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Comment by butwhywhyoh | Hacker News Reader

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!

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Assumptions and reductions are always required, there is no researcher in the world that reads every book or paper released in their field, and for those that do read voraciously, only a tiny fragment of that is remembered or understood on the grounds that the author intended.

Part of learning is to deciding which parts to ignore. The book is rejected on it's face because its core claim is essentially "I solved a major issue in another field by reducing it down to the one I know", which is a big red-flag for crank claims.

The article's focus on spreadsheets is part of why it's so easy to brush it aside. The author doesn't realise that the fidelity of the spreadsheet is less important than their own ideological assumptions.

It's possible they cover this in detail in the book, but it's not in this article, nor in any description of the book I've encountered. If something appears as crank-science on it's face (and is getting little traction), then why waste your time on it?

> Assumptions and reductions are always required, there is no researcher in the world that reads every book or paper released in their field

It's good practice to read the ones you're commenting on.

I think you couldn't have really given that comment much thought.

It takes no imagination at all to poke a hole in that.

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

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

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

> I'm talking about why people don't think it's worth engaging with to begin with.

But that's not what the author is talking about in his article - you did read it, right? His book is drawing criticism from people who haven't read it. It's fine to choose not to engage with something, but if you're going to comment on it you should read it.

Yes, like I said, I read the article, and I read the linked notes. The article was not really about people criticising his book without reading it, the article was about not engaging in qualitative criticism of his spreadsheets.

Caplan indirectly mentions a paper criticising him, and his dismissal is that it doesn't acknowledge the math.

It's entirely reasonable to comment on why you're choosing not to dedicate your time to something. Especially when the thing to be analysed relies on fundamentally incommensurable values.

FWIW, from actually reading his notes and the extracts of the spreadsheets he quickly dips into a number of flaky assumptions and uses them to apply "corrective biases" which make it very easy to dismiss without wasting time on arduous numerical analysis.

The obsession with “evidence “ is killing discourse.

You don’t give “evidence” when drawing a conclusion, you have a set of assumptions and from there there’s usually only one logical way to go.

Imagine asking for “evidence” 1+1 equalled 2. You could be given a “proof” but there’s no “evidence”.

Even if there were some magical set of data that could “prove” something, humans are not and can not be rational creatures; because time is finite, you must cut off data collection somewhere, even though technically the very next bit of information collected could completely change the measured outcome.

Of course the author’s spreadsheets were ignored; of course people cut off their data collection before getting to them. It’s such an absurd notion, the idea of precisely quantifying value of education, that spending time trying to understand what the inputs were to this spreadsheet is a waste if time for… well, anyone.

The set of people with the time and the expertise necessary to evaluate the author’s math on its merits is apparently zero. That isn’t a “bad” thing.

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.

But that's the complaint: People aren't finding flaws with the premises. They are simply asserting that the premises are false.

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