33 ms·

No one cared about my spreadsheets

• zwieback 5y ago
  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.
  • lamacase 5y ago
    I have read the book. He says that engineering degrees are basically the one exception. They're like trade schools. Also, e.g. a social science degree is useful if you're going to be a social science professor/academic, but otherwise none of the skills or knowledge are transferable. He also says that having any degree is "worth it" to an individual, monetarily. It's just not worth it to society to require everyone to have education they don't use.
    • VictorPath 5y ago
      > He also says that having any degree is "worth it" to an individual, monetarily. It's just not worth it to society to require everyone to have education they don't use. Half of Finnish people between 35 and 44 have a degree, whereas only 7% of people in that age range from South Africa do, so South Africa must be much better off than Finland.
      • renewiltord 5y ago
        Fascinating to think that all you have to do is get 43 out of 100 people in South Africa degrees and it will be Finland.
        • Brian_K_White 5y ago
          Perhaps it would be. I don't find it at all silly to guess that if a critical percentage of everyone were made to confront more ideas and and generally be made more aware and thoughtful, that the eventual result is more civilized behavior between members. I certainly don't think it helps the situation to use the historical and current state of thimgs as some excuse not to bother trying. You can't create better civilization be decree or force. It can only happen when enough percentage of the population does it for themselves, and they don't when they are ignorant or bubbled.
          • renewiltord 5y ago
            Fascinating that Colorado right now is Finland.
            • Brian_K_White 5y ago
              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 example of the topic. What field on what spreadsheet gets what number increased or decreased by one to quantify the cost of this sort of lack of understanding?
              • renewiltord 5y ago
                Take a chill pill, my dude. Go out, smell the roses. It’s a beautiful day. Not one to go argue on the Internet.
                • Brian_K_White 5y ago
                  Then why are you?
      • EverywhereTrip 5y ago
        No, he's saying that everyone having a degree isn't the difference between Finland and South Africa. If South Africa suddenly had as many degree holders as Finland, it wouldn't suddenly become Finland.
      • lucb1e 5y ago
        Not sure if you are serious or trolling, but if I'm not mistaken the fallacy here is correlation vs. causation: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Correlation_does_not_imply_causation&oldid=1068543028 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Correlation_does_... (see specifically section 3)
    • Jemaclus 5y ago
      > otherwise none of the skills or knowledge are transferable. While I understand the source of this statement and why people often say this, I'm not entirely sure I agree with this, at least anecdotally. For example, I have a degree in Theater. Which, on the surface, doesn't transfer well to, say, software engineering or law or accounting or teaching or social work. But is that really true? To pick a popular theatre-related discipline, consider what an actor does: - They show up on time (to scenes, to rehearsal, to performances) - They can memorize vast amounts of material in a relatively short period of time verbatim - They work well with others - They work well individually - They can take direction - They can take constructive criticism - They meet deadlines under pressure (the show must go on!) - They can put themselves in other people's shoes (Method acting, ftw) - They know how to do research (how does a 1940s soldier talk, dress, walk, act?) - They are comfortable speaking in front of groups - They can speak clearly and enunciate appropriately (especially good in a remote world with fuzzy tech!) And so on and so forth... I don't really care what industry you're in, those are desirable qualities for ANY hiring manager! I would be THRILLED if candidates metaphorically walked through the door with evidence of those skill sets under their belt! This is the holy grail of "soft skills" that everyone looks for, whether you're a doctor or a restaurant manager or a postal worker. I've had a lot of jobs in my career, but I've never in my life walked onto a job and known everything I need to know. There's a LOT of on the job training -- so much that I might as well be taking a boot camp at every new job! And so from that perspective, someone who walks in with a theater or really any kind of arts or social science degree and a modicum of Python under their belt is a very, very attractive hire to me. I can teach you our framework of choice and how to run tests and how to use Jira, but I don't have time to teach you how to learn or how to communicate or how to take direction. Anyway, my two cents.
      • torbTurret 5y ago
        A fifteen year old cashier at Target can make the same value claim, minus the four year time investment and student debt. Which I think is the author’s point.
        • lucb1e 5y ago
          It's a bit more terse than I'd have put it, but I was about to reply along the same lines when I reloaded and saw your comment. While the supermarket employee (for those who don't know Target, it's a USA-specific thing afaik) might not be able to prove some of those things like doing research for a 1940s soldier costume, it's indeed not that hard and doesn't need a university study. Many of GP's points will be much harder to prove than to learn in the first place. And so I would also conclude that years of study might just not be required to start doing the job. Trying to be respectful of an actor's skill, since I truly don't think I could do that job well (or at least not without months or years of trying, and even then idk), it also doesn't strike me as requiring deep study. That's just not required for showing up to work on time (I'm cherry-picking one of the points here, to be fair). Even for IT there's an argument to be made that it's super easy to learn 80% at home and do maybe some hands-on work in a lab with 500 virtual computers (that you wouldn't easily setup by yourself in a realistic manner), then go into the job. After a magazine got me started on HTML with a 3-page explanation at 12yo, things just started rolling from there and I was basically always ahead of what I was expected to know by year x of the study because I had already done stuff out of personal interest. Don't need an N-year study there, either. Engineering (in the sense of building a bridge that stands 100 years) is probably different though.
    • jccalhoun 5y ago
      I've never heard of the book until this thread. How does he define "worth" to society? That seems like a big issue that I wouldn't think it related to proving the math wrong?
  • sanxiyn 5y ago
    I have read the book and it is pretty common sense and reasonable. I recommend you to read the book too.
    • speedgoose 5y ago
      Arguments that are common sense and reasonable are not necessarily true. The book is not pair reviewed, and I prefer scientific research over a spreadsheet so I will skip.
      • sanxiyn 5y ago
        The book is not peer reviewed, yes, but it meticulously cites (peer reviewed) social science research for most of its claims. I did spot checks and citations are good. (Through checks would be full time work. 1/7 of the book is dedicated to references.)
  • chrispeel 5y ago
    My bias is also to think that social science degrees are not as useful as technical degrees. My guess is that we'd be much better off in adding real science (including some humility) to those degrees, rather than abolishing them. I'd prefer incremental improvement over revolution. BTW, what is the value of a university degree is to someone's self-worth?
  • Brian_K_White 5y ago
    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 otherwise identical countries to act as the controls.
    • orangecat 5y ago
      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.
      • Brian_K_White 5y ago
        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.
  • haltingproblem 5y ago
    I have been interviewing a ton lately for software developers and it invokes a visceral reaction to see students with a technical education spend two years and tens of thousands of dollars getting a masters degree in "data science". These folks basically spend two years learning what they can pick up in a few coursera and youtube classes which is basically how to "operate" scikit learn. Which made me realize even in my CS degree all the "useful" courses could fit into one semester and the rest was just learnt the old fashioned (read: medieval) apprentice way - osmosis from being around other practitioners. Paraphrasing the great Yogi - thing change yet so much remains the same.
  • pmontra 5y ago
    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%.)
• epgui 5y ago
  I bet a spreadsheet that thoroughly analyzed the profitability of going out for a run every day would also find a negative ROI.
  • thedatabase 5y ago
    I'm never running again!
  • robbedpeter 5y ago
    Then you'd lose that bet. Running, even just a little, results in such clear improvements to general health and lowering of all cause mortality that the spreadsheet creator would have to work really hard to push the effects into the negative, and anything you did to frame running as a negative would be trivially dismissed.
    • csours 5y ago
      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 NOT MAKING THAT ARGUMENT, I'm just saying it's probably easier to do than you imagine.
      • librarianscott 5y ago
        Um, there actually are peer-reviewed studies which address things like running and health. For example, "The Influence of Running on Lower Limb Cartilage: A Systematic Review and Meta‐analysis," Sports Medicine (2022) 52:55–74 [1] One conclusion is "Results suggest that cartilage recovers well from a single running bout and adapts to repeated exposure. Given that moderate evidence indicates that running does not lead to new lesions, future trials should focus on clinical populations, such as those with osteoarthritis." My understanding is the evidence for walking is much stronger than running given the assumption that an "active lifestyle" is a goal, rather than just living longer. [1]: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-021-01533-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-021-01533-7
• jka 5y ago
  For anyone looking for a statistical analysis auditing challenge: the author links to an article[1] where they made the spreadsheets in question (questioning the return-on-investment from education) public. A collaborative auditing effort could involve some further documentation of what the origin datasources mean, how the sheets process and transform that information, and how to interpret the results produced. [1] - https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/06/embarrass_me_no.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/06/embarrass_me_no.htm...
  • jka 5y ago
    (see also this comment that reads like it could be onto something, although it'd require a bit of digging to determine what that is, if anything: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/06/embarrass_me_no.html/#comment-136458 https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/06/embarrass_me_no.htm...)
  • orborde 5y ago
    The final versions used for the tables/figures in the book are here, I think: http://www.bcaplan.com/returns.htm http://www.bcaplan.com/returns.htm
• _e 5y ago
  The author posted his spreadsheets at http://www.bcaplan.com/returns.htm http://www.bcaplan.com/returns.htm
• hirundo 5y ago
  Bryan's boss weighed in on this today: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/no-one-cared-about-bryans-spreadsheets.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/no... He says the education researchers who might audit this don't because Bryan is an outsider in that field.
  • giantg2 5y ago
    That, and some other reasons. Personally I think the lack of (political) splash/impact would be the biggest driver.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • Fomite 5y ago
    Honestly, as a researcher in another field who on occasion gets asked to "audit" people's thoughts, it's a return on investment problem. Doing something carefully enough to actually be worthwhile is (especially for someone's wall of madness spreadsheet) many hours of work. There's no real outcome where it's helpful for the auditor. They don't get paid. No one got tenure checking over someone's Rogue Outsider Spreadsheet. People doing economic analysis should understand incentives. What he has actually discovered is the same thing that makes writing quality scientific code so difficult - no one cares but you, so those unit tests your writing need to bring you some inner satisfaction.
    • lucb1e 5y ago
      > People doing economic analysis should understand incentives. For all we know it's just game theory. By doing X (pretending to be surprised, posting about how nobody cares about the math), the other party might do Y in response (someone is triggered enough and does go through the work). It might not add up economically, but that might be lost from sight. Or maybe it does add up now that publicity is in the mix. (I don't necessarily believe that the author is truly being deceptive, but neither would I argue they must necessarily have understood one economic area because of work in another; if I'm understanding your point correctly.) For what it's worth, I did not know this, so your comment was helpful to me at least. I did not realize it matters whether you're "in the field" or not, thinking that good contributions are welcomed equally as being good contributions.
• civilized 5y ago
  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 the wind and made wild guesstimates, and Caplan took it all very literally as some sort of sound foundation to evaluate education as a whole. I mean jeez, what did he even compare our status quo education system against? Where did the kids go in the counterfactual no-education scenario? Did the kids all go home to an infinite supply of stay-at-home moms? Did they go to extended daycare, all the way up to age 18? What did they do with all that time?
  • joebob42 5y ago
    On a certain level I might agree. On the other hand, I think it's a reasonable point that if we disagree with him, go find the parameter he's chosen wrongly or forgotten, since it must exist somewhere if he's wrong. On the third hand, that's probably unfairly much to ask of your audience, since it requires auditing work that took a year.
    • chasil 5y ago
      Several years ago, I wrote against a local option sales tax for schools with some uncomfortable data. This particular referendum was lost, but the next prevailed. We do not allocate money to education intelligently. As an aside, the comparison engine provided by the Federal Education Budget Project appears to have been taken down. [My Illinois town's] Schools have again placed a sales tax increase before the voters for the April 7th election. Voters should reject this increase after reviewing the financials below. In Iowa, the average 2013 teacher salary is $33,226. The Illinois average, however, is $37,166, which is above the national average of $36,141. Illinois teachers are (more than) fairly compensated. On a local focus, the Federal Education Budget Project lists the [nearby Iowa] Community School District budget for 2012 (which likely includes local option tax funds) as $174,000,000, which served 16,955 students for a per-student cost of $10,262. [My town's] budget for the same period was $76,568,000 and served 6,622 students, for a per-student cost of $11,562. [Our neighboring Illinois town's] budget for the same period was $78,817,000 and served 7,429 students, for a per-student cost of $10,609 per student. [Our nearby Illinois town's] academic performance is solidly ahead of [my town] - [our nearby Iowa town's] scores 70% and 66% proficient in the 2011 "No Child Left Behind" [high school] reading and math tests, while [my nearby Illinois town] respectively scores 46.9% and 53.8%, and [my town] trails the pack at 30.1% and 25.9%. [My nearby Iowa town] achieves performance dominance while spending $347 less per student than [my nearby Illinois town], and $1,300 less per student than [my town]. [My town's] schools should not ask for larger budgets, but instead trim costs and increase performance to match our nearby peers. If [my town's] schools cannot meet these standards, then perhaps we should consider outsourcing the maintenance of [my town's] schools to the [nearby Iowa town], which appears both more capable and thrifty by all measures. [My town's] students deserve better.
• Havoc 5y ago
  If you want people to look at your work (of any sort) it has to be at least marginally reader approachable. Novel thinking wrapped in a huge ball of spreadsheets isn’t that. Per authors own words it takes whole day author guided tour to get through it.
  • nickff 5y ago
    Caplan’s approach was not particularly novel thinking, it was just thorough. He used existing studies, tools, and paradigms to calculate the returns to different educations.
    • diatone 5y ago
      So in other words, the kind of thing that typically is suited to academic peer review? I don’t want to sound cynical, and this certainly isn’t ideal from a “cultivate a vibe of intellectual humility and curiosity” perspective, but is it a surprise to anyone but the author that laypeople didn’t take to a thorough critique of his work?
      • GaylordTuring 5y ago
        Unfortunately, however, peer review in these fields extremely seldom involve someone actually checking the code/all the calculations/the underlying data.
  • lucb1e 5y ago
    On the other hand, I often see studies where I'm quite curious to reproduce it and I just can't. Just today: saw a 2007 study from a university finding a correlation between sleep quality (deep sleep phase duration) and exposure to a GSM-frequency signal for 3 hours (a long, but not unusual/absurd, phone call) before sleep, even though the participants could not tell better than chance whether they had been exposed... would love to see if that reproduces even though the p value was not bad, but I just don't have the people nor the radiation calibration equipment nor the sleep lab nor anything. Even so much as a survey is hard to properly reproduce, definitely more than a day's worth of work if you need to go out and find a random pool of surveyees. Opening up a spreadsheet in your favorite software sounds fairly approachable by comparison, assuming it has no fancy university-level mathematics in it. Whether it is fun to talk to people for a survey vs. sit through pages of arithmetic is a whole other question, though.
• BurningFrog 5y ago
  > Several programmer friends advised me to learn a new programming language like Python to do everything automatically, but I’m 98% sure that would have taken even longer – and introduced numerous additional errors into the results. I did plenty of programming in my youth, and I know my limitations. I'm biased since I don't know spreadsheets at all, but I think Python code would have been far more reviewable.
  • civilized 5y ago
    I know "spreadsheeters" and I strongly suspect the author is right about his own programming incompetency.
  • taeric 5y ago
    I've seen plenty in both realms that were impenetrable.
  • mint2 5y ago
    That bad justification for choosing a very wrong tool for the job does not instill confidence for other logic employed by the author. “I used the tool that obfuscates my work that I’m trying to get others to review and buy in on because I consider myself hopeless at clearer tools and don’t want to even try. Why will no one engage with my obfuscated work?” I mean even he admits he made and corrected a ton of mistakes in his beast of excel. It’s absurd to think anyone would want to wade through that mess. Intentional or not, if one makes it impractical and unreasonable to crosscheck ones work then critics shouldn’t be expected to unravel it to point to the internal error. They only need to point to external evidence in the contrary.
  • fddhjjj 5y ago
    There are dozens of examples in the wild of python code getting reviewed, corrected, and enhanced. I’m not a spreadsheet expert. Does that even happen for spreadsheets?
    • cool_dude85 5y ago
      The most high-profile story is some grad students at UMass getting ahold of the spreadsheets powering the calculations in a high-profile economics paper by Reinhart and Rogoff about national debt levels, and finding elementary errors that destroyed the work.
• Legion 5y ago
  This reminds me of people online who construct gigantic walls of bad faith argument text and insist that it's up to everyone else to "debate them" and spend hours deconstructing their argument. Just possibly, dude, your argument isn't worth anyone else's time to debunk.
  • fennecfoxen 5y ago
    This would be contradicted by the fact that his argument makes splashy headlines and is engaged with regularly.
  • lucb1e 5y ago
    > Just possibly, dude, your argument isn't worth anyone else's time to debunk. 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. Education is a huge chunk of everyone's life, of course it's important to know the upsides and downsides. The returns are one aspect (I haven't read the book, it honestly sounds depressing, but I'm also intrigued) and calculating those with the highest reasonable precision seems like an important input to me, regardless of whether we like the answer. Why would you dismiss this altogether as not even worth anyone's time to look into?
    • erulabs 5y ago
      You quoted the wrong part if you’re after the dismissiveness. Declaring someone’s argument is in “bad faith” is unimpeachable. You can counter “no, I genuinely believe this” - but that’s just more bad faith argument! It’s an iron-jawed and unconquerable tool to deploy against any argument you do not want to engage with. Now - are there arguments not worth engaging with? Absolutely.
    • krisoft 5y ago
      > 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 valuable time finding where you slipped up. Now clearly his claim is more nebulous. One has to invest money and time to even understand what the book claims, so then one can invest more time to debunk a spreadsheet?
• Demiurge 5y ago
  This is a great example of how money and market does not encompass all of life. I didn't read the book, regrettably, so I'm not sure if that's besides the point, but the value of education is a sum of many values for the society as whole that seems a bit hard to put a numerical value on in a spreadsheet. I think the reductionism is kind of obvious.
  • burrows 5y ago
    For every dollar you put in this box, I’ll put ten cents into a scholarship fund for poor children in your country then burn the dollar. How many dollars do you put into the box? What if it were 300 cents instead?
    • Demiurge 5y ago
      What if it were a recipe for a functional fusion reactor?
      • burrows 5y ago
        Would I rather spend money on scholarships for poor children or buy the recipe for a functional net-positive fusion reactor from aliens? How much recipe does each of my dollars get? I’d give away all of my current net worth and take out a loan for $1 million from loan sharks and give that away too for a functional fusion reactor recipe, pending some questions about whether they will be able to sell the recipe again, do we actually have the materials to build the device and I’d want my nuclear engineer friend and lawyer to review the terms.
        • sudosysgen 5y ago
          I know this is besides the point but even if we didn't have the materials, just knowing what materials we lack and that they are possible is monumental and would be worth tens of billions of dollars.
• torbTurret 5y ago
  “ Several programmer friends advised me to learn a new programming language like Python to do everything automatically, but I’m 98% sure that would have taken even longer – and introduced numerous additional errors into the results. I did plenty of programming in my youth, and I know my limitations.” This screams stubbornness and a lack of willingness to push past a small barrier to me. Maybe unwarranted, but that also makes me less willing to accept his ideas. Who knows what evidence, lead, etc. was met with the same laziness?
  • heavyset_go 5y ago
    Learning a new programming language when you aren't a professional programmer isn't a small barrier. The best tools to use are the tools you know. Would you rather they had spent an inordinate amount of time putting together a hacky script that doesn't work/barely works? I believe if they did that, the comments section here would be picking their code apart for not using industry standard design patterns and for being worse than a new intern's code. Spreadsheets can accomplish the same thing and are more accessible to most people than a script full of one letter variables and no modules.
  • burrows 5y ago
    > Maybe unwarranted, but that also makes me less willing to accept his ideas. Who knows what evidence, lead, etc. was met with the same laziness? I think you can only say that you’ve chosen not to engage with this these arguments, not that you’ve rejected them as that would require engaging with them.
    • torbTurret 5y ago
      I agree with his arguments at a surface level, but I don’t accept that his analysis was rigorous. Especially because his spreadsheet is monolithic and impossible to double-check.
• pram 5y ago
  I’ve read a few of his books, this and the “open borders” one. I think the problem is it’s kind of “preaching to the choir” for people who are already ideologically aligned. As in, the solutions he advocates, despite being backed up with lots of numbers, are not actually convincing anyone who wasn’t already receptive. So it just gets dismissed as “not even wrong” unfairly or not.
  • brimble 5y ago
    The "open borders" book was recommended to me by a friend, but I passed after reading in a summary that my uninformed intuition about the bad economic effects of the policy on at least some large-ish fraction of existing citizens of rich countries was considered correct by Caplan, that he was relying on some kind of compensation to make these folks whole, in a world in which this plan was made reality. Seeing as we've rarely done a good job of this in the past, that sure looked like a great way to convince me open borders were not a good idea, from the perspective of most people already living in rich countries. Does it make a good argument that doesn't rely on that kind of thing, or did I make the right call? (Weinersmith's part, though I probably hold positions very similar to him on most issues, just looked... not even near the edge of being compelling, from what I could tell in the couple summaries I looked at)
    • pram 5y ago
      Not really. If you put it all together Caplan's world would be a United States with a population of 5 trillion uneducated people. This would propel us to unimagined and unprecedented wealth somehow.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
  To all the people who are criticizing the author doing it in Python, I think spreadsheets are actually superior to this for public policy. They are easier for the average person to grasp and play around with than is python. Almost any person who works in an office, can download a spreadsheet, look at the formulas, and then change a single cell and immediately see the results.
  • tgv 5y ago
    I'll repeat what I wrote above: Discussion might have been a bit easier if he'd just listed the assumptions and the model underlying the calculations. What can you learn from modifying a single cell? Very little. Just the (hidden) model's sensitivity to that parameter with the rest staying equal.
  • alisonkisk 5y ago
• ggm 5y ago
  If they found a good bug in the sheet, you can bet they'd make a lot of it: Some heinous spreadsheet bugs have leaked out over time https://theconversation.com/excel-errors-the-uk-government-has-an-embarrassingly-long-history-of-spreadsheet-horror-stories-147606 https://theconversation.com/excel-errors-the-uk-government-h...
• renewiltord 5y ago
  Interestingly, while it's entirely possible that the spreadsheets, through their abstruseness, hide incorrectness; current policy recommendations just try things by assuming outcomes. The conclusion is pre-determined, so evidence isn't really acquired. Of course we must spend more on educating everyone. So anything that says that we shouldn't is wrong on its face. Of course of course.
• insaider 5y ago
  Perhaps if his audience were better educated they would have the competency to challenge his math and logic...
• karl11 5y ago
  I love the irony in all the comments here criticizing his spreadsheets and arguments by people who have clearly not read the book or looked at the spreadsheets.
  • lelandbatey 5y ago
    I mean, I did download the spreadsheets and (skim) read the book after reading the parent article. TL;DR is that the spreadsheets are solid and unsurprising, though his interpretation of said spreadsheets seem to be the part that makes me ask "hmmm, I'm not sure if that follows from the evidence." Full breakdown, with direct links to the spreadsheets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30368620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30368620
  • mizzao 5y ago
    I once spent a long time building a pretty detailed pro forma model to raise money for a brick and mortar business in a spreadsheet. It was beautifully formatted, comprehensive, and appeared convincing. I patted myself on the back for training myself as an investment banker in 3 months. I showed it to an i-banker friend that I respected. He barely glanced at the spreadsheet, but offered one thing: "It's not about how detailed your model is; the most important thing is what your assumptions are." I was floored. No one cares about spreadsheets for a tech startup, but it turns out even when you're trying to get a brick & mortar, cashflow business off the ground, still no one cares about spreadsheets. That's probably what folks are reacting to here: the author is ultimately making an point by taking a set of assumptions and using those to derive the point. It seems like the argument is about the assumptions, not the calculations. In case anyone's curious, here's the model in question. It was for a ping pong social club with food & beverage in NYC: Base model: https://www.dropbox.com/s/m8amviwttxsq09b/The%20Push%20BK%20Financial%20Models.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/m8amviwttxsq09b/The%20Push%20BK%20... Sensitivity analysis: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vcw1un7usubb5vb/Sensitivity%20Analysis.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/vcw1un7usubb5vb/Sensitivity%20Anal...
    • sundarurfriend 5y ago
      > the author is ultimately making an point by taking a set of assumptions And here the discussion is mostly based on people's assumptions about those assumptions.
• analog31 5y ago
  Honestly I haven't read the book or checked the spreadsheets, but neither of them answer the question: Are the findings true? Are they of value? To make an analogy, we don't go back to Maxwell's writings or his calculations to figure out if his electromagnetic theory is true (within its domain of applicability). If no other scientific work were ever connected to Maxwell's, we still wouldn't know if it's true, or at least, his equations would merely be amusing factoids. His equations gained truth and value, along with a list of limitations, through their predictive power and track record.
  • butwhywhyoh 5y ago
    You're going to be very disappointed to find out that physics is nothing at all like social sciences.
• molszanski 5y ago
  Don’t know the guy or his work and don’t care. But his statement is true. Numbers, research, facts and logic rarely change opinions or drive policies. It is a miracle when they do
• lelandbatey 5y ago
  Well, if you're going to throw down the gauntlet like that Mr. Caplan, how can I resist! I began by actually looking at this authors spreadsheets, then looking at their claims, and ultimately, I downloaded a copy of their book[0] to review what that book says. So here's the info: The fundamental claim of the book is that currently, the "western education model" is not (really) about skill accumulation or increasing the utility that an individual can provide society. Instead, our current "western education model" is about signalling a workers productivity to potential employers. That is the thesis of the book, as spelled out in the introduction of the book. I downloaded the spreadsheets[1] that the author talked about.[2] I've reviewed them for about an hour, in between reading, and my take is that no one cares about the spreadsheets because they're INCREDIBLY basic. In short, the spreadsheets are a collection of statistics about the outcomes of students who complete various levels of education. It shows income earned per year of education completed, for a number of different hypothetical students (excellent students, poor students, etc). The numbers aren't particularly shocking on their face, and the spreadsheets don't have anything like a single cell on the first sheet labeled "SMOKING GUN, WOW" to catch your attention. Instead, the general point from the statistics is that we see unusual jumps in the expected compensation of students at various "round numbers", such as jumps at 12 years of education completed (finished high school), and 16 years of education completed (finished undergraduate). The author seems to take these as strong proof for their original point that the value of education is in "signalling", not in increasing a persons ability. My fundamental issue with this is that this data, as I've read it, could be understood a different way than "education is just a social signal". By my reading, this data could just as well be "western hiring markets are wildly under-valuing the abilities of folks who narrowly miss common landmark achievements". I believe that's also an idea worthy of study, but I don't see it addressed in any of the authors writing, or in the book. [0] - https://eddierockerz.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/the-case-against-education-why-the-education-system-is-a-waste-of-time-and-money-pdfdrive-.pdf https://eddierockerz.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/the-case-ag... [1] - https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/compensationcleanfinal.xls https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/compensationcleanfinal.x... [2] - https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/06/embarrass_me_no.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/06/embarrass_me_no.htm...
  • sgdjgkeirj 5y ago
• Brian_K_White 5y ago
  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 hear about this book the more ignorant it sounds. The benefits of having a significant, as large as possible, portion of everyone being at least somewhat educated on a wide range of basic ideas (not facts so much) isn't quantifiable. It's effects are in countless infinite small thimgs that no one can tally. It's not good enough that some small percent of people would always be educated, because those people still have to interact with everyone else. We already have a bad enough problem of people simply not even understanding what other people say, and therefor not crediting or respecting it at all and going with their feelings on everything.
  • betwixthewires 5y ago
    If the benefit is not quantifiable then how is it possible to draw the conclusion that there is a benefit (or negative impact on the same token) in the first place? If the price of education is quantifiable and the debt for it enforceable, then the benefit better be quantifiable.
  • butwhywhyoh 5y ago
    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 spreadsheet, which is precisely the authors point. You are one of the many people who heard something about the book, made assumptions about it, and then decided the book must be ignorant. Bravo!
    • tomrod 5y ago
      When conclusions are far outside reality, one must question the process and axioms from which it was generated. Reasoning from false premises can be strongly supported analytically.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• frazbin 5y ago
  does this only work if labor markets are efficient?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• lancebeet 5y ago
  This might be a knee-jerk reaction, but perhaps the reason nobody reported errors in the spreadsheets is because spreadsheets aren't easily auditable, which is one of the reason many dislike spreadsheets being used for this purpose.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• whatever1 5y ago
  Who cares about the accuracy of your excel calculations. It’s the modeling assumptions that drive the results, and this is what people rightfully focus on.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• thekashifmalik 5y ago
  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 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. It rings true with me even in casual discussions with peers when talking about social issues.
  • a123b456c 5y ago
    Two possible counter arguments: 1) The people who do the math are too busy read these articles and books. 2) Amazon has 15 phd economists running a single structural model of consumer behavior. They use it to inform feature changes.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • jmeister 5y ago
      2 only amplifies Caplan’s broader point about the importance of corrective feedback mechanisms(from real or prediction markets or anywhere else). I remember my manager in finance telling me that he would readily use a “mickey-mouse-in-a-box” as a model if it made him money.
      • HPsquared 5y ago
        Applying results from social sciences has the problem of weighing costs and benefits (policy X helps with A but hurts B). But how much 'A' do you need to get to outweigh the loss in 'B'? Business decisions are far simpler: both sides of a decision can be analytically boiled down to the same units (dollars/cents) and compared (more money = better than).
• mvhvv 5y ago
  With a grain of salt, as someone who has not read the spreadsheets (and has no interest in doing so). The author just seems to misunderstand the relativity of ideology. In particular they bemoan their critics as "..go[ing] with their ideology and status-quo bias, using the latest prestigious papers as fig leaves", but they don't acknowledge that their own findings obviously require some major ideological assumptions founded in neoliberalism. Critics aren't concerned about the correctness of the spreadsheets, because calculating the value of education as ROI requires assuming that all metrics are objectively (and abstractly) quantifiable, which is simply laughable (in my option). Even ignoring the ideological assumptions you have to make to quantify things like self-actualisation and it's impact on quality-of-life, there's an obvious issue here: How does education affect our political and cultural landscape? Assuming the math is right and reducing education funding improves the national budget while increasing some measure of quality-of-life, then what's the long-term impact? The democratic process is fundamentally reliant on the quality of information available to voters. Epistemology doesn't come for free, and "common-sense" is rife with biases. We already have widespread problems with low-information voting, so what happens when we stop teaching critical theory because it's not profitable?
  • piyh 5y ago
    I found a wife at college. Don't know how you fit that into the spreadsheet model.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • stereolambda 5y ago
    I also don't align with the author ideologically, but I have to protest somewhat. Assuming that the inputs and the model are sound (which I'm not saying they are, going by some other commenters' judgements), the spreadsheets tell us something regardless of whether we subscribe to making policy decisions with pure monetary terms ROI. Mainly that we need a damn good non-monetary arguments to make young people learn something (here I'm thinking of oversaturating the school programs in the country where I reside) and to justify existence of places that say "higher education" and usually charge money but they give their students not much. I am fully in the "you are a citizen before a homo economicus" camp, but don't actually want to make this an object level discussion about education. Two things: - A social assertion can be sound and consistent with facts while missing the bigger picture. This means people should tackle it and learn from it, at least on the intellectual discussion level, and not try to bury it. - Dismissing attempts to get things like formal logic and statistics into politics because it's all "ideologically motivated" is nihilist. Where the methods are sound and applied honestly, they can improve discourse (as a more disciplined kind of argumentation), unless you think you are a genius that perfectly knows how to improve society thanks to casual thinking and social proof. To be fair, these attempts usually are ruined by ideology, but this is because the attempters ultimately choose ideology and are willing to compromise discipline. To go way back, see the "Specimen demonstrationis politicarum" by the great philosopher G.W. Leibniz, where he promises to mathematically solve the current election of the king of Poland and arrives at the conclusion predictable from knowing who was paying him.
• cafxx 5y ago
  > The most novel feature of my return to education calculations was that I tried to count everything that matters. I took the countless papers that start with the standard return estimates and tweak them with one novel complication. Then I merged all the tweaks that seemed convincing to me to get final policy-relevant numbers. (emphasis mine, highlighting in the author's own words enough wiggle room to potentially undermine for the purposes of general policy whatever number comes out of said estimates; if you pick and choose the conditions, you can get any arbitrary value as an estimate; I'm not arguing his estimate is not valid, it very likely is - but only under the author's choice of values)
  • parksy 5y ago
    I had a similar reaction. I haven't heard of the author or their modelling prior, so haven't had much time to process the data, but I thought I'd bite, and took a look at some of the spreadsheets. The bit I was unclear about is where the predictive modelling takes place. I can see the raw numbers and how they've been composed across the main variables like education spending, education level, workforce participation and income, social benefit from workforce participation, and cost of crime. But I'm not seeing how the model itself is predictive. Where would I look to see the effect of dropping education spending by 50%. How does that impact crime rates and costs? What about the generational effects of deeply-connected criminal families and their children vs having more opportunities to participate and contribute to innovation etc. Does the model assume a linear relationship, i.e. n times the number of criminals = n times the crime rate = n times crime costs, or does it account for network effects such that n times the criminals have n^n crime rate, and crime costs are n^n - and is there a point where criminal justice processes break down and crime breaks out? Anyway save from writing a novel, it seems like the author did some homework to pull the various numbers together but I think some high level diagram of their model, inputs, calculations and outputs would be a better way to capture interest. Analysing something like this is a job, relying on the kindness of friends and internet strangers seems like a funny thing to get caught up on when the author themselves acknowledged the time and energy they had to spend pulling all of this together. I'm maybe going out on a limb but the lack of interest probably doesn't indicate that no one cares about the numbers, nor must it indicate people would rather use emotional intuition, just that there's probably better and more complete models out there used by social scientists and economists that follow tried and tested conventions that take many more factors into account, not my wheelhouse though, if no such standard models exist I'd be very surprised.
• vajrabum 5y ago
  I've built spreadsheets with financial data before for business investment and decision purposes and the idea that any spreadsheet or argument relevant to public or business policy would be value free seems laughable to me. There's always an agenda. Given that, I think the right starting place might be to ask cui bono, who benefits from these policy recommendations? I'm reminded of the argument and policy prescription coming from that argument that we can't afford decent roads or other infrastructure such as sewage treatment plants in rural and suburban areas with little to no mention of the long term trend of declining taxes on the wealthy and major land owners. Given that, I don't feel sorry or surprised on behalf of the author that nobody is interested in the construction of their spreadsheet. Nor do I feel the need to take their argument any more seriously on that basis. It seems to me to be a matter of literally just politics. Especially so when I notice that he's a scholar at the Cato Institute and a self described libertarian. So yes, it's no surprise to me that he's advocating libertarian policy. It's also worth noting that he got a prestigious and expensive education with a BA from Cal and a Phd from Princeton.
• failuser 5y ago
  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.
• tylermenezes 5y ago
  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.
  • Someone 5y ago
    There also is (FTA): “I took the countless papers that start with the standard return estimates and tweak them with one novel complication. Then I merged all the tweaks that seemed convincing to me* to get final policy-relevant numbers” So, the model was adjusted from tweaks created by one person, and then those tweaks were evaluated by the same person, not on objective criteria, but on what seemed right. I also guess the author at the start had ideas about the quality of each of the “countless papers that start with the standard return estimates” and used them to pick those he included in the model. I don’t see how that could ever lead to an objective model, even if the author started this exercise unbiased.
  • IshKebab 5y ago
    Yeah I wouldn't look at his numbers for the simple reason that it's a predictive model that's presumably chock full of fudge factors and educated guesses. It's pretty trivial to tweak it (he even admits he did that) to get the result you want. And he clearly has a result that he wants. Well, that and the idea that education is just to make money... I'm sure there are dozens of beneficial returns he left out, like more educated people voting for parties that are less likely to screw them over.
• cribbles 5y ago
  There's a strain of Marxism called Maoism Third-Worldism. (This relates to the article -- I'm getting to it.) This is a contentious strain within Marxism because of the way it contorts some of Marxism's basic ideas to its own ends. The main one being Lenin's theory of "labor aristocracy." If you're not familiar with this, it's the idea that the working class in first world countries is effectively "bribed" by their national bourgeoisie through wages higher than those available for the same types of jobs in developed countries. Maoism Third-Worldism extends this concept by claiming that, actually, first world laborers are not exploited _at all_. No matter how bad workers in developed countries have it, their class interests are fused with those of the national bourgeoisie and their share of imperial "superprofits" means that they effectively belong to the same class category as the latter. I'm simplifying somewhat, but this is the basic idea, and it's proven through hundreds and hundreds of spreadsheets. If you leaf through a book like Zac Cope's Divided World, Divided Class, half the book is citations, charts, and tables. Now I admit I am a bit of a dilettante here, but to my knowledge there have been no serious attempts made to challenge the vast quantitative efforts made by Third-Worldist writers. This is at least partially explained by the fact that Marxist audiences tend to be a bit less quant-focused than their peers in mainstream economics (to put it lightly). Still, it upends some of the most basic contentions of Marxist analysis, so you'd expect there to be a more lively debate over all those charts and graphs. Right? I claim there's a larger issue at play here: most people are driven to ideas within social sciences for basically pathological reasons. The ideas agree with them on some basic level, and the research is largely a pretext for legitimizing those ideas or creating a sort of ideological playing field for its adherents. People aren't drawn to Marxism or any of its sub-sub-ideologies because they started reading Capital on whim one day and found its ground-up arguments on the commodity form compelling, any more than libertarians start from a blank slate and are "woken up" by reading Hayek cover-to-cover. So if you propose a wildly heterodox idea within one of these fields, no amount of math is going to help you. Most people, even academics within the same area of research, will either be drawn the idea - in which case, great, there's math to "back it up" - or repelled by it and dismiss it out of hand. I'll show my hand here by saying the author's idea sounded kind of dumb to me so I didn't look at the spreadsheets.
• julienfr112 5y ago
  It's time to write a Case Against Research...
• periheli0n 5y ago
  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 leads to declining assessment standards. Or "value added" as a major criterion for educational success, i.e. how much students improve as opposed to how well they did overall (leading to universities taking on many students who are actually not fit for study, because as long as they graduate, much "value" is added for them). Education has a value beyond money, and in countries where education is free or low cost (like Germany) it is often organised around providing the student with the opportunity to learn, rather than focusing on graduating as many students as possible. It is in the responsibility of the student to make use of the resources provided, rather than the responsibility of the provider to satisfy a paying customer. Students who graduated from such universities often are more capable of independent thinking in my experience.
  • edanm 5y ago
    > 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 help for the homeless, more money for healthcare, etc. That might be the correct decision! But it is a decision. 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.
    • m000 5y ago
      > 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, more money for healthcare Ironically, the same people who would complain about free education, would complain 10x over more money for the homeless or healthcare.
• ajuc 5y ago
  > A few critics bizarrely claimed that one recent paper had refuted my entire enterprise. For them your whole enterprise is also "one recent paper". And yours is the one with extraordinary claims. I only skimmed the spreadsheets and my criticism isn't quantitative so feel free to ignore it. For one thing signaling provides value, so just treating it as useless isn't fair. You can argue it's not worth it at the current prices, but at some price over 0 it would be worth it. For another thing there's a lot of nonlinear special cases that you throw out of window by looking at aggregates. Scientists and engineers don't grow on trees. For example imagine we save 30 years of education spending but we don't have quantum mechanics and relativity. Are we better off? Unicorns in education have crazy high potential value and can be used to justify a lot of wasted spending.
• cycomanic 5y ago
  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 talk about the benefit to society or the ROI for an individual? Again the title seems to imply it's about the overall benefit to society, but from what people are writing here it seems to be about the question if investing in a college education is a financial decision. Can someone who read the books clarify these points, because I would be interested in the book if it is actually about the benefit to society and education in general, but if it is just about personal decisions then I don't care much and would consider the book a waste of time with a click-bait title.
  • saint_fiasco 5y ago
    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 vocational schools in some other countries, where only a minority of students go to college and therefore employers don't demand college degrees for simple jobs like they do in the US. The spreadsheet he mentions, that he complains nobody ever looked at, includes the costs and benefits to both society and individuals. I didn't read the spreadsheet either, but in the book he says that the cost-benefit analysis is positive for smart individuals (if you can go to college and get a degree you should go, for selfish financial reasons) but negative for societies because of all the subsidies.
    • cycomanic 5y ago
      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 ...
• callesgg 5y ago
  Uneducated people would not bother with investigating something like that and why would educated people try to undermine their own choices? It is not in their interest to do so. On personal note... I for one did not go through higher education for the money. I did I so that I could alter my "social status". So for me it is not about my financials or really myself at all; it is about how other people perceive me.
• kwhitefoot 5y ago
  I haven't looked at the spreadsheets either, or read the book. But this sentence stood out when I scanned the web page: > How unpleasant school is compared to work. That was very much not my experience and my working life was pretty good too. Am I an outlier? Or just lucky that I didn't grow up in the US?
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  > 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 the fact question it addresses is considered important to other people in the field.) If you publish a work aimed at a popular audience and intended as policy advocacy, and it's full of heavy quantitative analysis, you haven't understood the domain you are operating in. Long-form heavily analytical work does have a role in informing policy debates, but that role is in wonkish intrafactional debates among policy types within the group that already agrees with you on values.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
    I will build on that. "They tweak standard return calculations to get another publication – then move on with their lives." I will go even as far as to say that the quantitative does not matter. Or more specifically, it is there only to provide an excuse for promoting a specific agenda. It is depressing, but this is where we are. I saw few exceptions to that rule.
  • GaylordTuring 5y ago
    > 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.
    • trelane 5y ago
      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.
• Shorel 5y ago
  > How unpleasant school is compared to work. Well, I just started studying to get a degree in something I have already worked, and let me tell you, it is extremely fulfilling and enjoyable in ways I could not have imagined. And I don't say it is easy or trivial, I have to prepare for exams and stuff. But just looking from the perspective of the actual experience, it is great. And having worked for some micromanaging if-I-pay-you-you're-my-slave unpleasant bosses in the past, no, hard disagree. Work now is good, but it was not good twenty years ago when I started. Having said that, I am in Europe. Other places should offer different experiences.
• bigDinosaur 5y ago
  The main reason I couldn't care less about spreadsheets: I have no desire to open a goddamn spreadsheet. Why didn't he just use a sqlite database or something?
• jwr 5y ago
  I don't care about your spreadsheets. But it's not because I don't care about quantitative assessments, it's because I believe you can't measure everything quantitatively (and put in monetary terms, and make decisions based on that). As an example, much of the trouble we are in today is caused by insufficient education. Climate change denial, avoiding vaccinations, electing idiots as leaders, religious fundamentalism, wars and conquests, lack of rationality in decision making (ahem!) — all these effects would be lessened if we were better educated and more rational. Unless you model the entirety of human civilization in your spreadsheets, they just aren't enough.
• usgroup 5y ago
  > ...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.
• rendall 5y ago
  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-of-happiness-debunked-nick-brown 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.
  • shawabawa3 5y ago
    > which was purportedly the precise ratio of positive to negative emotions you should experience to be mentally and emotionally healthy This doesn't make any sense. It's not a matter of some formula using bad maths, it's the fact that maths isn't applicable to something so obviously subjective I'm surprised it needed debunking at all when the premise is so obviously and immediately flawed
• straffs 5y ago
  I work with data and make nice presentations. With the same data i'm able to make compeling and accurate arguments for whatever point of view. Pro, or against something, i can come up with a story for anything.
• fastaguy88 5y ago
  I have not read the book, nor looked at the spreadsheets. But as someone who knows a bit about argumentation, I have to point out that, often, if you are forced to argue about the specific data, you have already lost the argument. Data (and quantitative arguments) are appealing because they appear to be "un-biased", but the person picking the numbers has already set the terms of the debate. Someone else might point out that a set of numbers measure some things accurately, but not everything. One might point out that averages (perhaps, on average, many college students learn little more than they learned in high school) obscure the extremes (for some groups, particularly poor people with poorly educated parents, high school and college are far more efficient paths for improving quality of life than any alternative). It sounds good to say that you can't argue with the data, but you can certainly argue with how the data was picked.
• IMAYousaf 5y ago
  Curious, what's the best way to self-education to become good at econometrics?