> Small children will touch a hot stove only once yet billionaires will fund personalized learning initiatives again and again and again and we might wonder why.
The author doesn't answer and I don't have an answer either. But the interesting observation is that billionaires don't learn from experience. This is a sure sign of ideology at work.
I'll admit that there's a flip-side viewpoint here: If you're a billionaire, in a society that very obviously has a lot of problems, and all you've got for tools and skills is a billion-dollar hammer that you're real handy with...well, okay - try hitting some things with your hammer. When the world is screwed up badly enough, even kinda-clueless change has a decent chance of improving something...right?
That's not enough. Repeating the same stupid ideas again and again and again without learning from past failures is not a viable approach.
The only stupid thing is following this absurd "argument" from the article. Kids, stoves. Seriously, what the fuck? Giving up on things after first negative experience is no way to live a life - literally, you would not survive to adulthood if you followed that brilliant idea.
At some points you have to stop trying stupid things.
Here the stupid idea is thinking education is a solo activity while in truth it's a social one. A 50's multiple choice quiz on papers is the same as a quiz on computers. It's a very small part of what learning is about.
The world would be a much better place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
Even setting that aside, your premise doesn’t hold: you can’t “learn from experience” by watching others. The whole point of the phrase is that you have to do it yourself to learn.
What worries me more than billionaires funding learning initiatives is how many people fall for this kind of "reasoning" when it's about something they're primed to not like - where they'd reject it in any other context.
I mean, seriously. Small children will touch a hot stove only once, yet try to walk despite repeatedly tripping up. Obviously they don't learn from experience.
And you can make a small child cry without hurting them at all, e.g. by saying "Boo!".
Tell me you've never had small children without telling me you've never had small children
This is my personal speculation, but self-learning can be extremely helpful for people with a lot of investment in a specific topic and high intrinsic motivation - a description likely to fit most people that made a vast fortune by themselves and their usual peer group. This is probably a serious filter bubble making them believe that self-learning is the way forward for everyone, since it worked for (nearly) everyone they know.
I run a small science club where the kids learn and experiment in small groups guided by tutors who enjoy the stuff. And I'm running out of money fast: I cannot charge much for the courses and workshops (those without money run along free of charge anyway) and I need to spend money on rent, materials and especially the tutors. And the last expenditure is growing linear with the amount of classes I offer and is easily the biggest.
People in business, especially in tech business, try to set things up in a way where you can automate stuff away and it's easy to see schools and classroom education as a great opportunity to try the same approach.
The answer is in the analogy: the billionaire didn’t get burned. If the child touched the stove but it was merely warm, they wouldn’t learn to avoid it.
Losing millions when you have billions is not a big deal.
I don't think it is possible to have a true understanding of what these (tax exempt) foundations are really intending - we only have what they tell us, which is a form of spin.
As far as I am concerned, these foundations are about paving the way for commercial interests - their job is to prepare the ground with a view to the long term benefits that the corporate side will then reap. They are simply structuring society for their benefit; it's not for the love of Man.
In this particular case, how would personalised learning work, with all the collectivisation that is planned and being implemented? Perhaps the intent was to personalise within narrow bands to give the illusion of an individual personalised education..
It is ok that many of these fails. Some will work (wikipedia, khan academy etc). We should only require that things are being tried.
Anyway, i agree experimentation is needed, that's why I was talking about averaging out biases. I just don't agree that the darwinistic model that caused wealth to concentrate to be the best model to achieve this.
E.g. "The richest 10% of the global population own 76% of all wealth." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59565690
Or
Table 4-5: "Wealth shares and minimum wealth of deciles and top percentiles for regions and selected countries, 2021", p.140 https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...
If you own 3% of Alphabet, you can do things others can't.
Even if (and big if!) we say that wealth/power-alone doesn't make people think differently, you're sampling from a much smaller population.
And I'd need some convincing on "I don't know how much a gallon of milk costs" not changing a person's perspective.
Governments must spend much more of their treasure chest (when they have one) than billionaires and are scrutinized more heavily. Risks are not the same. Ultra rich are way more capable of corrupting governments than the masses which gives them even more power.
Sure, some will fail, but it's better than the alternative, which is everything run by committee.
Committee 's tend to never manage to agree on any big bets - and therefore all resources get ploughed into low risk mundane things with no ongoing benefit. The town hall gets repainted frequently, rather than resources being spent building a cathedral.
Maintenance isn't sexy or grand but it is good for the normal, everyday people who have to use the stuff to do the things.
Bigger infrastructure projects are often done by the state.
But for more frivolous, would never happen otherwise stuff, certainly a single deep pocket is a good thing to reach into.
Have you looked at the biases of the many recently?
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter
>when it is [relatively] cheap to believe something (even when it is wrong) it is rational to believe it.
"Engineering" (manipulation of the environment) is the most intuitive for humans to sort out irrational beliefs.
"Science" is a method of eliminating human bias (preconceived notions) beforehand as much as possible as to maximize the space of possibilities in terms of technology ("knowledge").
"Anarchy" in the realm of social order in its most basic form minimizes the abuse of power of the few by optimizing structures of hierarchical order.
Every single one of the human enterprises is non-telic, a constant work in progress. My sense is that through its accelerated atomized structure and loss of power "the West" has lost itself in delusions and constant anxiety resulting in disproportionate numbers of megalomaniac leaders free of account and apathetic citizens giving up agency.
Everyone wants to live in "interesting times" but no one wants to live through it with one lifeline and a 52.5% chance of belonging to the bottom 1.2% in terms of credit points (wealth) and dependent on highly corrupt structures. I surely wouldn't play that game, so what do I care what my rational beliefs are (no participation) as long as every belief I fancy has an underlying cynicism it is a far effective short-term strategy to avoid being "scammed" which could potentially cost the lifeline.
The idea behind governments, even the most liberal, has always been that you give up some of your freedom in exchange for security against violence. This was also the primary motivator for swearing serfdom to a feudal lord. And the idea behind corporations is effectively giving up a large share of your labor value (the other part of serfdom) nominally in exchange for security against economic instability, in that you get a steady paycheck regardless of revenue fluctuations.
In practice, I think many people are finding that security is dubious since corporations lay off employees, but they don't understand what the tradeoff is that they made. Lack of loyalty by employers has then fueled lack of loyalty by employees, and overall the situation is more tenuous now for employees.
And for that matter when people complain about crime (and why crime against its own citizens is particularly heinous), they're complaining that the government is not holding up their end of the contract with protection from that. I'm not sure whether it's easier or harder today to find a different "lord" in the form of emigration. On one hand we're not bound by feudal oaths so leaving as such is usually pretty easy, but on the other hand the process of living somewhere long-term and changing citizenship can be very difficult on the other side depending where you go.