Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

> Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook says, “The best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company.”

This anecdote, in a list of others related to rich people who think they’re changing the world, is misplaced. Marc isn’t just talking to rich people — he’s saying that starting a company is a powerful way to potentially change the world.

Is that not true? Perhaps his view is skewed by survivor bias. But what would we have him say? “If you want to change the world, go be a politician”?

> It’s that one awesome charter school — not equally funded public schools for all.

Does he not realize that charter schools are open to all (though sometimes lotteried)? And that it’s much more practical to do the former than the latter?

This essay (and the book it’s promoting) seem well-timed to ride a wave of populist discontent. But I don’t personally find it very convincing. It seems like the author just wants to complain that some rich people and companies protect their self-interest, and therefore all of the good they might do is tainted. This strikes me as naive (yes, people protect their self-interest, and always have) and impractical. As the saying goes: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good-enough.

There are people out there trying to accomplish the perfect. Don’t demonize the people who are trying to make incremental changes.

One note: charter schools are almost never open to all.

They're not open to those with learning disabilities. Or those with physical disabilities. Or emotional problems at home.

Which means they take a school's worth of finding out of the pool but leave the most expensive students behind.

Setting the rest of the discussion aside, I think there is an argument for specializing care. People with learning disabilities would benefit from attention from experts, people with at-home problems would benefit from school-based childcare (for them, school lunches and afterschool programs would be disproportionately helpful), and while people with physical disabilities need the same good teachers they benefit from specialized access mechanisms as well (for example there are schools for the blind, where knowledge about blindness is concentrated in the staff to an extent not present elsewhere.) Children with physical disabilities have no need for dyslexia experts, children with lots of support at home have no need for elaborate all-day childcare, and so on.

So, there are clear efficiency and quality gains to be had if the system is specialized. Physical disabilities are one of the most stand-out cases, where you can invest in special access mechanisms and make special testing conditions normal if you concentrate enough people with the same needs in one place. See: Schools for the deaf, schools for the blind.

> So, there are clear efficiency and quality gains to be had if the system is specialized.

I'd agree that "specialization" is a good thing when it means that educators have the training needed to most effectively deal with other-than-typical circumstances. But it may be less of a good thing when it means segregating those students into their own classes or their own schools, which I think is what GP is saying effectively happens with charter schools. Setting aside the cost argument, giving students a chance to interact with and befriend those with different backgrounds, circumstances, and abilities benefits the students and society, though it may not be reflected in standardized test scores.

The charter school "lottery" where I live obviously is not random, yet the law doesn't require them to be audited for fairness. They are basically private schools with selective admission that are funded by money pulled away from the public school system.

Yeap. It's pseudo-public for the benefit of the rich kids while denigrating public schools as "inefficient" and other libertarian/utopian hate against "socialism" while duplicitously funneling welfare to the rich while stealing from the poor.

>> It’s that one awesome charter school — not equally funded public schools for all.

I would also note that charter schools are great as a proof of concept. It's naive to think that education is already "solved" and just dumping money into giving everyone access would do better than many people experimenting on the micro level and then hopefully using those concepts to benefit the less fortunate.

>> The best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company.

I would certainly agree with this statement. If you think a community doesn't have healthful food options, start a grocery. If you think a community is underserved, look to serve it. I don't think ending the carried interest tax credit will somehow magically fix everything. Most solutions are best done on the micro scale

Starting a company is all well and good from the biased survivors whom can operate at scale, opening a store or starting something small and manageable is more feasible for most people.

That seems like really awkward advice if the change you want to see is less corporate and commercial interest/power...

Zuckerberg changed the world immensely. Whether it was for better or worse is a subject of ongoing debate, but a world where 2 billion people use Facebook is very different in many ways than it was before.

If the question were “how do you change the world for the better?”, then the response would have to be much different.

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