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Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

There appears to be a bunch of people defending Caplan in this discussion, but most of that defence boils down to "read the entire book!"

No, I'm not going to do that. And if you've read the entire book, and think I'm an idiot at this point, you are free to say so and disengage from this discussion.

But the reason I'm so dismissive of his work is that the conclusion is ridiculous and the premise inherently flawed because education has inherently unquantifiable value that cannot be expressed in a spreadsheet. Ever.

And the reason I'm dismissive of the defenders is that no-one seems to be able to come up with a succinct rebuttal to the criticisms fielded by me and others in this discussion other than "read the entire book!"

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I think it's fair to say it's easy to over focus on the quantifiable, but arguably we also fail on even qualifying what exactly we concretely are trying to do. Like, what's the real purpose of school? Does it actually serve the goals that we often talk about - is it readying students to be good, engaged citizens, or particularly good workers? Of course, a simple numeric score would just be the fraction of the goals achieved / every goal, and that'd certainly capture something important about the education system.

> education has inherently unquantifiable value that cannot be expressed in a spreadsheet. Ever.

Any attempt at modeling any phenomena will fail to capture some aspect of that phenomena. So are you suggesting that all attempts at modeling are inherently flawed and must lead to ridiculous conclusions?

- To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important is that objective? Question 1 rates the poem's perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem's greatness becomes a relatively simple matter. If the poem's score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph--

- O Captain! My Captain!

Right. But I didn’t assert that all things can be gainfully modeled.

I suggested that the non-specific incompleteness of a model isn’t a compelling reason not to use the model.

The person you were arguing with is saying that it's a compelling reason to not use the model because, I quote, the conclusions of the model are "batshit insane".

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