[mvhvv]

I agree it's a positive move to bring formal logic and statistics into other fields, but (at least where I'm from) the social sciences do engage heavily with epistemology. And as a STEM major myself, I'll admit it's often in critical ways that the hard sciences fail.

The problem with many attempts to apply statistics is that even for the best quality science, the conclusion is only ever relative to the foundational assumptions. I don't mean they're intentional manipulations, but that it's very clear that Caplan is so far off the mark here that his work is difficult to take seriously.

I think a common critique of the trolley problem is an apt analogy here. Not an ethical argument about a specific choice, but that the thought experiment itself is flawed. It presents an absurd binary that neatly removes the human experience and incommensurability of individual life and insists on it's own utilitarian nature.

The problem with the spreadsheets, as with the trolley problem is that these kinds of analyses are founded on ad hoc assumptions that conveniently remove important context.

There is always a better approach. There are issues with our education system that don't work for many children, and wages do not correlate evenly with education across the board, but the conclusion that we should therefore slash public education funding and transition high schools to vocational training is doesn't follow from that unless you make those trolley-problem-style simplifying assumptions.