Comment by absherwin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by absherwin | Hacker News Reader

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I'll bite. I won't discuss my experience in my posts since I don't want to argue from authority but will do so below. But first, I should point out that you're committing a similar sin to that which is alleged in the article. What you really care about is the correctness of an argument. You hypothesize that formal training is an important indicator of correctness. Presumably there's also noise in that scatterplot but we don't even have it. Since it's the best thing available, you are choosing to rely on it.

As for my formal stats training: None beyond High School. That said, I've worked with and interviewed many with far more training. One thing, I learned is that most people don't have great intuition for statistical problems and it's not terribly highly correlated with years of schooling. I've met PhD's in economics and statistics who have made basic conceptual errors as well as those with less training who were more reliable.

So while training may be correlated with accuracy, you should still demand a well-reasoned argument and think critically about it.

I agree almost entirely. I'm specifically not asking for people to say "I'm a PhD in statistics, and here's the answer. Accept it because I know better than you." What I'm asking for a a complete and reasoned response, along with some evidence as to how much I should listen to you in the first place.

If you have no such evidence then the onus will be on you to make your argument more complete, more coherent, and more comprehensive. If you have evidence (note: evidence, not proof) then you can be a little less rigorous in what you say, and rely on people giving you the benefit of the doubt while they work through the argument.

What I see a lot of is long, apparently good arguments, that then turn out not to be as complete or coherent. they sometimes just don't hang together.

Significant amounts of formal study in a subject is evidence that someone might just have a better understanding. After spending a lot of time on the internet I'm tired of having to wade through every single argument in detail looking for all the possible chinks.

Maybe that's just impossible. Maybe every person has to redo every analysis for every argument. Seems like a complete waste of almost everyone's time. What about "Don't Repeat Yourself" or "Don't re-invent the wheel." I guess we are doomed to reinvent the wheel in every single discussion.

Reinventing the wheel would be a major problem if our goal is to solve the education problem with this discussion. No one here has done even the basic work I would expect of someone trying to understand teacher evaluation as a solution and compare it to other alternatives.

I would argue that the whole point of HN is to think through arguments in other domains and build intuition by reasoning through problems and arguments. Otherwise, what's the point? No one is going to arrive at this thread and scan the top-rated comments for the solution to his school district's problems.

In cases where actual decisions are being made where the analyses are much more thorough and fully validating much more expensive, other techniques are available. First, one generally builds an awareness of the strengths of each team member which suggests where errors may be more likely. Additionally, one can check a random set of the most likely problem areas. Perhaps, most importantly, while everyone won't re-do every analysis, it's highly unlikely that an any important analysis will only be done once. So one can expect that the high-level results are generally consistent.

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