complementary; you won't really understand either without reading both. In order to understand 'the work', you also have to know the question and the final answer.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#390

Post by lucb1e »

krisoft wrote: post #264
krisoft wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wow, that's one of the most dismissive remarks I've seen here in quite a while. It also does not seem like you could possibly believe it yourself. It's a natural thing. If you come up with an implausible sounding thing supported by a very complicated argument then most likely you made a mistake. It is very easy to make mistakes and very hard to find them. If you have a 1000 page proof that 2*2 is 5 I won't spend my…

So i bought his book (10 pounds down the drain, I will never get back) I’m barelly in the first chapter and already feel cheated. The title “case against education”, and the subtitle “why the education system is a waste of time and money” makes it feel like it will be about the whole concept of education and it will show, well “why the education system is a waste of time and money”. Turns out he is already backpedali…

> He says he doesn’t talk about the kind of education which teaches usefull skills.

And what percentage of people do those kinds of studies? And for those who do, what percentage of the time was still spent on useless things?

I'm about 15 minutes into a podcast with the author about the book (linked elsewhere in this thread) and from what I got so far, it's indeed about the majority case, not the couple of engineers that obtain applicable knowledge. It's also mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

You're right that it does seem like a youtube title among books and I get the frustration, but you're also exaggerating what the author is saying and posting that version online for everyone else to take home.

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