Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
He's talking from experience. Between the late 1990's and early 2000's, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wasted around $1.7 billion on a broad-ranging, intensive, national effort to study small schools... based on a flawed measurement of Bayesian probabilities!
The foundation looked only at the probability that a school would be small given high school performance, and seemingly forgot to look at the probability that a school would be high-performing given a small school size. The two are not the same. $1.7 billion, poof!
The following analysis, by a professor of statistics, explains in more detail how the foundation got it wrong: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8863.pdf
Probably would have been better to fail faster, etc. But it was his money. Kudos to him.
At least he deserves respect.
We know that Gates is aware of this, because he is credited with having once said: "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." We can only hope that he is keeping this in mind; he certainly makes no reference to the problem in this piece.
The Gates Foundation has in the past spent billions driving ruthlessly and with careful measurement toward what turned out to be entirely counterproductive goals. Simply measuring more stuff will not be sufficient to prevent it from doing so again.
Some recommended reading material on the subject:
Ritter & Webber, "Dilemma's in a General Theory of Planning" (1973) introduced the concept of "wicked problems" - http://www.uctc.net/mwebber/Rittel+Webber+Dilemmas+General_T...
Dietrich Dörner, The Logic of Failure (1996) covers this ground very well, including with case studies of people trying to save a fictional third-world country in a computer simulation of an aid program... with uniformly disastrous results.
Can you expand on this a bit? I haven't heard anything so firmly condemning of the Gates Foundation's efforts before, I'd value reading about it.
But I want to clarify that I am not condemning them (and I wasn't trying to use the term "ruthless" in a pejorative sense, so it was probably a poor choice). I am simply pointing out that if you want to use the engineering method to effect change on a global scale - and I think that is absolutely the right approach - then you first need to make sure that it is good engineering. Gates, who by all accounts is an excellent engineer, is (if the quote is genuine) aware of the problems with software metrics. It is less clear whether he is carrying that scepticism over to the use of other metrics, and that is my concern.
EDIT: Not as only factor, but as significant factor.
While the Gates Foundation did waste time and money on the small schools initiative, but in some ways I view it as a model for how social research should work.
They had a theory and some supporting data. They tried to implement a program to optimize it and measured the results. And while they may have been ruthless in driving this, they were equally ruthless with their measurement. They didn't hide their results. They came out and said, "we are disappointed with our results". http://www.gatesfoundation.org/speeches-commentary/Pages/bil...
If more social research was done in this way and was as transparent I suspect we'd make some better progress in education. But unfortunately, most people have taken sides -- the issue has been politicized. And so outside of groups like Gates, the data no longer matters.
From my experience, it seems the solution the software industry used was very much like putting rocket engines on planes made of lead.
The fact that Mr. Gates ignores this leads me to believe that he thinks that the grossly unequal distribution of resources is the result of some process that has a sound basis. Our current 'economic' models, since they do not take into account equality, health, education, or any other important scientific data, are fundamentally unsound, and that is why we have the problems of gross inequality and inadequate distribution of resources.
We should frame this as less exploitation and more fairness rather than more charity.
MEASUREMENT
I'm confounded by the emphasis on Taylorism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management) and privatization, and by extension the emphasis on teacher performance.
Make a list of all things wrong with public education in the USA (inequity, parental involvement, malnutrition, etc). Teacher performance isn't even in the top ten.
A friend works on some sort of in school room surveillance system at the Gates Foundation. It records the teacher. Which is then reviewed and the teacher graded. By what criteria, I can't imagine. Then the teacher's performance is graded and coaching in administered. For improvement. I asked if any teachers were advising the project. No. I asked who reviews the tapes. Non teachers.
Yea, that'll help.
Even more standardized testing is another aspect of Taylorism. As every QA/Test person knows, you cannot test your way to quality.
The only measure of teacher performance is student achievement. But with so many factors beyond the control any teacher or group of teachers, it's patently unfair to judge teachers. And yet ask any faculty, group of students, or parents, and they'll tell you who the great teachers are.
PRIVATIZATION
The outsourcing of education is just a way to divert money meant for the classroom towards cronies. Standardized testing, textbooks, misc contracts are some examples.
The rationalization for corporate charter schools is that somehow the free market will make schools more competitive. Alas, free market means monopoly, not more parental choice.
Further, how is a private entity more accountable than government? I can attend board meetings, vote on levies, submit public records requests. But corporations can easily hide their activities, that's what makes them private entities.
THE FIX
I believe what's needed is more transparency, more accountability, more democracy.
Every single profession struggles with their bad apples. What's needed is a way to hold individuals accountable and some means of either correcting the problem or firing them. This applies to cops, doctors, accountants, teachers, everyone.
It's always an open secret who the bad teachers are. But just try to fire one.
A second friend was a principle for a few years. Of the bad apples, one of his teachers was assaulting his students. For years. My friend wasted three years trying to fire this person. Opposed by the district, the union, the other teachers, etc. Couldn't get it done. Violent teacher was a few years away from retirement, hey buddy, don't rock the boat.
Another friend works in the local school district. He recently related that people within the district admin were quite pleased they only "had to fire" 5 teachers out of 2,000+ in the last year. That's astonishing. I know there's more than 5 bad apples in the district. The documentary The Rubber Room shows what happens to bad teachers in NYC that can't be fired. (Spoiler: They all sit in a room every work day, doing nothing.) I have it on good authority that happens in every district. Probably in every profession.
One example from my experience: I wasn't allowed to fire 4 developers on my team. Pushed onto my team by my VP, who was building an empire. Completely toxic individuals (eg one Lebanese and one Isreali who would go at each other). No other manager would deal with them. Complete drain on my team's morale and productivity. I had numbers, facts, personal reviews in my arsenal. I couldn't fire them. I can't imagine how much harder it is in a public context.
But in truth, I don't know a specific fix is for culling bad apples. I believe this governance issue is the central management challenge in our society.
Meanwhile, I advocate for gathering more data (transparency) so that we can at least know what's going on.
(Thanks for reading this far.)
I feel like giving more power to school principals and trusting them to make non-standardized-test-based judgment calls is a solution but unions are terrified of it for whatever reason.
On the one hand, the teacher's unions are the only people who stand up for teachers, a job that would otherwise be whittled away in pay and benefits until only an idiot would take the job. On the other hand, union leadership's primary concern seems to be protecting bad teachers and retirement benefits.
My mother fought both the district and the union. Her specialty was learning disabled kids. Non standard everything. In a world that demands standardization.
I'm very pro labor, pro teacher, but have many grievances with the teachers unions. Like every other self-preserving group (cops, gangs), they can't show weakness.
I get it. I have many union friends. They're assaulted from every side. All sorts of contradictory demands, without any concessions or compromises offered.
I believe in my heart the only way for teaching to be reformed is for the teacher unions to get out in front of the reform issue, instead of digging in. Like the french cliche, Do or be done.
Unfortunately, there are few professions more susceptible to fads than education. "Reform" for most teachers is "Been there, done that, it sucked. Just let me get back to teaching."
Meaning there'd be near zero consensus on a reform platform.
Alas, free market means monopoly, not more parental choice.
seems like it came out of nowhere. Since charter schools entered my area, my kids have gone from two choices, the local high school and a gifted program for engineering students at a local college, to many choices, includes a performing arts school, a science and engineering school for the "non-gifted" and many others.
As a parent, I have concerns about how charter schools impact the local school budgets, but monopoly is the exact opposite of the word I'd use.
So I'm curious about what logic brought you to that statement. Your comment was well thought out, so I don't think you are just pulling statements out of nowhere.
Yea, that was quite the leap. I see privatization equated with competitiveness all the time. (As those the bidding process isn't an insider rigged game, but that's whole 'nother issue.)
I'm pleased that charter school led to greater diversity and choice in your district. Like they say, YMMV.
In the reports I've read, charter schools have been selectively admitting students, cherry picking, excluding the low potential, aptitude students. Reinforcing inequity.
Whereas public schools have to take all students. Different rules, same scoring system. Very unfair.
In my district, we've had short-lived "magnet" programs and schools. They're hugely popular with students and parents. Teachers seem like them too. District administrators hate them. Non standard. Must be closed down. Taylorism redux.
Two of our low income high schools have hugely popular magnet programs. My friends that teach at those schools say that it creates a class (caste) system, like two schools in one. The smart, rich, mostly white students in the gifted programs. The rest in the remedial programs. The two groups rarely commingle. (I used to volunteer in the classroom, I've seen this firsthand.)
I find that so weird. So much wasted potential.
Whatever the current situation, there's huge money being poured into our local pro-charter school campaigns. So whereas our district foolish tried to culled diversity, maybe we'll eventually get it with new charter schools. That'd be ironic.
Thanks for replying.
How so? It sounds as if the students capable of handling high level work are receiving it. Similarly, the students needing remedial help are also receiving it.
Would it be better if students who can't do long division were dropped in a calculus class, or students who are capable of doing calculus were bored re-learning long division?
What is the potential you believe is wasted?
Personally, I think our best option would be to do away with the notion of age-based grades. Make progression based on competency (at least for the core curricula), so if you are highly competent in math, you may be with students several years older than you but if your writing stinks, you may be with younger kids. Instead of trying to force kids into a mold that very few fit comfortably in, let them grow in their own ways.
I would love to have my kids attend a school like that. My daughter, who is a gifted writer and artist but struggles non-stop with math (and there are physiological reasons for that) would be able to be comfortable in school and, as a result, better able to focus on her strengths instead of trying to shore up weaknesses that only matter for testing programs.
If the charter system allows more experimentation, then that alone justifies its existence; but the transition of more than 100 years of "prepare them for the factory" type of education to "prepare them for knowledge work" will not painful, especially since we still need some of the "prepare them for the factory" and many more "prepare them for a trade".
Personally, I think our best option would be to do away with the notion of age-based grades.
I've been chewing on two ideas.
Assess student achievement with actual achievements. Just like achievement badges in the Boy Scouts. My son is an Eagle Scout. After meeting the minimum requirements, and completing his project, he was able to assemble whatever achievements tickled his fancy. Promotes self direction and working at one's own rate.
Have students teach each other, work more collaboratively, grade each other. Versus lectures, rote memorization, and testing. I've experienced this first hand (as the student). Peer pressure and expectations work wonders. Hardest, most rewarding 'A' grade I ever earned. (I was otherwise a terrible student.)
Alas, to date, there's very little research on these two reforms. Some places have tried the achievement system, results inconclusive. I haven't looked to see if the peer support system has been tried else where.
The real question is whether this is worse than the alternative[1]. The alternative was women and minorities unable to get jobs or stuck in their current job. I think in many areas our society has moved past that, but not in all. It is certainly worth looking at the regulations to see if we can improve the situation.
1. Unions are a completely different piece of the equation, especially when it comes to teachers. I don't know how you break that stranglehold, short of increasing completion by including schools that don't hire unionized teachers, but that's if you can even hire a non-unionized teacher.
I got to layoff the under performers on my team. Productivity soared. The whole time, it would have been cheaper for me to pay them to go away.
More seriously...
Humans are hard wired to punish cheaters. It can go wrong. But preventing it is also counter productive. My hope (optimism) is that with greater transparency, we'll have better feedback loops, to better identify and mitigate the cheaters.
This is why you use VAM rather than simple test scores. You build a statistical predictor of how a given group of students should perform, measure how they actually perform, and the teacher's score is (actual - predicted).
The outsourcing of education is just a way to divert money meant for the classroom towards cronies.
Employees of public education system are the cronies you speak of. Consider the recent presidential election - the education industry funneled $21M to the candidate who wanted to spend more money on public education.
Handouts don't fix underlying problems. Education and better health might.
It is only in modern times that we discovered the productive capability to escape the Malthusian trap and improve the human condition. Because this happened unevenly, "inequality" rose. But this was not a bad thing, it was a necessary step in progress.
Today, much of the developing world is catching up to the rich world. This is reducing inequality.
Inequality is neither good nor bad in itself. Focusing on this one variable creates a far too simple model to understand the world.
So I tried to get some financial help from related funds and organizations and contacted all of them I could find on the internet.
Guess what happened: 90% of them just ignored me, and the rest told me that they are not helping sick kids, but only doing research work. One came up to cover up to $3.500(!) if I provide a bunch of documents I was sure I wouldn't be able to gather in a short term.
On web pages of such funds you normally can easily find a button to make a donation. But try to contact them if you need help - you will be surprised how difficult it is.
So we (relatives and friends) collected as much money as we could, the kid was receiving treatment in one of the local hospitals, in the end both of his eyes got removed. Maybe the same would have happened in those best hospitals too, but if there was even the slightest chance to keep his sight it certainly would worth any money.
Bottom line is - I don't believe in cancer funds any longer, and will never donate any dime. In fact I'm not even sure that they spend all money for "Research", they might be just another way to avoid taxes.
May be Bill Gates fund is different, I hope so...
Bill Gates does not have unlimited money. The $40BN or so they manage is not enough to really make an impact if they focus on immediate solutions like helping individual cases. They need to use the money to research better ways and change how governments handle things so that the overall system will be better.
While it's sad about what happened to your nephew, it's much more sad if such diseases remain expensive and difficult to treat and more people suffer in the future. Unfortunately, it is not worth unlimited amount of money to save one child's sight.
Do the math. If the Gates foundation spent $100,000 to help one person out, they'd be able to only help about 400,000 people. That, in the scope of things, is not a whole lot of impact. Their current plan will have far more impact.
And why spend $100K+ to save one child? Why not that money, to, say, feed many starving children? Or build housing?
If "trying to help him" would be a form of "great research", then chances are someone would be interested in it. You might need to realise that he is simply unlucky. But not necessarily any more unlucky than a child that gets polio, or has their skin burned off, or is left brain damaged from a car accident.
It's complicated and sad, but denouncing long-term investment because of immediate sad situations will only create more sad situations.
"Trying to help him could be a great research in itself"
Only if you volunteered your nephew as a test subject to go through unproven clinical trials.
http://www.macmillan.org.uk/Documents/AboutUs/Newsroom/Livin...
The situation isn't great and that report highlights the problems. And rare cancers are not going to attract research effort until the common ones are solved. But fundamental research is what is required. And I believe that rich philanthropists are going to remain an essential part in funding that research.
I understand your hopeless feelings, but this is totally false. My uncle is oncologist.There has been a tremendous advance over the last decades, not as much as we want but it improves.
"may be it would make some sense to spend some of that money to help sick people?"
Some of this money is already being spent on them. I don't know in USA but in Europe it is.
For me the best use of this money should be prevention, like less diesel and cancerous particles in cities, better quality food, and less flame retardant in our polar linings or bed foams.
So on next even the management of this organization arrived on three brand new, shiny SUV's bought using donated funds.
The only good thing coming from these fundraisers is that people are getting together, socializing and participating in decent activities. The reset of it - in particular - "collecting funds for research" is a bullshit bordering with scam.
"Well, first of all become a doctor and discover a marvelous cure for something, and then, when the medical profession really starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right so there'll never be any diseases ever again."
But I think he was an even better bussinessman. I am pretty sure he's applying more from the latter background than from the computer field.
I suppose it is "applied science" but that seems like a weak term. My point is just there is a difference between acquiring knowledge about the world, and actively engineering change in that same world. He is doing both.
It may not be ideal but there's still a lot more value to it than just throwing up your hands and dismissing the problem as un-explainable/impossible to solve.
Compare "buying food for the hungry" and "teaching the man to fish" - which effort carry more residual value?
You developed DOS, and then Windows. Even when you stopped - the world continued rolling with your software and building more and more great stuff on top of it. Even Ballmer with all his powers couldn't derail your past efforts.
Dear Bill Gates, please stop taking consequences for causes, stop fighting with shadows. See where you can turn on the light so it will shine when you'll be long gone. Money + creativity goes the long way. It's time to add creativity. You can do that! You can do that!
Also I'm not sure his creation of DOS and Windows really has much bearing on his more recent philanthropic efforts.
Invest in helping people to discover the powers within. Do not invest in making people think they need to depend on some external rich power to pull themselves out of their misery. That is misservice. This is lie. That warm, fuzzy feeling you get after spending billion on buying stuff for poor people comes with deeper unease - deep inside you know that you did not really make a lasting difference. Difference yes. Lasting - only until that billion ran out and your vaccines are used, food is eaten and very soon they will want more. This is not a difference.
Invest in helping people to learn the skills, invest in helping people to find inspiration within, invest in helping people to express their own creativity and power.
Invest in helping people to discover how each of them can help other million people without spending billion dollars.
Research does serious lasting good as well. Research funding built the Internet, for example.
"The Secret" is hogwash, not modern medical science. You can't help someone "express their creativity and power" when they're dying of preventable disease.
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2002/12/death-is-an-outra...
You'll see a number of mainstream foundations in the Methuselah Foundation lists, and those also support the SENS Research Foundation, working on the basis for ways to reverse the cellular and molecular damage that causes aging. The Gates foundation isn't there:
http://mfoundation.org/?pn=donors
But that's not entirely surprising: from the beginning, the Gates Foundation has been a very traditional Big Philanthropy operation. Wealth does not grant vision. Where there is innovation or stepping away from the norms it is of the incremental type, with none of what Peter Thiel calls "radical philanthropy". Is this is a criticism of Gates? Sure. But it's equally a criticism of everyone else. The Gates Foundation is doing what most people think Big Philanthropy should do. The blind spot for aging is near universal.
Additionally solving childhood mortality issues will do wonders for the average life expectancy.
I'd say aging and, yes, death are two related things that have helped us evolve from organic Carbon molecules to a species that is thinking of colonizing other planets in the Solar system. And I also do believe that if "we" as a species (or an evolved species based on our own) ever are to go beyond our Solar System we would only do that if we let this process of evolution continue.
To say nothing of the fact that you cannot have a non-dying and increasing in numbers species such as ours without resorting to eugenics. Eugenics is bad.
We are devolving in many ways: diseases that kill us or make us infertile are being treated so as to not kill us and make us infertile. With time, we might devolve to the point where we completely depend on modern medicine to survive and reproduce.
> With time, we might devolve to the point where we completely depend on modern medicine to survive and reproduce.
That's a possibility, of course. Then you have to wonder what happens if the social structures crumble or change dramatically and you do not have access to modern medicine anymore?
http://dianeravitch.net/2013/01/10/how-bill-gates-wasted-50-... http://seattletimes.com/html/dannywestneat/2014437975_danny0...
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02...
It is also fair that when someone proposes a certain set of objectives, and then declares a plan to accomplish those, that you can criticize the plan to accomplish those objectives as being less than optimal. IMO, since this is his own money, he has every right to pick the objectives he thinks most important.
I think a marginal $1b spent to end the drug war would do more for his stated goal of fixing underperforming urban schools than a marginal $1b spent on teacher measurement. The irony is he wouldn't even need to spend $1b to make a huge impact on ending the drug war -- just showing through data that the drug war is responsible for many of the problems in schools and urban culture ($10mm to study this?) and then having the courage to promote that result (free or priceless) would accomplish it.
OS = what we see(input) and what we do with that knowledge(output)
We can Install this software and this firewall and this make things easy tool but at the end we still are on the same OS.
What is not measured, can not be controlled.
> The process I have described—setting clear goals, choosing an approach, measuring results, and then using those measurements to continually refine our approach
This sounds like a pretty pragmatic plan to me. I know that I don't necessarily agree with the direction he's going (I would personally pick other problems to tackle), so I just hope someday I'm in a position to do something along the same vein and learn from the lessons he's willing to share.
Ask anyone who has gone aboard to do good works. There's a very fine line between helping and inadvertently creating a dependency or destroying previously stable social or economic structures.
Big example is famine relief. We dump our excess commodities in a local economy. That enriches the power elite. It nukes the local agriculture. People end up worse off.
Can you list some examples of this type of harm? Are they outliers or is it normal for this kind of aid to hurt its recipients?
Why can it not just be "rich people"?
Second, even if the parent commenter's ancestors were colonists of some stripe, people aren't bound in any way to say that the actions taken by their ancestors were the right ones.
Sounds like "Rich White Guy" is the best person to solve the problems, then. Which is a fairer fight- bushmen vs. rich white guys, or rich white guy vs other rich white guys?
This is not a binary "problems" or "no problems". The manner by which colonialists "improve" the rest of the world is at the expense of the rest of the world.
Not commenting on Gates' particular methods, but injecting money generally comes with a cost, and at various freedoms of the countries involved. At best of intention, throwing money at a problem is not usually solving the conditions behind a problem.
In a few years it will be billionaire Chinese who are solving big problems. What will be the negative attribute for that? Lots of people from all places around the world are solving problems for all of us. If Muhammad Yunus had not been local to Bangladesh, would he be some kind of villain? Is it bad that he's male? Would it have been better had he been a woman (most microloans are lend to women, since they appear more dependable and have greater need)?
Let me tell you what I think you mean. I think you're attributing something happening inside your own head to the person you're reacting to. You're angry. The reason you're angry is that you have a bunch of arbitrary prejudices that have been set off by something you read. But you don't want to attribute your reaction to your own prejudices. So the only place left to attribute it to is the stimulus that made you angry.
He's donating $40 billion and more importantly his time, yet people are reacting so negatively.
What I find even harder to understand is that he is using the Scientific Method to do the greatest good for the time/dollars and people in a community that are all about measuring value are calling him prejudiced and making excuses to allow themselves to hate him for their own reasons.
1. A framing effect: the narrative of "poor, starving Africans" makes you sympathize with them, and thus consider them the "in-group" of the narrative.
2. A fairness/democratic bias: people think that the best way for a group to decide on something, is for everyone to have an equal vote. Even if half the people making up the group are experts and the other half have no idea what they're talking about; even if what they're "voting" on is a fact like "the distance between [two cities none of them have ever heard of]."
(Or, at least, on the face of it. People actually like being ruled by a high-status dictator as long as they have a way to pretend they're not being ruled--and thus aren't losing status from submission. This is why you'll get more enthusiasm for electing a leader than most forms of direct democracy--even when things like holding referendums are pretty easy to implement today.)
3. People believe that only their in-group holds the information necessary to make decisions about what their in-group should do. This one is actually not that far off; central allocation, as tried in Communism et al., failed due to many instances of the Principal-Agent problem: "orders from on high" to do things with neither clarity as to how accomplishing those things will benefit anyone, or an accompanying incentive structure to make those actually the things that will get done.
But this only holds for in-groups that are about the size of "tribe" in hunter-gatherer terms: 20-150 people--where the group can come to a single decided set of social mores pretty much by osmosis. When you get entire societies thinking this way, countries composed of millions of people where there's no single thing everyone can agree on, only laws that are barely tolerated--you begin to find that decisions derived from sociological statistics achieve better results than just asking the population what they want.
---
Combining these effects, we see a poor, sympathetic in-group being dominated by the will of a dictator, who must not know what the heck he's talking about, not being part of their group and all. It smells vaguely of colonialism [something most Americans are familiar with]: of being ruled over from the seat of power of a distant empire who has no "real" idea of what's important to your own people or what your own desires would be. And so, we don't like it.
Even though, in consequentialist terms, it's the best possible thing.
Western countries telling the rest of the world what to do is not only condescending; it repackages old imperial propagandas of improvement, development, dependency, etc., and serves to further entrench Western power abroad.
Bill Gates is not a Western country. He is a really smart guy who has proved himself pretty good at solving big problems by spending his own money. [1]
If you read the article, he actually criticizes aid linked to furthering political interests. All he is saying is "Aid and development programmes should use feedback to improve things they do." I can't think of a good reason why any one on hacker news who would disagree with such a simple, logical argument.
Are we so blinded by misdeeds of Western nations in the past that we want a man who has experience running some of the largest scale aid operations in the world to shut up and not talk about what he has learned just because he is a citizen of America and he is white?
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2012/01/12/bill-ga...
Except that the Gates Foundation acts like one. Its endowment is larger than the GDP about half of the countries of the world. It exists to promote a "creative capitalism" in which the domain of public, governmental services is now understood to be yet another market open for business (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/exec/billg/speeches/2008...).
Let's say that during America's period of slavery, there was an extremely wealthy northeastern industrialist who donated a large portion of his wealth to improve the living conditions of slaves. He wanted them to have better food, better clothes, better medical care, etc. But even though his wealth was gained by legitimate free enterprise and not slavery, he had never called for the outright abolition of slavery, just lamented the poor living conditions of the slaves.
The industrialist's contribution should certainly be applauded, as it would certainly do good, but without addressing the fundamental injustice, it only makes a system predicated on vast suffering slightly more tolerable.
In short, hoping for the winners of a corrupt system to save the losers is foolish. If we had real free markets and real democracy, it might be a different story, but we don't. Our situation cannot be remedied by charity, welfare, or incremental reforms. We need fundamental structural transformation of our political and economic institutions. Anything short, however noble the aim, is equivalent to trying to make slaves more comfortable without freeing them.
I respect Bill Gates and think his cause is noble but they are partly childish because of the idealism and the hopes to cure disease. ilaksh's post on this thread is part of the reason why though I wanted to reply to your post instead of doing so to his. It will be far more controversial though.
David Attenborough recently said that human beings are a plague on Earth.
I'll present you with three stories:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906520/planet-earth-narra...
Peter Beard, in an interview with Alec Baldwin on 'Here's the Thing', said that AIDS was a good thing in Africa because of overpopulation and it caused quite a stir.
I listened to an All Things Considered story where, not only was there a slaughter of elephants for their ivory tusks, but they would wait until more elephants would come back to mourn the slain and the poachers would kill them too. When asked, off the record, the poacher said he had to feed his family. The natural question I asked is "Why are you having kids you can't afford?" The question wasn't asked during the piece and it's something that isn't asked worldwide.
There are numerous examples of mankind ruining the environment. As the most intelligent life on this planet, we are to be the custodians and not expand like a virus.
Even if you took the approach of mankind over everything else we are now destroying the soil which we rely on and food shortages continue as the price for food continues to rise.
The answers don't come easy in this world. The best ones are the most difficult to make. I suspect Western countries will have to do the same in the coming years to limit population growth.
The thing is, it's impossible to gain an education when you are constantly starving or sick. Solve that problem and you move towards solving the next.
>Educated societies have far fewer children than non, to the point that some first world countries are losing population.
You're citing statistics without understanding the reason why. Education means a higher household income which has become less so during the recent economic crisis. The traditional reasoning, while crude, of why poor people have more kids is because they have less money. What they can do is have more sex because they don't have the money to do anything else.
We are at the point now where college grads have a hard time finding a job. How is more college grads going to solve the problem?
The gap has been widening in the US between the rich and middle class ever since Reagan. The same is happening for other Western countries as well.
Not sure why you're trolling so hard, but that did make me laugh. Access to entertainment has killed sex!
That said, all of the science on the subject is measuring very specific things and should be interpreted narrowly. You can say income is broadly correlated with fertility, and rule out some specific measures of education as an explanation for that particular (small) piece of the variance pie, but you can't then just make up an explanation and pretend it's supported by science. Just-so stories like the one you're telling are at best food for thought, or fodder for future experimental hypotheses. There's no scientific basis that I know of for the kind of mechanism you're proposing. Though I'd be happy to see more studies on the subject.
Perhaps the poacher from your story would not need to kill more elephants to feed his children if the general condition of his country were better, and the economy supported other endeavors more readily (and prosperously) than poaching. In fact, if you believe the Rand think-tank, "first world" inhabitants produce less offspring, and much of the developed world is facing a looming underpopulation crisis.
I know many Western European countries have a birthrate that is lower than the replacement rate. This may be the case for America as well, but last I heard our population was still rising, with immigration also being a contributing factor.
In any event, you're right in that the answers don't come easy. I think the fact that Mr. Gates is willing to make the attempt, and is showing some signs of success (whether it's the right success metric is certainly up for debate) is to be commended. More people should aspire to philanthropy and there are certainly worse role models than him.
I know you "can't get an ought from an is", and I can come up with several utility functions that have the effect of limiting humankind's impact, but I'm not sure there's any fundamental reason they're valid. You may want to save the environment so you can continue to live, but poaching elephants doesn't harm human survivability.
If you'd like to be arrogant about it then that's fine. However, we revolve around and are dependent on animals, insects and plants to provide us life.
>We evolved to expand; we're machines to replicate DNA.
You can expand as much as you want. Nature will fight back like it has with adaptive viruses and the Ice Age.
>You may want to save the environment so you can continue to live, but poaching elephants doesn't harm human survivability.
My comment dealt with saving humanity from humans. If you think it's fine to kill elephants while they hold a funeral then you've lost your humanity. Some already have. A bunch of 6 year-olds just got killed and NRA subscriptions went up during that span before any legislation.
That's because we are predators. There's no shame here; it's a simple truth.
> Nature will fight back
The way you put it sounds like nature is a person. Instead, nature is a set of rules that we don't fully understand yet. One day, we may understand those rules and control nature. OR, our bets fail and we are dead.
Ice Age? Can you point me to the theory that shows how Earth or "Nature" is somehow an entity that performs massive climate shifts in response to too-successful lifeforms?
There is no necessary balance in nature. It's a constant struggle and what you see just might be a somewhat stable state. If an actor in that system (like humans) finds a game-theoretic superior strategy, there's no fundamental reason why they won't "win" and destroy the rest of the ecosystem and go extinct. Plenty of other species go extinct all the time. That's nature.
Anyways, I'm not saying it's fine to kill elephants at all. Indeed, I find it disgusting, and it'd be fantastic if societies could figure out ways to ensure that poaching isn't a beneficial action. But I am pointing out there's no mandatory acceptance of any axioms that would generate an obligation to "take care of the Earth", whatever that means. And there's definitely no particular reason why a human killing elephants to feed his family is somehow invalid, whereas if lions do the same thing, it's OK.
I can point to scientific theses about how it will occur in the future. Are you willing to bet against 95% of the scientific community?
>why a human killing elephants to feed his family is somehow invalid, whereas if lions do the same thing, it's OK.
Are lions wiping out a species?
You are misusing the word “natural” there…
It could be from no access to contraception or abortion, either due to lack of wealth or social precepts? Social mores that disparage men who don’t have kids? Lack of biological and statistical understanding of how sex and procreation are related?
Even in the West, it was only until recently (the Enlightenment, maybe?) that the notion of “choosing to have children” even existed. It was either considered an uncontrollable instinct or something influenced by divine providence, with the actual question of sexual behavior being dodged outright.
Now, finally, in this post-modern world we have invented Anti-Humanism. This allows truly clever humans to signal how truly clever they are. Because it takes a truly clever human to recognize the value of Anti-Humanism.
Simple folk still think humans are a good thing.
An interesting analogy can be drawn from dwarf wheat, the grain that allowed the agriculture industry to become exponentially more efficient and productive over the last several decades. Dwarf wheat is a "genetically modified" crop, but not in the way you would imagine; we didn't make it hardier, or higher-producing at its own expense, or anything else. All we did to get massive gains in wheat production, was to turn off the part of the wheat's genetic code that made each stalk of wheat attempt to grow taller than each other stalk of wheat, thus making every stalk expend the majority of its resources on (inedible) stalk, and relatively little on (both edible to us, and reproductively important to it) grain. Since all the wheat has the gene for competitive growth turned off, all the wheat ends up short--and so all the wheat stalks still end up getting just as much sunlight, but can use all the resources they would have put into growth upward to instead sprout hardier, more nutritious grain.
Humans--all animals [1]--have a competitive program of their own: absent certain status-signaling drives that arise in high-intelligence+education groups, each human attempts to have as many children as possible to ensure their line has as many opportunities as it can to be passed on. The length of our stalks is pretty ridiculous :)
[1] Okay, maybe not all animals. I'm sure some parthenogenetic lizard or other such beastie fails this test after careful thought.
http://books.google.com/books?id=22JBi4RC-HwC&lpg=PA55&#...
Any crop wheat has already been bamboozled into massively over-investing in each seed.
On the other hand, those farming techniques rely on heavy fertilizer loads--which then rely on either hydrocarbons (which we will run out of) or large masses of animal waste--which requires large numbers of animals--which requires feeding those large numbers of animals. And what do they eat? The majority of the mass-farmed crops. Just because it's stalled now, doesn't mean it's stalled forever. :)
While you may view Bill's idealism and hopes as childish, the fact he's trying to optimize the measurement process of human progress shows an awareness and openness to adapt as the information changes. This is crucial to ensuring resources are continually distributed efficiently as our understanding evolves.
Are we humans selfish to some extent? Sure, but we're trying to live in an existence out to kill us. What can we do but fight?
Another bad assumption you're making is that the West's population is growing rapidly, but it's not. In fact, populations in Western countries are barely growing, and often are only growing due to immigration, or due to higher birth rates among immigrant populations.
Finally, yet another bad assumption you're making is that we should limit population growth through draconian measures like… well murdering people, or allowing them to die unnecessarily. In fact, the best way to limit population growth is through education, better access to healthcare, and economic development. As people become more educated and financially successful, they naturally delay childbirth and have fewer children as a result. When people have access to health services like education, birth control and abortions, they can better make decisions about children.
You can google “overpopulation myth” or simply “overpopulation” to verify what I've written here.
The curve is on an upward climb while available resources have been declining.
>Finally, yet another bad assumption you're making is that we should limit population growth through draconian measures like… well murdering people, or allowing them to die unnecessarily.
I never said murder anyone. Nature's been doing that for a very long time.
Ever been to Africa? Do you think that the tribes care about education.
If the world had enough jobs to support everyone, then Western countries would have low job rates. Maybe you should have read my replies to similar comments.
Keep reading though, and keep thinking. You'll get through it soon enough. In the meantime, try to find things worth appreciating. See the good in what people are doing. Go into a big box store, and instead of thinking "look at all this disgusting consumerism sucking up natural resources and destroying the world!" try thinking "wow, isn't it great we've managed to develop such efficient and powerful technologies that we can provide such a dizzying array of products for so cheap to so many people? And isn't it great that our society is so open and undiscriminating that we let anyone buy whatever they want, if they have the money?"
This argument is simultaneously (1) viscerally horrifying and (2) completely wrong.
It is wrong because curing disease does not increase population growth rate. Birth rate is extremely well-correlated with infant mortality rate, and pretty well anticorrelated with both life expectancy and quality of life. That's why the countries with the highest population growth rates also have some of the highest mortality rates. If you want to stop overpopulation, you should target common causes of death, especially those that afflict young children.
Which is exactly what Bill Gates is doing.
Westerners who think population growth are usually talking about people living in underdeveloped countries, and are doing so in a way that is both prejudiced and dehumanizing. To me it looks like nothing more than people with power and money advocating for blatant cruelty towards those without either.
This isn't a particularly new idea, although recently it's been popularized with articles like this:
http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/01/11/overcrowding-nah-the-wor...
We are doing just fine limiting population growth without any difficult choices, and so is the rest of the world. Even birth rates in sub-Saharan Africa have been dropping like a stone.
If you actually look at KIPP (the main education reform that Bill Gates advocates), it seems more like an effort to basically enslave low-income minorities rather than a real attempt to improve education. I think there is actually pretty good reason to complain about this.
Paul Tough (the NYT's main KIPP advocate) has an article here explaining it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html?_r=0
The basic idea is summed up in this quote from the article: "Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the ability, or the right, to take on?" In other words, kids need to be in school 24/7 in order to "change their culture."
There a variety of problems with this, e.g.
- Not supported by data.
- Not being allowed to do stuff on your own prevents you from developing executive function.
- The program revolves entirely around extrinsic motivation, which will prevent most of these kids from actually maturing into adults and being able to handle anything beyond minimum wage jobs.
- Even if these kids do have improved reading and math scores on standardized tests, which there is not yet data to support, it's nowhere near clear that this would outweigh the other problems with the program.
KIPP makes a lot of sense if your goal is to take kids who would normally join gangs and give them enough skills to work at McDonald's, but as a compulsory government program (where you go to prison and literally become a slave if you don't participate) I think this is highly dubious.
And remember, parents have to enroll their children in KIPP. How is that any different than rich parents sending their children to afterschool and summer programs that are commonplace? In many ways their completely identical. Except that historically poor students haven't even had the option of good afterschool and summer program.
This is a voluntary program. If you think your child will thrive outside the program then don't send them there. Analogies to enslavement don't help. And saying that a parent who sends their child to KIPP is somehow denying their child some culture, yet not calling out middle-class/upper-class children who enjoy these benefits today, seems hypocritical.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_learning_loss#Vulnerable...
Also, KIPP is voluntary now, but my understanding is that Gates is trying to make it the standard model of schooling. I have less of an issue with parents sending their kids to the program voluntarily, though I still think it's a bad idea.
What's the alternative in your mind? Personally, it makes complete sense to me to have year-round schooling. Especially considering the effects its been shown to have on math and reading performance.
What's so bad about extra schooling?
Edit: Also, perhaps it was different for you as a child, but most children are not intrinsically motivated to participate in school as it stands. As a kid I was far more interested in playing Age of Empires or playing outside, so the argument that extrinsic motivation doesn't work seems weak to me.
Other things that help are giving books to families and encouraging parents, especially male father-figures, to read to children.
That might need some adult eduction, because adult illiteracy is a bit of a problem.
In the UK we have a charity called BooksTrust. Unfortunately it seems to have wider reach among middle class families (who have enough money to buy books, and who read to their children) than among poor parents. They have quite modest funding (£13m per year)
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8218115/C...)
In general this is true. There is a serious culture change that needs to happen and the parents aren't doing it. This is coming from a black man that has seen first hand the toxic culture a lot of these kids grow up in.
>The program revolves entirely around extrinsic motivation, which will prevent most of these kids from actually maturing into adults and being able to handle anything beyond minimum wage jobs.
I see some version of this argument trotted out all the time, and frankly its nonsense. The majority of kids, rich poor black white, do not have the motivation to learn or try hard at school on their own. It is only through extrinsic motivations that these kids are able to succeed: parents, peers, culture. This is precisely exactly what poor inner-city kids lack. Any program that aims to change the trajectory of black achievement must address these issues head-on. There is absolutely no place for political correctness in these discussions; this is entire generations of kids being lost to low achievement and poor future prospects.
During the 1950s, basically the height of segregation, blacks were doing just fine. If it's an exaggeration to say that the black community was on track to be what the Jewish community is in society today, it certainly isn't by much.
Considering that much of the decline in the black community has been caused by the school system (as well as the war on drugs and a few other factors), I think it's rather optimistic to think that radically increasing the amount of schooling is going to fix things.
Citation?
Re: McDonalds, what's wrong with that? It's not glamorous but it's a solid job which teaches good skills. People need to start somewhere, people from poverty may have no experience with the very most basic financial and life-skills you take for granted: managing expenditure, keeping income regular, putting aside spare cash, staying in one job. Those are the basics people need to learn, and the idea is that someone from poverty who succeeds at that stage can pass on the benefits they gain to their children, who will do even better. Then in a generation or two more they can become a university-educated family.
I realize this. I don't think having kids in school for more hours per day is the right way to change the culture though.
Yes, enslavement of low-income minorities, that's exactly what he's going for. This is ridiculous hyperbole.
It's also partly because there are some flaws in his methods here and there and it isn't perfect. That's more of a reason stemming from a complete disconnect from how charity projects usually work. It's very rare to see any metric, useful or otherwise, nor any consideration toward "Ok, so looking at the data, is there a better approach?". Most take a kind of "field of dreams" approach and at best confirm that they're doing more good than harm and leave it at that, rather than heavily crunch into how much good it's doing or isn't doing, how well it works compared to other approaches, what could be learned and applied to future efforts including area differences, and so forth. That's terrible - just because something is better than nothing is no excuse to not attempt to optimize it. Yet it never seems to happen outside of medicine (a field used to living and dying on it's data) and even then often taking a rather naive approach and considering improvements in cases rather than a more bulk-medicine approach similar to military medicine (people are dying constantly at a high rate, so the problem isn't so much how well an individual treatment works as how well a treatment, applied shotgun over a group, works considering it's cost).
Seriously, the freedom to enjoy success and the autonomy to use one's own money and run one's own business however one sees fit, within the limits of the law, are like the fundamental principles of capitalism and basically the key to all modern economic and technological progress...
Microsoft Office is only "his" product because Microsoft is holding its source code in secret rather then releasing it to the benefit of the entire world. Since Bill Gates' entire career is based upon secrecy rather then productivity his ownership of billions of dollars is illegitimate.
> the key to all modern economic and technological progress
The main thing holding back technological progress today is secrecy. When corporations develop products in secret this leads to wasteful overlap. We should be using the Internet to facilitate global cooperation on technological projects.
Bill Gates is bringing a lot of assumptions with him that tacitly validate the incumbent political, social, and economic regimes. I think a lot of us would prefer that Gates do something revolutionary with his money rather than something evolutionary.
First and foremost, the BMGF needs to consider overall-quality of life, not just specific, narrow measurements. It is only within this context that the big problems can be defined, and the correct measurements determined. It may very well be that improved infant mortality and education outcomes are not linked to overall improved quality of life. This might seem counter-intuitive, but it's easy to think of scenarios where this is the case.
Anecdotally, the thing that seems to improve people's quality of life is reducing the risk that they'll win the "you're life is ruined!" lottery. You can win this lottery in ways that are hard to prevent, like disease, accident, or natural disaster. You can win this lottery politically: surprise, the FBI, CIA, or Carmen Ortiz has decided to ruin your life.
Contrast this with what the BMGF is doing. They seem to be focusing on another goal, which is to give more people a life that can be ruined. E.g. a baby that lives is going to have a chance at life. A child who's educated is going to have a better chance at life. Noble indeed. But I have to wonder of that time and money would not be better spent helping those who manage to "naturally" obtain a life avoid winning the your life is now ruined lottery.
So stopping polio not only saves those potential victims but actually encourages less children to be born.
This is something I thought was commonly accepted but maybe I'm wrong.
Are you serious? I read here that being alive isn't necessarily a premise to having an improved quality of life!
Edit (addition): I wish I could down-vote you for this kind of nonsense.
I want to apologize for these next two words. It's completely out of character for me, and they might get me banned from Hacker News, and that's fine with me. If you are reading this, and you are one of the aforementioned negative posters, I have only two words for you, and I say them from the deepest part of my heart:
edit: redacted. Moment of rage. You can guess what the words are.
Fuck You!
Fuck off!
Eat Shit!
These four are from me though:
Fuck off and die.
but you kinda described the problem in your very post. that's quite a common problem(in the states arguable more than elsewhere) in attitude. throwing unlimited amounts of money at things, and hoping they will magically resolve themselves is not really very smart imho.
but then again, i would argue he's old, and he's tired, and his own company has turned in this mixture of xerox parc on the one hand, and a massive goliath that moves so slow you barely even notice it on the other, that he feels with some luck the money might just end up in the right guys hands. in a way that's very close to vc thinking
However, this should not mean that your criticism's of the Foundation's methods should reflect your opinion of Bill Gates The Man, or really provoke any kind of moral response other than "holy shit, this guy is a massive force for good in the world, and my entire life's work will amount to a hair compared to the work that Gates and the foundation has done."
Basically, if every comment here would have started with "Bravo and kudos to Mr. Gates and the foundation. I am concerned that some of their goals, however, are misguided...", then we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Secondly -- unless you've worked extensively with the developing world, there's a very large chance that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about when it comes to the Foundation's efforts or goals. Developmental economics, for some reason, tends to attract much more armchair philosophers than other professions, and it's much worse because these systems we're dealing with are off-scale in terms of complexity and uncertainty.
I don't want Bill Gates to do the world what he did to computing and commerce.
Plus, beware of the publicly-stated do-gooder. They're dangerous people.
This sounds like a pretty pragmatic plan to me.
Sounds like a good outline for startups.
"Students would be better served by measures of which colleges were best preparing their graduates for the job market." is total corporatist bullshit. How about more free courses online like what MIT and Stanford are doing.
Good on Money elf!
"Huzzah!"
And that's just accounting for the existing base of resources and knowledge we have today. What we'll have in just another 50 years will be astounding, and further ensure that we won't have a resource problem. :)
Also, are you trying to be clever, offensive or something else entirely by contributing with silly one-liners?
And the people here who do have meaningful discussion on topics other than tech sure don't do it here. I know, I live outside the cities encompassed by startup nonsense and work in medical research.
For people who even vaguely know what they're talking about chances are pretty good they're aware of that the problems and hard and are still trying to make progress. Showing up and espousing that idea doesn't add anything to the conversation other than maybe suggesting your priorities are different than theirs (but that too can be articulated better).
I can compare it to talking to a libertarian, or alternatively someone who doesn't think anything matters but profit. All of their ideas are very sound within the realms of the overarching theory they subscribe to. That's all well and good, and sometimes makes for good conversation but they don't bother to extend their ideas to the current state of reality which exists outside of the already ideal conditions those philosophies provides.
Don't want to be reduced to "a simple Malthusian"? Make a post that says more than simply reiterating a watered down version of his thesis.
What are you doing other than posting "WE ARE DOOMED!!1" to seemingly every HN thread you come across?
Of course they will. They'll just be hit much later than the rest.
I'm sorry you're being dismissed as a Malthusian.
I also believe we humans are in deep trouble.
I volunteered at a treehugger organization for about a decade (the 90s). Trying save the birds and the salmon. These people were scientists working on policy. Like saving critical habitat such as wetlands.
Etc.
Pretty much everything I first learned in the 90s has come true. And the actual numbers are worse than the predicted worse case scenario (eg climate change).
I personally believe we're past the tipping point. Meaning climate change has entered into a positive feedback loop where even if we stopped burning fossil fuels, atmospheric CO2, methane etc will continue to increase. Because of the arboreal forests continue to burn and the tundra continues to thaw and the ocean (the biggest carbon sink) continues to acidify.
To stop this progression or even reverse it, decades from now, humans will have to aggressively retool our industry to remove CO2 from the atmospheric.
Weirdly, I'm strangely optimistic. I think it's possible. I'm not willing to give up hope.
I sometimes wonder if I'm just fooling myself. Things are so bad, I just go to my happy place. Like Sam Lowry in the movie Brazil.