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Re:No one cared about my spreadsheets by majormajor on Thursday February 17, 2022 @12:50AM (#30369958)
> His book talked about those things; the spreadsheets are just him 'showing his work'. I think Caplan is trying to highlight that despite the fact that many challenged his conclusions, almost nobody challenged his logic or calculations.

Hermitian909 said "the spreadsheets are flawed by not including calculations for these additional levels of effect," and that claim seems pretty compelling: the calculations may be perfectly accurate and also perfectly useless because they say nothing about greater societal effects if everyone changed their behavior.

The problem of individual strategy given the current system vs the question of what the system should be is a classic one, and the latter is far more complicated to compute. The "Moneyball"/baseball stats revolution shows a bit of this: as the things that were initially undervalued were no longer undervalued, "smart teams" had to continue changing. The system wasn't static.

You say he talks about those things in his book in addition, but you can't call that "showing his work" if the work shown doesn't include the most relevant parts.

Re:No one cared about my spreadsheets by nickff on Thursday February 17, 2022 @04:56PM (#30379219)
>"You say he talks about those things in his book in addition, but you can't call that "showing his work" if the work shown doesn't include the most relevant parts."

The spreadsheet and book are complementary; you won't really understand either without reading both. In order to understand 'the work', you also have to know the question and the final answer.