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description= 15 posts published by Lars Syll during December 2014;
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s yours truly finds his open minded thought provoking and non dogmatic statistical thinking highly recommendable the plaidoyer infra for reverse causal questioning is typical gelmanian when statistical and econometrc methodologists write about causal inference they generally focus on forward causal questions we are taught to answer questions of the type what if rather than why following the work by rubin 1977 causal questions are typically framed in terms of manipulations if x were changed by one unit how much would y be expected to change but reverse causal questions are important too in many ways it is the reverse causal questions that motivate the research including experiments and observational studies that we use to answer the forward questions reverse causal reasoning is different it involves asking questions and searching for new variables that might not yet even be in our model we can frame reverse causal questions as model checking it goes like this what we see is some pattern in the world that needs an explanation what does it mean to need an explanation it means that existing explanations the existing model of the phenomenon does not do the job by formalizing reverse casual reasoning within the process of data analysis we hope to make a step toward connecting our statistical reasoning to the ways that we naturally think and talk about causality this is consistent with views such as cartwright 2007 that causal inference in reality is more complex than is captured in any theory of inference what we are really suggesting is a way of talking about reverse causal questions in a way that is complementary to rather than outside of the mainstream formalisms of statistics and econometrics in a time when scientific relativism is expanding it is important to keep up the claim for not reducing science to a pure discursive level we have to maintain the enlightenment tradition of thinking of reality as principally independent of our views of it and of the main task of science as studying the structure of this reality perhaps the most important contribution a researcher can make is reveal what this reality that is the object of science actually looks like science is made possible by the fact that there are structures that are durable and are independent of our knowledge or beliefs about them there exists a reality beyond our theories and concepts of it it is this independent reality that our theories in some way deal with contrary to positivism i would as a critical realist argue that the main task of science is not to detect event regularities between observed facts rather that task must be conceived as identifying the underlying structure and forces that produce the observed events in gelman s essay there is no explicit argument for abduction inference to the best explanation but i would still argue that it is de facto nothing but a very strong argument for why scientific realism and inference to the best explanation are the best alternatives for explaining what s going on in the world we live in the focus on causality model checking anomalies and context dependence although here expressed in statistical terms is as close to abductive reasoning as we get in statistics and econometrics today axiomatic economics total horseshit 28 dec 2014 at 17 33 posted in theory of science methodology 7 comments yours truly and people like tony lawson have for many years been urging economists to pay attention to the ontological foundations of their assumptions and models sad to say economists have not paid much attention and so modern economics has become increasingly irrelevant to the understanding of the real world within mainstream economics internal validity is still everything and external validity nothing why anyone should be interested in that kind of theories and models is beyond imagination as long as mainstream economists do not come up with any export licenses for their theories and models to the real world in which we live they really should not be surprised if people say that this is not science but autism studying mathematics and logics is interesting and fun it sharpens the mind in pure mathematics and logics we do not have to worry about external validity but economics is not pure mathematics or logics it s about society the real world forgetting that economics is really in dire straits mathematical axiomatic systems lead to analytic truths which do not require empirical verification since they are true by virtue of definitions and logic it is a startling discovery of the twentieth century that sufficiently complex axiomatic systems are undecidable and incomplete that is the system of theorem and proof can never lead to all the true sentences about the system and always contain statements which are undecidable their truth values cannot be determined by proof techniques more relevant to our current purpose is that applying an axiomatic hypothetico deductive system to the real world can only be done by means of a mapping which creates a model for the axiomatic system these mappings then lead to assertions about the real world which require empirical verification these assertions which are proposed scientific laws can never be proven in the sense that mathematical theorems can be proven many more arguments can be given to explain the difference between analytic and synthetic truths which corresponds to the difference between mathematical and scientific truths as i have explained in greater detail in my paper the scientific method arose as a rejection of the axiomatic method used by the greeks for scientific methodology it was this rejection of axiomatics and logical certainty in favour of empirical and observational approach which led to dramatic progress in science however this did involve giving up the certainties of mathematical argumentation and learning to live with the uncertainties of induction economists need to do the same abandon current methodology borrowed from science and develop a new methodology suited for the study of human beings and societies asad zaman share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky vaiennut viulu private 28 dec 2014 at 13 14 posted in varia comments off on vaiennut viulu private for all the love and care this is for you ritva may the blessing of god be upon you what americans can learn from sweden s school choice disaster 28 dec 2014 at 09 59 posted in education school 2 comments advocates for choice based solutions should take a look at what s happened to schools in sweden where parents and educators would be thrilled to trade their country s steep drop in pisa scores over the past 10 years for america s middling but consistent results what s caused the recent crisis in swedish education researchers and policy analysts are increasingly pointing the finger at many of the choice oriented reforms that are being championed as the way forward for american schools while this doesn t necessarily mean that adding more accountability and discipline to american schools would be a bad thing it does hint at the many headaches that can come from trying to do so by aggressively introducing marketlike competition to education there are differences between the libertarian ideal espoused by friedman and the actual voucher program the swedes put in place in the early 90s but swedish school reforms did incorporate the essential features of the voucher system advocated by friedman the hope was that schools would have clear financial incentives to provide a better education and could be more responsive to customer i e parental needs and wants when freed from the burden imposed by a centralized bureaucracy but in the wake of the country s nose dive in the pisa rankings there s widespread recognition that something s wrong with swedish schooling competition was meant to discipline government schools but it may have instead led to a race to the bottom it s the darker side of competition that milton friedman and his free market disciples tend to downplay if parents value high test scores you can compete for voucher dollars by hiring better teachers and providing a better education or by going easy in grading national tests competition was also meant to discipline government schools by forcing them to up their game to maintain their enrollments but it may have instead led to a race to the bottom as they too started grading generously to keep their students maybe the overall message is there are no panaceas in public education we tend to look for the silver bullet whether it s the glories of the market or the techno utopian aspirations of education technology when in fact improving educational outcomes is a hard messy complicated process it s a lesson that swedish parents and students have learned all too well simply opening the floodgates to more education entrepreneurs doesn t disrupt education it s just plain disruptive ray fisman ray fisman is not the only critical international reviewer of the swedish voucher experiment this is what henry m levin distinguished economist and director of the national center for the study of privatization in education at teachers college columbia university wrote when he recently reviewed the evidence about the effects of vouchers in 1992 sweden adopted a voucher type plan in which municipalities would provide the same funding per pupil to either public schools or independent private schools there were few restrictions for independent schools and religious or for profit schools were eligible to participate in 1994 choice was also extended to that of public schools where parents could choose either a public or private school in the early years only about 2 percent of students chose independent schools however since the opening of this century independent school enrollments have expanded considerably by 2011 12 almost a quarter of elementary and secondary students were in independent schools half of all students in the upper secondary schools in stockholm were attending private schools at public expense on december 3 2012 forbes magazine recommended for the u s that we can learn something about when choice works by looking at sweden s move to vouchers on march 11 and 12 2013 the royal swedish academy of sciences did just that by convening a two day conference to learn what vouchers had accomplished in the last two decades the following was my verdict on the criterion of freedom of choice the approach has been highly successful parents and students have many more choices among both public schools and independent schools than they had prior to the voucher system on the criterion of productive efficiency the research studies show virtually no difference in achievement between public and independent schools for comparable students measures of the extent of competition in local areas also show a trivial relation to achievement the best study measures the potential choices public and private within a particular geographical area for a 10 percent increase in choices the achievement difference is about one half of a percentile even this result must be understood within the constraint that the achievement measure is not based upon standardized tests but upon teacher grades the so called national examination result that is also used in some studies is actually administered and graded by the teacher with examination copies available to the school principal and teachers well in advance of the testing another study found no difference in these achievement measures between public and private schools but an overall achievement effect for the system of a few percentiles even this author agreed that the result was trivial in evaluating these results we must also keep in mind that the overall performance of the system on externally administered and evaluated tests used for international comparisons showed substantial declines over the last fifteen years for sweden for those who are interested in the patterns of achievement decline across subjects and grades i have provided the enclosed powerpoint presentation with respect to equity a comprehensive national study sponsored by the government found that socio economic stratification had increased as well as ethnic and immigrant segregation this also affected the distribution of personnel where the better qualified educators were drawn to schools with students of higher socio economic status and native students the international testing also showed rising variance or inequality in test scores among schools no evidence existed to challenge the rising inequality accordingly i rated the swedish voucher system as negative on equity among the industrialized countries only three have a universal voucher or choice system chile holland and sweden some would also argue that belgium qualifies in this category the former three countries have very different designs with the dutch system being the most highly regulated and devoting the most attention to equity even so the tracking that takes place at age 12 in the netherlands between vocational and academic secondary schools has important equity consequences in terms of socio economic stratification although based upon choice the available choices available to a student are heavily dependent on her achievement test results the chilean system has witnessed an increasingly notable stratification of the population both within and between public and private sectors students from more educated and wealthier families are found in the private schools which receive public funding but can choose which students to accept from among applicants the chilean system allows schools to charge additional fees beyond the voucher also favoring more advantage families a recent swedish study on the effects of school choice concluded the results from the analyses made in this paper confirm that school choice rather than residential segregation is a more important factor determining variation in grades than is residential segregation the empirical analysis in this paper confirms the pisa based finding that between school variance in student performance in the swedish school system has increased rapidly since 2000 we have also been able to show that this trend towards increasing performance gaps cannot be explained by shifting patterns of residential segregation a more likely explanation is that increasing possibilities for school choice have triggered a process towards a more unequal school system a rapid growth in the number of students attending voucher financed independent schools has been an important element of this process the idea of voucher based independent school choice is commonly ascribed to milton friedman friedman s argument was that vouchers would decrease the role of government and expand the opportunities for free enterprise he also believed that the introduction of competition would lead to improved school results as we have seen in th...
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