Are you saying you wouldn't take a look at this spreadsheet? I definitely would. Though I don't think it's possible it would certainly be interesting to see someone try, and if it failed to be interesting I could entertain myself by writing a comment explaining how they had failed.

You say that education's value is "unquantifiable" but that's not quite even wrong. The question isn't "What is the ineffable value of education?" But rather, "How much should we be spending on education?" and that is perfectly quantifiable. Indeed, we spend some quantity of money on education currently - should we spend more or less?

The discussion of how much money to spend on education should not be done based on some expected value of education. It should instead be done by polling various interested parties on how they feel about current the current education system, what resources they are missing (if any), what types of spending are not producing useful results etc.

You don't have to quantify the expected value in order to decide on costs - this is only done as a reductionist homo economicus type model.

For a more direct example, when deciding to go watch a movie, do you do some computation of how much your net worth will increase by virtue of seeing the movie, and compare that to the ticket price? Or are you simply acting on practically unquantifiable subjective feelings of enjoyment about the movie, and comparing the price to entirely different goods (e.g. you probably wouldn't go if the ticket price is 10000$, because you can buy other things you feel are much more enjoyable/important with that kind of money).

It's not reasonable to liken the decision making processes of deciding to go see a movie and determining government funding priorities for education.

> Education's value to society and the individual is inherently unquantifiable with today's tools.

Why? What makes it inherently unquantifiable?

More importantly, we live in the real world, in which we need to make actual decisions, which cost money and time. Both policy decisions, like: should we encourage higher education? Should we subsidize it? Extend schooling to 15 grades instead of 12? Etc. But also personal decisions: should I personally pursue a University degree?

You can't just handwave decisions like that by saying it's unquatifiable.

> Why? What makes it inherently unquantifiable?

The fact that we are nowhere near being able to mathematically model individual and societal human behavior at a level that could help us come up with such a quantity. To do so, we would need to have a model which can predict how someone's behavior would change by reading and understanding a particular book, or how much value a new ideology could bring to society times the probability of someone could come up with a new ideology by getting an education. We would need to deeply understand the human mind at the same level we understand the behavior of gases at least.

As to how we can then decide how much to spend on education, the answer is somewhat simple: you poll people's opinions of where education is lacking, where it is strong, what kind of resources could help improve it, how important they feel this improvement is. Then you come up with some qualitative goals ("all children should be able to read and write by grade 4"), and then invest money needed to achieve these goals.

What you don't do is try to come up with some bullshit a priori monetary value (an education will increase people's salary by this much, times the tax rate, times the number of people => this is how much we should invest), as if you were running an investment bank and not a democratic society.

And note that the first example is exactly how people make most decisions in the real world. You use your (currently) unquantifiable subjective preferences to set a goal for something, try to estimate how much it would cost, and then at best you do some computation of "what else could I do with this money/time" and decide based on that whether you should spend the money.

> If someone said they came up with a spreadsheet that quantitatively proves that Homer's Odyssey is a worse piece of art than the Mona Lisa, would you go through their quantitative analysis, or simply dismiss their argument on the face of it?

Are you kidding me? I would look at the damn spreadsheet. Nothings preventing you from building extremely intesting ML to objectively quantify artwork, and if you’ve created a reliable measure to compare the two I would want to see what you’ve created.

What sort of a closed minded attitude is it to say “why would I bother looking into the facts that support a conclusion I am not willing to believe could possibly be true”

> What sort of a closed minded attitude is it to say “why would I bother looking into the facts that support a conclusion I am not willing to believe could possibly be true”

It's not about not believing the conclusion itself, my point is that it's absurd to claim there is a meaningful objective sense in which the Mona Lisa is better or worse art than the Oddisey. The question itself is meaningless. Of course you can invent a model which assigns some quantitative art goodness value to pieces of art - your model could say "the more color it has, the better the artwork": perfectly objective, entirely useless.