Talk:The Case Against Education

Why is Vox a reliable source, but Quillette is not?

@Adrian J. Hunter: A previous edit deleted a review of The Case Against Education because the author was writing for Quillette, which is generally known as a libertarian-leaning site. I objected to this because I had also included a negative review from an author writing in Vox, a well-known left-leaning site. Upon the reversion of my reversion, a link was provided suggesting a difference in how each site is viewed for reliability. It is curious that the reliable sources page suggests that "Quillette is generally unreliable for facts," when anyone who is aware of the biases in American political news sites is aware of the leftward slant on facts that usually appears in Vox articles. This is made even more absurd by the fact that a number of mainstream academics publish in Quillette, which - while no guarantor of accuracy - suggests some tether to factual reality. Frankly, this asymmetry in treatment is almost certainly a result of ideological bias on the part of Wikipedia. In this particular case, the deletion was even more egregious because the offending article was a book review, which presumably falls into the opinion realm. Come on! Mersenne56 (talk) 07:50, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

@Mersenne56: Thank you for engaging here. There is no prohibition against using biased sources. What matters is reliability. Current consensus, as recorded at WP:RSP, is that Vox is reliable enough to cite, whereas Quilette is not. If you disagree with that consensus, the place to discuss is Wikipedia_talk:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources. Adrian J. Hunter^{(talk•contribs)} 07:59, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

@Adrian J. Hunter: That is an amicable way of telling me to sit down and shut up. You and I both know I'll just be wasting my time. Mersenne56 (talk) 08:07, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

Calculus-based explanation tok inaccessible

I don't think Caplan explains signaling using integrals or calculus notation, so why does the summary need thus? Using this notation makes the article too inaccessible for a general audience. Burritosol (talk) 00:27, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

Also, the units in the would-be explanation are wrong. If the units of value are dollars--and it seems from the presentation that they are--then in order for PV to have the correct units--dollars--the constant V needs to have units dollars/year. (Or, dollars/whatever-your-time-unit-is.) And r needs to have the units years^(-1).

Another issue is that the reference to the expected value of an exponential distribution is confusing because the present value computation doesn't exactly use the distribution, though it does use an exponential function. (In fact, in the second calculation, the one that uses the survival function, the calculation uses two exponential functions.) It's clear that the expression V/(r+lambda) diminishes when either r or lambda increases, I don't think the reference to the expected value of the exponential distribution helps. --Britishisles (talk) 16:51, 14 January 2023 (UTC)