Month: August 2009

A Complaint About College

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Kent Pitman argues that college is overpriced. Perhaps the way out — freedom from needing to go to college to get a decent job — will look like this:

1. American colleges adopt gap years. (I proposed this to the Chancellor of UC Berkeley. My suggestion was brushed aside — impractical, I was told.)

2. A larger and larger fraction of students realize that they can profitably continue to do what they do during the gap year. So they don’t go to college.

3. Given a substantial number in both categories, businesses notice that students who haven’t gone to college (who have, equating for age, more useful skills) do better than those that have. I’ve heard complaints about Ivy League graduates not knowing basic stuff.

4. With less demand for college, there is less demand for college teachers. This causes research universities to shrink because, with less use for a Ph.D, they won’t be able to attract as many graduate students. Harvard is out in front here.

Just as the Pentagon is a tax on women (because the military is almost all men), so are colleges a tax on everyone who isn’t a professor. (It’s an arms race because if your competitor for a job has gone to college, so must you.) As the American economy implodes — in In The Jaws of the Dragon, Eamonn Fingleton says the rate of American decline has no historical precedent — non-professors and non-professors-to-be will become less willing to pay this tax.

Gamesinwelt.com Scam

Seth Roberts84 Comments

I finally decided to get a Wii Dance Dance Revolution. This required getting a Wii, and gamesinwelt.com had the lowest prices. Curiously they shipped from China, where Wii’s are not for sale. I searched for “gamesinwelt.com complaints” and “gamesinwelt.com sucks” and found nothing. Okay, I thought. As it turned out my credit-card payment did not go through so I haven’t lost any money but here is what should have made me suspicious:

1. The site didn’t work very well. One of the error messages I kept getting made no sense.

2. It didn’t take direct credit card payments. The credit-card payments were made through Paypal.

3. Delivery was not only free, it was really fast — 2-5 days.

4. The site listed FedEx as a delivery choice in one place but not on the home page.

5. Although there were about 9,000 Google hits for gamesinwelt.com, when I went to the pages the ads weren’t there. They were brief ads. And only ads.

When I searched “gamesinwelt.com scam” — after the purchase — I did find useful information that confirmed my fears. One persuasive point was that the site was registered only a week ago. This is why there was so little negative information available. Foolish me.

More “My credit-card payment did not go through” — that’s what I was told when I called Paypay. But then I got an email saying it had gone through. Ugh! So I called Paypal again and complained. And was told I needed to call back in a week when I hadn’t gotten the stuff. Then I waited a week and called Paypal for the third time. And then I was told a dispute had already been filed and — when it was resolved in my favor — I would get an email saying the money had been refunded. So I had to call Paypal three times (so far) to deal with this and one of those times was given wrong information.

The story continues.

Andrew Gelman on Writing

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Andrew gives excellent advice about how to write a scientific paper. This is his best point:

Consider Table 2. Do you want the reader to know that in line 3, Min Obs is 894? I doubt it. If so, you should make a case for this. If not, don’t put it down. When an article is filled with numbers and words that you neither expect or want people to read, this distracts them from the content.

In other words, most tables should be figures or omitted. I would add a broader point: Don’t try to impress anyone. It gets in the way of helping them — helping them understand what you’re saying. (The classic example is B. F. Skinner, apparently insecure Harvard professor, calling one of his books The Behavior of Organisms instead of The Behavior of Animals. The book said nothing about plants.) Many tables seem more meant to impress than communicate but it isn’t just tables. That section at the end where epidemiologists talk about the “limitations” of their study: The content is so predictable, so fact-free and unhelpful that I think they are just trying to impress readers with how careful they are. So I would add to Andrew’s advice: Don’t tell people what they already know.

I also like his list of content-less words, such as very and nice. Allen Neuringer told me you should never use very and I was impressed.

Alex Tabarrok’s comments.

The Blue Sweater

Seth Roberts2 Comments

When Jacqueline Novogratz was a young girl, she had a favorite blue sweater. She continued to wear it after it became too small. One day a boy made fun of her for wearing it (“We can ski Mount Novogratz”). The next day she gave it away. A decade later, in Africa, she saw it being worn by a skinny young boy. Thus the title of her new book about trying to make the world, especially Africa, a better place: The Blue Sweater.

In contrast to so many books, usually by men, about helping others, which tend to be about how right the author is/was, this book stresses how wrong she was. An example is a job interview.

“Tell me why you want to be a banker,” he suggested. . . .

“I don’t want to be a banker,” I said. “I want to change the world. I’m hoping to take the next year off but my parents asked me to go through the interview process. I’m so sorry.”

“Well,” he said with a grin, shaking his head. “That’s too bad. Because if you got this job, you would be traveling to 40 countries in the next 3 years and learning a lot not only about banking, but the entire world.”

I gulped. “Is that really true?” I asked, my face completely red. “You know, part of my dream is to travel and learn about the world.”

“It is really true,” he sighed.

“Then do you think we might start this interview all over again?” I asked.

She got the job. It’s easy to see why. And stories like that made me want to read the book