True, but there are things where AI can help. For example, in the domain of electronic gas sensors, AI can be used to disentangle confounding variables like gas, humidity and temperature. All three affect the sensor output in a nonlinear fashion, and an ANN can learn the transfer function that extracts the (almost) pure gas response.
Gas sensing is really tricky. Metal oxide gas sensors respond nonlinearly to all three of gas, temperature, and humidity. Plus they drift. AI can help with the nonlinear response. Drift hasn't been solved yet, as far as I know.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Judging the benefit of education only on the financial bottomline is bound to underestimate its real value.
For example, a democracy can only function if citizens are able to process complex information to base their voting decisions on. Therefore it is in the interest of a democratic country that citizen have access to education, and that they can afford it.
> 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.
Education is correlated with health and longevity. Also, educated people are more likely to make sane life decisions and plan ahead. Therefore, by subsidising education, one likely reduces the number of homeless and the cost of public health.
But none of this is expressed in the calculation that measures the "value" of education by the personal financial gain an individual can achieve. Therefore I argue that this measure is not suitable to measure the value of education.
> But none of this is expressed in the calculation that measures the "value" of education by the personal financial gain an individual can achieve. Therefore I argue that this measure is not suitable to measure the value of education.
I agree, that would be a very short-sighted calculation. Luckily, that's not even close to the calculation that Bryan Caplan did and is talking about.
I'm not sure if we're actually disagreeing or arguing past each other. Bryan Caplan wrote a book about whether education is "worth it", in many senses - both the personal "is it worth it for me" aspect, but also the "is it worth it for society" aspect. He delved into multiple different topics as part of this question - including, I believe, questions like the ones you raise. (It's been a while since I read his book).
You are not fundamentally disagreeing with the notion of calculating the value of education. You're disagreeing with a specific calculation that you think I (or someone else) did, but which isn't the actual calculation done by anyone.
Judging the benefits of anything only on the financial bottom line is risky. Many extremely valuable things are valuable because they are cheap to the point of irrelevancy. Which is why it is a valid question to ask whether the resources are worth it.
> For example, a democracy can only function if citizens are able to process complex information to base their voting decisions on.
It has worked pretty well for the last 2,500 years with voters possessing extremely questionable education. The main issue is whether a democracy has a culture of being graceful in both political victory and defeat.
> Education is correlated with health and longevity.
Correlation is not causation. Wealthy people tend to be healthy, long-lived and well educated. It might not be the education as much as having enough wealth for leisure and health.
> Also if anything has become clear in the last 5 years it’s that educated people are much less likely to be deceived by false populist promises.
Agree with the basic premise that the main political division is not between “right” and “left” but “educated people” (ie progressive college-educated) vs “uneducated people” (the working classes.)
Disagree that it’s clear who is right. We will have to wait 20-30 years to see. (Personally I think the working classes are wiser than the progressive elites, but that’s just one opinion..)
The last two years have shown that the educated portion of the population was just as easily deceived by false populist promises, and just as easily provoked into channelling their frustrations onto an undeserving scapegoat.
> It has worked pretty well for the last 2,500 years with voters possessing extremely questionable education. The main issue is whether a democracy has a culture of being graceful in both political victory and defeat.
I would like to hear more about this democracy that has lasted 2500 years please.
> Judging the benefit of education only on the financial bottomline is bound to underestimate its real value.
In the article he mentions that he gets this type of criticism on his book, despite the fact that he spent chapters on these exact kind of questions. Painstakingly including those things is what the whole thing is about.
And now he gets the criticism despite putting that in the article!
The effects of education on democratic participation, workforce participation and public health are all explicitly assessed in Caplan’s book, particularly chapter 6. This comment tends to prove the point he makes in the article: “Quantitative social science is barely relevant in the real world … 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.”
I am digging through his book and it reads to me like a healthy dose of ideology littered with references to sociology papers that would likely not survive replication.
Additionally, I am reading a back and forth between Bryan and Noah Smith[1]. The main thing that stands out, is that after putting forth such a quantitative focused text on the topic, Bryan seems to resort to an idealogical back and forth with Noah. If you are going to put all this effort into building an excel model that makes your case, why are you not using that as your first line of defense?
Quite frankly, I don't think either Noah or Bryan really make convincing arguments. But that is because the debate between "human capital" and "signaling" is such a squishy topic, and no amount of data analysis or philosophical reasoning is really going to change the debate any time soon.
Of course it is. If literally nobody wants to hear your answer, you might well (to use an example from a previous article) replace your audience with a rock saying “it’s not true. Go away.”, and have the same effect.
I’m predisposed to saying education is insanely beneficial though. I want everyone to have all of it for free.
> For example, a democracy can only function if citizens are able to process complex information to base their voting decisions on.
Jason Brennan (another libertarian) wrote the book Against Democracy. So these two books should be policy companions.
Which also goes to show how nefarious this assertion of yours is: all people have to do in order to suppress people’s right to participate in a democracy is to defund education and the civil square. Then people become “not informed enough” to process “complex information” (as if our elected representatives seem capable of that… but whatever).
> 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,
Not everywhere. Next to no homeless people here in Scandinavia yet education is universally available at almost no cost to the student.
The US is richer both in absolute terms and per capita so lack of money is presumably not the reason for the difference.
I wasn't saying that it's either education or specifically helping the homeless. I'm saying it's a tradeoff between spending on education, vs. spending on other things. If homelessness isn't a problem, great! There are still other ways to spend the money. Maybe raise the standard of living of the poorest 10% by giving them a UBI. Maybe build nicer gardens. Maybe just have lower taxes!
It's totally possible that education is more important than all other uses for that money. It's likely true to some extent, because that's what the country has effectively decided to do.
But that comparison has to be made, either implicitly or explicitly, because that money is either going to education or to something else. There's literally no way to not make a decision about this topic.
Abolish police and military, and suddenly you'll have plenty of funds for your UBI or whatever cool system you'd like to invest in.
Also worth noting: money is just a meaningless abstraction designed by the rich to extract value from the poor (without money, the rich and the poor don't even exist). If you're really concerned about welfare of people, abolition of money and private property is a question worth raising and studying seriously.
> Abolish police and military, and suddenly you'll have plenty of funds for your UBI or whatever cool system you'd like to invest in.
Abolish police and then what? Who will enforce any kinds of laws? Or do we just revert to having nothing?
Abolish the military and leave every country at the mercy of any invader that comes along? I can certainly understand the idea of not spending as much money on the military, but how can anyone that has heard of any amount of history take seriously the idea that a country like the US can just abolish its military without it being in catastrophic danger?
> Also worth noting: money is just a meaningless abstraction designed by the rich to extract value from the poor
That's... a pretty bold statement.
But I'm curios. What do you mean? If the abstraction of money didn't exist, what would happen exactly? In some sense you are right that money is just an abstraction, it's just an abstraction for the fact that there are limited resources that everyone wants.
Maybe you and me, and our neighbors, as a community. Why would we concentrate police powers in the hand of a specialized militia answering only to the psychopaths in government? Cops are never here when we need them to protect actual people, but they always show up and mess everything up when things were getting better.
Laws are written in a social context. You can break laws without harming anyone, in which case nobody in your neighborhood may mind (and maybe some people would like to repel that law at the next general assembly). If some people think you are harming others, then there are many ways to try and find an arrangement to the situation and repair any wrongdoing (see also: reparative/transformative justice).
Of course, some extreme cases require use of violence to control a person who's physically endangering others. Why would we make a job out of it, though? Concentrating those powers and responsibilities into a finite set of hands sounds like a fragile system that can be abused.
See also: past HN threads about the positive outcomes of not involving police for mental episodes, accounts/studies of indigenous systems of justice (such as in Chiapas), and academic research on the abolition of prisons (Angela Davis, Gwenola Ricordeau).
> how can anyone that has heard of any amount of history take seriously the idea that a country like the US can just abolish its military without it being in catastrophic danger?
The US is the catastrophic danger to many countries (Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, etc). By dismantling the US military industrial complex, we'd be doing a lot to promote peace and stability across the entire globe. The USA is still by far the largest military in the world and has helped countless coup d'État and assassinations. If only those, the war files released by Wikileaks and the recent debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan should be good examples of the military producing the exact opposite of its stated goals.
> If the abstraction of money didn't exist, what would happen exactly?
It depends on a wide variety of social/cultural factors. There's not a one-size-fits-all way of life, and each community may adopt different approaches to property and commercial exchanges. But in my opinion and experience taking away the abstraction allows us to focus on actual concrete problems.
For example, think about housing: by reasoning in terms of money, you reach the conclusion that we need more investment in new housing. By thinking without money, you can notice empty dwellings outnumber homeless people > 10-to-1, so the question becomes: if we have enough housing for everyone, why would we let people be homeless?
If you abolish money how will I ever be able to obtain a new computer with which to read Hacker News?
Money makes it possible for me to exchange my time, effort, and expertise for good produced using someone else's time, effort, and expertise. Without money or something that is so similar as to deserve the same name that is not practical except for the very rich and powerful.
This whole thread is in response to Bryan Caplan complaining that no one is actually engaging with the quantitative analysis he did in the form of a spreadsheet.
As far as I can tell scandinava has all the alternate uses you mention and more, plus the education.
But, your point still stands; what they dont have is an ability to push a button and wipe out the human race within 15 minutes, and fleets of stealth bombers flying low over every sporting event (support the troops you commie). All while the population struggles to figure out how many points their team will have if they score a field goal to add to the 7 points they scored in the first half.
For the most part governement spending is finite and there is only so much total money that can be dished out. Exepct for in crisis (Covid / War / Great Recession / Election time) of course and then the magic money tree is found in the back yard.
> 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.
> Ironically, the same people who would complain about free education, would complain 10x over more money for the homeless or healthcare.
That's pretty country-dependent, and is a caricature of most serious people. (Unfortunately lots of people actually do fall into that caricature).
E.g. Bryan Caplan is a libertarian, and while I don't think he personally supports a universal basic income, supporting a UBI is a fairly common libertarian position.
Paying a lot of money into education prevents homelessness! Educated people are more likely to find an income than people who have less knowledge of the world. And it's not only purely educating people, it's also about providing supportive services, such as job finding programs, mental health counseling, etc etc. By spending more on education you may spend less on homeless right now but you can prevent people from becoming homeless.
And on top of that, you can also reform how homelessness works in your country. In Germany, having a home is a fundamental right, why is it not in America? By burderning the government with sheltering you and giving you a postal address, a lot of hurdles for reentering the job market are simply taken away, reducing the need to spend much.
The same argument applies if you pick a different alternative, though. Money you choose to spend on education (with all its knock-on effects in homelessness, public health, employment, and so on) is money you can't spend on street cleaning, road maintenance, whatever, but also the investment you're making via education in the future homelessness problem is money you can't spend on acute homelessness problems today that can't be reached by education because it's too late for the people involved.
Then you need to make your spending on these other problems more effective. Give tenants more rights to stay in a home, give people more job security, make mental health programs cheaper and target vulnerable populations. Etc.
...and the same argument applies again. It doesn't matter how effective they are, the same logic applies: money you spend on thing A cannot then be used on thing B. That is a choice.
I should add that changing things to make them more effective also costs money.
But can you then spend anything? Because spending anything is also a decision on what is more important? By the argument you propose, spending money seems immoral. But spending money on education and homelessness isn't immoral in most moral frameworks, hence the argument must be faulty. Something must be spend and that means allocating how much to spend on what. Preventing future harm on countless people is morally better than preventing current harm on countable people, hence it must be better to prioritize improving the situation in the future before improving the current situation. In conclusion, we ought to spend on education first (or preventative measures in general), then on everything else.
> Because spending anything is also a decision on what is more important?
Yes, that is literally true. Or at least, it's true in a rational economic framework, which is the most common shared fiction when people are discussing these things. When a rational actor spends $X, that means they expect to receive a value of more than $X. Between two things that cost $Y, the rational actor will prefer the one with a higher net present value.
The decision that society makes about allocation of money is equivalent to a decision of how to represent the intangible portions of the value of a given investment so that the things we as a society deem important have enough money spent on them.
> But spending money on education and homelessness isn't immoral in most moral frameworks, hence the argument must be faulty.
"Giving benefits only encourages dependence on the state and discourages people from improving their own situation" is a very frequent argument from conservative types. One assumes it's made in good faith.
From upthread:
> It's a totally valid thing to wonder whether it's the best use of that money there is.
You have a particular answer to that question in your head, and that's fine. It does not invalidate the question, nor guarantee that the assumptions leading to your conclusion are universal in time or space.
> By spending more on education you may spend less on homeless right now but you can prevent people from becoming homeless.
I'm not comparing against education with money for the homeless, specifically. It was just an example that money can be spent on other things we value, and we have to decide what we value more. There's not way around it - you're either spending money on education, or on something else (or just reducing taxes).
Of course if you can show that education causes less homelessness, that makes it an obvious "win". (Though I think that you're not grappling with Bryan Caplan's actual argument.)
> And on top of that, you can also reform how homelessness works in your country. In Germany, having a home is a fundamental right, why is it not in America?
If the assumption is that I'm from the US, I'm not.
But solving homelessnes is kind of besides the point I was making anyway :)
I have the same theory about healthcare. If you put the cost burden 100% on companies (copays, drugs, everything) they will lobby for sensible changes to the system. Sidestepping the glacial pace of reform we find ourselves in now where normal people are picked off one by one.
I believe the same way about taxes. As long as over 50% of the population makes low contribution to actual federal budget, they don't care much about how the money is spent unless it impacts an ideology - which allows forevermore government spending.
That may have been true if much of the cost of education was not artificial, like non-free manuals (as in free software) or paying for non-open access journals.
This is a problem with much of mainstream economics. Start by defining everything worth measuring as the things you can measure, then build elaborate models around those measurements, then declare success when your models yield an output. Finally, influence policy to try get more of one measurable and less of another.
>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.
The monetary value itself is useful to everybody who makes a decision. A student at least invests their own time into that education. Shouldn't they know how valuable that education is to decide if it's worth their time?
The problem is not the evaluation. Students seek graduation instead of education because they need access to that social network of alumni. A monetary value makes that demand visible.
> The monetary value itself is useful to everybody who makes a decision.
But I think the real value of education can't be expressed in monetary terms alone. Educated people tend to live longer and healthier. They tend to make more rational financial decisions and plan their lives with more foresight.
In a democracy it is essential that the voting population is educated and able of processing complex information, otherwise it stops functioning.
Of course you need educated people for a democracy. That's why the old generation dedicates enough funds to educate the next generation.
Regarding the value of education. If it has a value, why can't it have a monetary value? At one point in your life, you have shifted the majority of your time from learning to making money. You can only make that decision rationally if you have put a monetary value on your education.
Fair point. So what's your evaluation of the real value of education?
I don't see how I can answer your questions in a short comment because they depend very much on individual circumstances. E.g. nowadays you have to be able to read to make informed decisions. But with the rise of text to speech synthesis, and information available as videos and memes, there is no need to receive a formal education to be informed.
Then again, how valuable is analytical and critical thinking? That depends on the democracy. If people live in an established democracy with established institutions, they just have to choose the outcome, i.e. where the government is going to spend money. Then no further education is needed.
In general, the value of education follows supply and demand and depends on the environment. If you were the only educated person among cavemen, then your education is worth the world because you can make all the difference. On the other hand, if you are the proverbial philosophy major working at a fast food restaurant, what's the value of that education?
> Shouldn't they know how valuable that education is to decide if it's worth their time?
It would be nice if that was the case, but we don't expose the value to them. We expose a cost to them, with a profit margin included, completely detached from any value that might possibly accrue years down the line. And we expose it in the form of a never-ending debt. That is a specific choice that society has made, and not the only one available.
> Students who graduated from such universities often are more capable of independent thinking in my experience.
Germany: 111 Nobel Laureates
University of Columbia: 83 Nobel Laureates
The whole country struggled to produce just a little more than one American university. They may think more independently, but it seems that it was so independent as to fail to advance human knowledge much more than a single American university.
Those numbers can't be compared one is number of nobel prizes by the country they were born at. The other number of people who were at some point at Columbia University, i.e. alumni, faculty (past and current)... who won a Nobel prize sometime in their career. The total number of nobel prize winners counting the way the Columbia winners are counted would add up to many more than counting by country.
In other words adding up all Nobel laureates by Country would yield the number of total laureates. Adding by alumni, past and present positions (at all universities) would yield a high multiple of total laureates, because the vast majority of laureates would not have spend their whole life at one institution.
It would be interesting to see the split:
Out of 83 Nobel Laureates, how many gained their education in University of Columbia? How many were professors that moved to University of Columbia after receiving their education somewhere else?
Also Arthur Ashkin (2018 Physics) only did his BS in Columbia. I guess everyone is counting that way, but this method of counting surely favours prestigeous, highly sought after, universities.
Also, the number of Laureates in sciences relates more to the funding of research rather than the quality of education. Any affiliation with a US institution gives you better access (in the short or long run) to research funding.
I believe that, in the 40s and 50s the occupying forces intentionally drained the research capabilities of Germany (as part of a larger push draining industrial capabilities). Hence I would expect Germany to be kneecapped in their Nobel laureate production for a significant part of the last century.
> The whole country struggled to produce just a little more than one American university. They may think more independently, but it seems that it was so independent as to fail to advance human knowledge much more than a single American university.
Has the university produced the Nobel laureates, or are they merely currently based there?
Also, producing Nobel laureates is not the primary goal of education. Independent thinking is a skill that is useful to everyone, in many areas of life.
Indeed it has long been known that the awake human brain operates near a critical point. Unfortunately, their significance statement is very generic and doesn't really summarise their main contributions.
The abstract has more information, describing how this paper adds to the picture a mathematical determination of that critical point, and the insight that low-frequency oscillations play a key role when switching consciousness states.
The level of the experiments is quite high, also they use primates (humans and macaques), some of them epileptic, and they administer psychedelics. All this sets the paper apart from lower-tier work.
It doesn't strike me as a real ground-breaking paper, but still an important contribution to the field. And the methods are impressive.
A transformer network is a variant of associative memory. You give it a query and it returns a value that it has learned to associate with the query during training.
> You give it a query and it returns a value that it has learned to associate with the query during training.
The zero-shot scenario they describe does not work like this. They explicitly mention that it's not trained with any queries (which is what makes it a very promising technique).
Sorry for the imprecise phrasing. During training, patterns are stored in the network parameters. The query will naturally be similar to one or several of the patterns stored, which are then returned (in hopfield-speak "completed").
Sci-hub is sometimes the last resort to obtain a resource that is otherwise unobtainable. But what has become of the old way of obtaining unaccessible papers: Ask the authors for a copy?
Sites like ResearchGate make this very easy. And often a simple email does the job, too.
Advantages:
* It is legal
* The author gets feedback that someone out there reads their research
* Making direct contact to your peers is a good thing.
It's too time consuming and has an undefined likelihood of success. People will naturally flock to alternative methods, such as sci-hub, that are faster and until recently were near guaranteed to have the desired content.
Agreed, sci-hub is so much more convenient. But when the publishers finally shut it down for good, we'll have to find another solution.
A community of scientists sharing their papers would be a good thing already now.
I personally know active scientists who don't even try anymore to look up the paper, but rather go directly to sci-hub for any doi they need. I can understand why, but I also think that this doesn't lead to a sustainable publishing culture.
But honestly, how often does one have to skim that many papers in a day, to a level where the freely available abstract is not sufficient?
Perhaps every once in a while when one compiles a survey of a new field they enter. Once the project is set on the rails, one rarely has to read that much.
> how often does one have to skim that many papers in a day, to a level where the freely available abstract is not sufficient?
More often than you might think.
To take an example from my own work, I was doing assay design a while back, and needed to collect all existing primer sets in the literature. I probably went through a hundred papers over a several day period.
> anyone can pay their way in those journals and publish (sometimes sub par) papers.
This is not true and comments like this are damaging to science.
Open Access papers are still peer-reviewed and by far not all of them make it into the journal. You can't pay your way into those journals.
Of course there are shady pseudo-journals which just cash in on the fee, do not carry out peer review and just dump the paper on the internet. But any scientist should be able to tell such scam journals from serious ones.
True, some journals, like many of the Frontiers series or PLOS One, make it very hard to be rejected in peer review. As long as your paper is reasonably well written and doesn't contain falsehoods it will almost certainly make it to publication. Still, you don't "pay your way into those journals".
Granted, many of papers in those journals report mere incremental progress. But these journals are still attractive for scientists to publish in, for obvious reasons. Publishers like PLOS use those journals as cash cows to fund their higher-tier offerings.
It is fair that the author pays for publication in those journals, since the most benefit is often for the author, not the reader. For the progress of science these offerings are not so useful, unfortunately.
