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It seems you deleted my answer. You wrote that it should deleted because:

  1. The numbers are unreferenced; 3.8 million is at the high end of the estimates I have seen.
  2. The arithmetic is flat out wrong. (Over an hour, over $1000 per teacher)
  3. You don't think it answers the question.

I have added a reference for 3.8 million teachers. Frankly it was easy to find, and is referenced in many places. Maybe I should have given the reference in the first place, but it was quoted by virtually every news article about the claim.

I did make a mistake in the cost, and the correct one is below. I would have written the same answer if I had got the math correct there. But both the figures you gave are wrong.

The time is:

4,239,530 / 3,800,000 / 4 = 0.27 hours per teacher per year.

That's about sixteen minutes. That's the figure I gave and it is correct.

The cost is:

$3.9b / 3,800,000 / 4 = $256 per teacher per year.

That was, as I say, my mistake and I've fixed it in the answer. If you are going to correct people's arithmetic at least get it right yourself.

As for your opinions as to whether the answer is relevant, that's your opinion. Plenty of upvotes and plenty of comments disagree with you.

You have a history of deleting my answers. You are entitled to dislike them, but please downvote instead of deleting.

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    You're free to complain about moderator actions here, but do make it about the action and not individual mods. Personal attacks are not helpful here. Commented Mar 22 at 12:02
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    Nothing I wrote was an "attack", and everything was about the action. But the action was carried out by Oddthinking, the reasons were those of Oddthinking, and the opinions were those of Oddthinking. That deserves to be said. Your edit is not in keeping with the intention of the author. Commented Mar 22 at 12:24
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    "If you are going to correct people's arithmetic at least get it right yourself." and "As for your opinions as to whether the answer is relevant, that's your opinion. Plenty of upvotes and plenty of comments disagree with you." are not about the action, they are about the person. Commented Mar 23 at 22:00

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You've partially quoted my reasons. Here was my full argument:

This answer can't be allowed to stand. (1) The numbers are unreferenced; 3.8 million is at the high end of the estimates I have seen. (2) The arithmetic is flat out wrong. (Over an hour, over $1000 per teacher) (3) From an engineering mindset, the answer is wrong. Making a unit 0.05% more efficient is relevant when there are 3.8 million units deployed! You can argue a small amount of DEI training is worth it, but that is a political opinion and can be easily countered by the opposite political opinion. (4) It doesn't answer the Q: did DOGE do this? Ultimately, an opinion-based answer.

Going through those one at a time:

  • Re 1) Your answer shouldn't be immediately deleted for not having references. You should be told to add references, a post notice added, and then at least a week later (or if an answerer refuses), then it should be deleted. I added the post notice first. I note you have since added a reference, and I have removed the post notice.

  • Re: 2) Your arithmetic here weren't in the original. I stared at your numbers for some time trying to work out why you were dividing by 4; that was the factor by which I thought you were out. I finally figured it was because you interpreted the costs as being evenly spread over Biden's 4 years in office. I had interpreted their figure as being the annual cost, so we had a differing understanding of the claim. I think your interpretation that the paperwork cost has been since inception of the new rules is probably correct, but now we need to know when those new rules were introduced. Was it really in the first few days of Biden's term? Was the cost once only? Once per teacher? Once per teacher per year? Or was it nothing to do with teachers, and they have an department of about 2000 admins working on it?) To answer that, we need to know which rules have been overturned, and this answer doesn't address that at all - see later point.

  • Again, this isn't enough for immediate deletion. But unreferenced arithmetic has long been a very sore point here, as back-of-the-envelope calculations are often wrong, as these were, and we ask that they be referenced, rather that original research.

  • Re: 3) The next problem is the fundamental claim in the answer: That small amounts of teachers' time is unimportant, and therefore the answer is irrelevant is wrong in several major regards:

    • Small efficiencies are can add up to very large numbers when we are dealing with millions of employees. The alleged result, $3.9 billion, is a huge amount of money, and (if the claim is true) can now be spent on other initiatives that the Trump administration considers better. You can't dismiss that number as irrelevant because it is a small percentage of a budget.

    • Just because we don't record every minute that a teacher spends on paperwork doesn't mean we can't come up with reasonable estimates. Just the time spent reading the "Dear Colleague" letters, and is likely to add up to millions of hours of paperwork.

  • Again, an answer being wrong is not a deletion reason. That is a reason to downvote, and perhaps add a comment and/or competing answer.

Which brings us to the real sticking point. My fourth point:

  • We don't have a "Who Cares?" close reason here. Your argument that the answer is not important doesn't mean we get to dismiss the question outright.

  • You made absolutely no attempt to answer the actual question. "Did Biden’s Department of Education add rules that imposed 4,239,530 paperwork hours?" We still don't know. If someone wants to argue (with references) that yes, they did, and that that is only a small additional imposition on teachers, and that the Biden administration considered that time well-spent, they can. If someone wants to argue that "No, DOGE's claims/estimates are faulty." they can. But an answer that is basically "I don't care, so no-one should" doesn't address the question, and that is a deletion reason.

In summary, I am not apologising for the deletion because this was not a Skeptics.SE answer. I was disappointed (especially by the lack of references), because I am generally a fan of your answers, but this didn't make the grade.

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    OK, let's try to de-escalate this a bit. I'm still pretty annoyed and you acted arbitrarily and wrong. More than half your anwser is listing things that you admit aren't a reason for closure. As for the last two: 1) For point 1 I'm not dismissing the question. I'm just pointing out why it makes no difference in the real world. 2) For point 2 we allow frame challenge answers, and they have all the issues you state. And again, this is all just your opinion. If you want to downvote, fine. But don't delete an answer because you disagree with it. Commented Mar 22 at 11:33
  • @DJClayworth: I am not happy to hear you are annoyed, but I do hear it. I agree that of the 4 concerns I had, exactly one is a reason for closure, but I think that one is sufficient. I disagree that it makes no difference - it remains a lot of time and money (if true). [Politically, it may or may not be justified, but that is off-topic.] To what degree do we allow frame challenge answers? We tend to be fairly literal in requiring an answer to the question, first; I suspect there are exceptions, but in this case the frame challenge was an opinion. Commented Mar 23 at 9:19
  • Thanks for listening. I appreciate this. I'm glad you admit there is only one reason for closure. You said, regarding the amount of money involved, that "I disagree that it makes no difference". You are completely entitled to think that it makes a difference. But "disagree" is an opinion. Other people may think it makes no difference. The political; space is littered with people trying to scare others with "The government wasted thirty million dollars", forgetting that is ten cents per person. ... Commented Mar 23 at 18:14
  • ... Or saying "by doing this the country is taking a million tons of CO2 from the air", forgetting that a 0.1% change will make no significant difference. As a highly upvoted comment on the original question says: "That sounds suspiciously like a bullshit number meant to scare people who don't understand scale." Here's a scholarly look at this phenomenon: climatechangenews.com/2016/04/15/… ... Commented Mar 23 at 18:19
  • ... So again my point is: if you disagree with my answer, vote it down. Unless you are incontrovertibly sure that an answer is not even relevant to the question, then don't delete it. Commented Mar 23 at 18:19
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    @DJClayworth: 'But "disagree" is an opinion.' Yes, that is the key point. The answer was entirely opinion-based; the fact that it could be countered by merely sharing a different opinion shows this. As a skeptic, I try not to be "incontrovertibly sure" of anything, but I remain very confident that that wasn't an answer to the question; it was an opinion that we should change the topic. Commented Mar 24 at 0:27
  • OK, that's a fair point. Commented Mar 24 at 13:35

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