You've Gotta Fight for Your Right to... OLPC | Hacker News Reader

You've Gotta Fight for Your Right to... OLPC

wilshipley.com

15 pointsbootload7 comments

I understood the point of the article... but damn, it made me respect the OLPC less, and confirmed my suspicions about NN. You see a village without power and your first thought is to make a laptop --- yikes, maybe you can include some cake with that.

Let me see if I have you right:

  Proposition: We do not have universal 'x'

  Proposition: 'y' depends on 'x'

  Conclusion:  We should not work on 'y' until everyone has 'x'

You, dear sir, fail.

If I see a village without power, it may very well have been a village with power, but had its power source stolen, or broken without ability to repair, or just destroyed out of spite. However, when I see a village without education, I know that this is a village that has not yet been touched by education. Education is viral; when you give real, useful information to people, it stays with them forever, and no one can take it away from them. Drilling a well, say, only helps those already-powerful who lay claim to the well. No one can lay claim to a mind.

Would have been awkward if I were in his position and asked "Uh, hmm, would I, uh, know your name?", and he would respond "Yes."

Being the brutally frank person I am, I would have then said "What do you do?" after reading his card.

Would have been better without all the juvenile comments. Could have made it seem like a Feynmann story, but no.

Note, this is from 2006.

"... Note, this is from 2006. ..."

Hey this is classic "Wil Shipley". It's worth the read just for the writing style and humour. But it's insightful gems like this:

"... There's an interesting side-effect to this last kind of fight, the fight for good. When you're not doing it for your own ego, you can win just by convincing others to join your side. If you get enough people to fight for you, you can even win without anyone actually knowing it was you. ..."

that make reading the article worthwhile.

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