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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

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 'factor' is not a word." Has everyone thought about the fact that the alternative to spreadsheets is policymakers putting their hands on their hips and saying, "Yep, $30k sounds about right for this month?"

labcomputer 5y ago
> nobody's saying "you're missing some important factors, and let's add them. Ok, so I’ll say it. Caplan doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. And neither did the people who he asked to check his spreadsheets. What he is trying to do, in an informal hand-waving way, is something known as causal inference. There are formal, robust ways to do causal inference, which Caplan is not using. No amount of checking his arithmetic or adding more factors is going to fix that. This would be a good place to start: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2943670/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2943670/ > Has everyone thought about the fact that the alternative to spreadsheets is policymakers putting their hands on their hips and saying, "Yep, $30k sounds about right for this month?" Well, I can’t speak for everyone else, but I don’t think about that because what you claim as fact is actually a false dilemma. The actual alternative is to do good science using the correct methods.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  The practice is not the “do good science using the correct methods”. The practice is “call for increased education spending for *waves hands* reasons”. Listen, this is the old Internet trick: people show up demanding rigorous models and evidence when they see something they don’t like, but what they like they demand nothing of.
  - pas 5y ago
    That's ... not a fallacy. It's simply extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence in action. (Eg. if your Bayesian prior is already edukashion gud, and someone says giv muniez to teacherz, you can say yes, ok, dollar. But if someone says no no, it's a waste of resources you can say okay the burden of proof is on you now, have fun.)
    - renewiltord 5y ago
      I'm not claiming it's a fallacy, my dude. I'm claiming it's a trick. Since the prior is uninformed, it's obvious this isn't "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" since both claims are extraordinary. It’s just that one is political desirous. Ain’t fooling nobody with the attempt at rational cover.
      - pas 5y ago
        It's not a cover, it's an explanation :) Caplan shouldn't be surprised at the reception of his work, because people have this prior. Of course as you say high priests of rationality examine their own biases as they reach for the book, and by the time they flip it to read the recommendations on the back they are already empty vessels for unadulterated pure non-chill-filtered high-octane data and nothing else. But most people working in public policy are just lowly humans. :/
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      How much evidence you'd demand to change your mind depends on whether your prior was 50%, 90% or 99.999999999%. You shouldn't need more evidence to change back to 50/50 than it took to get you to your current beliefs - otherwise you'd have two equal cases and prefer the one you heard earlier for no reason other than that you heard it first.
      - pas 5y ago
        Of course. I'm simply saying that Caplan shouldn know that people are entrenched in the pro-education position (because this is the norm for centuries, because nigh certainly everyone who is in the education policy sphere has gone through many years of the usual schooling and higher ed, and virtually all of these policy experts are pro-education). Plus it seems despite his many spreadsheets his model is not able to do causal inference, which means his tables are very verbose narrations or appendices to his arguments in prose, and not a decisive proof. > to change your mind Unless one is in a state of 100% confirmation bias then ideally every little piece of evidence counts. Sure, we are not perfect walking-talking sentient infinite resolution mathematical distributions, so in practice we simply discard a lot incoming information, as we have meta-(meta?)-heuristics that we depend on. (Eg. if our friends and family and the news and even random blogs claim X we start to take it seriously, but still, if it doesn't really affect us our attention won't bother. And so on.)
oehpr 5y ago
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 lacked what I think is important here. The humility to see that the piles of multiplication for the handwavey guesses that they are. Caplan's spreadsheets, to me, made his argument more persuasive. But still not that persuasive. My priors already have education being a net benefit as highly probable, and I'll update, but not much. This seems rational to me.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  >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?
  - oehpr 5y ago
    I guess just a life of listening to people, like economists, who were in more knowledgable positions than I, repeatedly saying it over and over again. I'm in no personal position to otherwise say boo.
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      Brian's schtick boils down to pointing out that sometimes, economists say things over and over again just because they, themselves, have heard them said over and over again - with the added trick (making it much more valuable) of proposing something better-researched than what they keep repeating. I guess that's my point, that this may be one of those. It'd be usual for him if it was.

labcomputer 5y ago

> nobody's saying "you're missing some important factors, and let's add them. Ok, so I’ll say it. Caplan doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. And neither did the people who he asked to check his spreadsheets. What he is trying to do, in an informal hand-waving way, is something known as causal inference. There are formal, robust ways to do causal inference, which Caplan is not using. No amount of checking his arithmetic or adding more factors is going to fix that. This would be a good place to start: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2943670/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2943670/ > Has everyone thought about the fact that the alternative to spreadsheets is policymakers putting their hands on their hips and saying, "Yep, $30k sounds about right for this month?" Well, I can’t speak for everyone else, but I don’t think about that because what you claim as fact is actually a false dilemma. The actual alternative is to do good science using the correct methods.

renewiltord 5y ago
The practice is not the “do good science using the correct methods”. The practice is “call for increased education spending for *waves hands* reasons”. Listen, this is the old Internet trick: people show up demanding rigorous models and evidence when they see something they don’t like, but what they like they demand nothing of.
- pas 5y ago
  That's ... not a fallacy. It's simply extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence in action. (Eg. if your Bayesian prior is already edukashion gud, and someone says giv muniez to teacherz, you can say yes, ok, dollar. But if someone says no no, it's a waste of resources you can say okay the burden of proof is on you now, have fun.)
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    I'm not claiming it's a fallacy, my dude. I'm claiming it's a trick. Since the prior is uninformed, it's obvious this isn't "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" since both claims are extraordinary. It’s just that one is political desirous. Ain’t fooling nobody with the attempt at rational cover.
    - pas 5y ago
      It's not a cover, it's an explanation :) Caplan shouldn't be surprised at the reception of his work, because people have this prior. Of course as you say high priests of rationality examine their own biases as they reach for the book, and by the time they flip it to read the recommendations on the back they are already empty vessels for unadulterated pure non-chill-filtered high-octane data and nothing else. But most people working in public policy are just lowly humans. :/
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    How much evidence you'd demand to change your mind depends on whether your prior was 50%, 90% or 99.999999999%. You shouldn't need more evidence to change back to 50/50 than it took to get you to your current beliefs - otherwise you'd have two equal cases and prefer the one you heard earlier for no reason other than that you heard it first.
    - pas 5y ago
      Of course. I'm simply saying that Caplan shouldn know that people are entrenched in the pro-education position (because this is the norm for centuries, because nigh certainly everyone who is in the education policy sphere has gone through many years of the usual schooling and higher ed, and virtually all of these policy experts are pro-education). Plus it seems despite his many spreadsheets his model is not able to do causal inference, which means his tables are very verbose narrations or appendices to his arguments in prose, and not a decisive proof. > to change your mind Unless one is in a state of 100% confirmation bias then ideally every little piece of evidence counts. Sure, we are not perfect walking-talking sentient infinite resolution mathematical distributions, so in practice we simply discard a lot incoming information, as we have meta-(meta?)-heuristics that we depend on. (Eg. if our friends and family and the news and even random blogs claim X we start to take it seriously, but still, if it doesn't really affect us our attention won't bother. And so on.)

oehpr 5y ago

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 lacked what I think is important here. The humility to see that the piles of multiplication for the handwavey guesses that they are. Caplan's spreadsheets, to me, made his argument more persuasive. But still not that persuasive. My priors already have education being a net benefit as highly probable, and I'll update, but not much. This seems rational to me.

whatshisface 5y ago
>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?
- oehpr 5y ago
  I guess just a life of listening to people, like economists, who were in more knowledgable positions than I, repeatedly saying it over and over again. I'm in no personal position to otherwise say boo.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    Brian's schtick boils down to pointing out that sometimes, economists say things over and over again just because they, themselves, have heard them said over and over again - with the added trick (making it much more valuable) of proposing something better-researched than what they keep repeating. I guess that's my point, that this may be one of those. It'd be usual for him if it was.