10 ms·

I don't get the negativity in this thread. Bill Gates is trying to solve hard problems and people here are complaining. Sure, they may not be the problems tha

by dos1 14y ago

I don't get the negativity in this thread. Bill Gates is trying to solve hard problems and people here are complaining. Sure, they may not be the problems that you think are most important, and I'm sure the foundation is making missteps along the way and wasting some money. But his message in this article is a good one I think: > 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.

jayferd 14y ago
The negativity is because of the legacy of colonialism. "Rich White Guy Solves all the World's Problems" ends up being really condescending, especially when other rich white guys are causing or exacerbating many of the problems.
- TDL 14y ago
  So you would rather have him do nothing?
  - specialist 14y ago
    Sometimes "free" is too expensive. 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.
    - TDL 14y ago
      I actually agree with you on this point. I was more reacting to the "White mans burden" comment.
    - rdwallis 14y ago
      I don't find the argument that famine relief does more harm than good compelling. 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?
    - dllthomas 14y ago
      My understanding is that it depends very much on the nature of the famine. Temporary famine caused by natural disaster or warfare can be helped quite a bit by temporary relief. Structural famine caused by ongoing problems is likely to be alleviated temporarily by temporary relief but the root causes deepened, creating the dependency you mention.
- anewguy99 14y ago
  Am I the only one that gets uncomfortable when white people are treated as an undifferentiated, malevolent mass?
  - 9392732 14y ago
    It was a racist comment
  - dmhdlr 14y ago
    Rich whites were specified.
    - 9392732 14y ago
      It still groups a large amount of people under one banner segmented with race as a variable. Why can it not just be "rich people"?
      - dllthomas 14y ago
        No no, the point was that we're a differentiated malevolent mass.
        stcredzero 14y ago
        Well, to be fair, I think the commenter meant partly malevolent and partly unintentionally harmful.
      - lhnz 14y ago
        I did not realise that rich people were all evil...
  - illuminate 14y ago
    Complicity is only with those willfully ignorant, I imagine. Colonialism ~is~ a malevolent mass. "Rich white persons" tend to be the force behind colonialism, but theoretically it could be anyone.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  especially when other rich white guys are causing or exacerbating many of the problems. 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?
  - illuminate 14y ago
    "Sounds like "Rich White Guy" is the best person to solve the problems, then" 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.
    - dllthomas 14y ago
      But measuring what you're doing and the impacts you're having and adjusting as you go is likely to have a better outcome than those with similar goals who lacked such introspection.
      - illuminate 14y ago
        I don't disagree with this at all.
- mc32 14y ago
  Doers it matter who is solving problems, so long as problems are getting solved? 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)?
- pg 14y ago
  Precisely what do you mean it "ends up being really condescending?" 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.
  - djt 14y ago
    Its a tough problem to shake for a lot of people by the sounds of it. 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.
    - derefr 14y ago
      It looks like there are three problems at work here: 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.
technoslut 14y ago
>I don't get the negativity in this thread. Bill Gates is trying to solve hard problems and people here are complaining. 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-narrator-david-attenborough-calls-humans-a-plague-on-the 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.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  The answer to that problem is education, not killing off an underclass. Educated societies have far fewer children than non, to the point that some first world countries are losing population. 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.
  - technoslut 14y ago
    It's not about killing an underclass. Human beings are selfish. >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.
Alex3917 14y ago
"Bill Gates is trying to solve hard problems and people here are complaining." 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.
- kenjackson 14y ago
  Huh? I've heard complaints about KIPP, but never anything about any sort of metaphorical enslavement. Could you expand?
  - Alex3917 14y ago
    One of the main components of the program is extending both the school day and the school year, so that schooling is 10 hours a day and 11 months a year or whatever. Why? The logic is basically that low-income minorities can't be trusted to raise their own children, so the government needs to step in and separate them from their kids. 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 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.
LarrySDonald 14y ago
I think it's partly because so many of us grew up basically hating him for the software we had to work under (and before it's brought up, no, no gun to the head, but usually there were few options and for the most part you work with what the boss tells you to work with), rightly or wrongly. 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).
jhuni 14y ago
This negativity could be directed against the authoritarian attitude towards problem solving. If you have a problem with Microsoft Windows you have to ask the Microsoft authorities to solve it for you because they won't give you the source code so that you can handle the problem yourself. In a similar sense, Bill Gates isn't asking for the community to democratically decide where money could be best spent, he is spending money wherever he wants to solve problems he personally deems to be the most important.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  It's his money, so he gets to decide what to do with it. Likewise, Microsoft Office was his product, so he got to decide what privileges to offer users. If you didn't like Office, did you build a competitor program? No? Then don't complain. 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...
  - jhuni 14y ago
    > It's his money, so he gets to decide what to do with it. Microsoft Office was his product, so he got to decide what privileges to offer users. 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.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
javajosh 14y ago
> I don't get the negativity in this thread. 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.
- adaml_623 14y ago
  Are you disagreeing with all the studies that have observed that decreases in child mortality lead to a decrease in the birth rate. 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.
  - javajosh 14y ago
    I don't think I said anything close to that, actually. It may be that the BMGF is doing exactly the right thing to improve overall quality of life; but I would like them to be explicit that quality of life is more important than quantity. Saving a baby just so that it can starve to death later in life is not a good outcome.
- 14y ago
natural219 14y ago
I am beyond disgusted with every negative poster in this thread. I have never met or heard of anybody so horrible, awful, and heartless that they would condemn one of the wealthiest people in the world for giving away his entire fortune and retirement to try and save the lives of millions of people. 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.
- gnarbarian 14y ago
  I'll say them. I assume it was one of these three: Fuck You! Fuck off! Eat Shit! These four are from me though: Fuck off and die.
  - userulluipeste 14y ago
    Mr. Steve Jobs was your role model, wasn't he?
    - gnarbarian 14y ago
      Not at all, I can't stand the guy. I'm more of a Carmack and Torvalds fan actually. But I really can't stand pussyfooting around and shielding people from negative perceptions. If something is bad they ought to know it and know why it is bad. One of the more valuable traits of a good professional is having the guts to say what needs to be said, albeit with quite a bit more tact than I demonstrated above and without resorting to insults of course. Truth to power and all that. Get it out in the open or it will fester quietly and blow up at the worst possible time. I think it's also very important not to take personal offence when someone disagrees with a design decision or says they don't like your implementation of something. Entirely too many people take engineering critiques personally and that simply should not happen. How many structural engineers would be butthurt if you showed them how to do something cheaper stronger and safer?
- 14y ago
spigoteater 14y ago
> I don't get the negativity in this thread. 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.
stcredzero 14y ago
> 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. Sounds like a good outline for startups.
- megablast 14y ago
  I am pretty sure this is the standard approach for doing almost anything int the business world.

by dos1 14y ago

jayferd 14y ago

The negativity is because of the legacy of colonialism. "Rich White Guy Solves all the World's Problems" ends up being really condescending, especially when other rich white guys are causing or exacerbating many of the problems.

TDL 14y ago
So you would rather have him do nothing?
- specialist 14y ago
  Sometimes "free" is too expensive. 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.
  - TDL 14y ago
    I actually agree with you on this point. I was more reacting to the "White mans burden" comment.
  - rdwallis 14y ago
    I don't find the argument that famine relief does more harm than good compelling. 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?
  - dllthomas 14y ago
    My understanding is that it depends very much on the nature of the famine. Temporary famine caused by natural disaster or warfare can be helped quite a bit by temporary relief. Structural famine caused by ongoing problems is likely to be alleviated temporarily by temporary relief but the root causes deepened, creating the dependency you mention.
anewguy99 14y ago
Am I the only one that gets uncomfortable when white people are treated as an undifferentiated, malevolent mass?
- 9392732 14y ago
  It was a racist comment
- dmhdlr 14y ago
  Rich whites were specified.
  - 9392732 14y ago
    It still groups a large amount of people under one banner segmented with race as a variable. Why can it not just be "rich people"?
    - dllthomas 14y ago
      No no, the point was that we're a differentiated malevolent mass.
      - stcredzero 14y ago
        Well, to be fair, I think the commenter meant partly malevolent and partly unintentionally harmful.
    - lhnz 14y ago
      I did not realise that rich people were all evil...
- illuminate 14y ago
  Complicity is only with those willfully ignorant, I imagine. Colonialism ~is~ a malevolent mass. "Rich white persons" tend to be the force behind colonialism, but theoretically it could be anyone.
sliverstorm 14y ago
especially when other rich white guys are causing or exacerbating many of the problems. 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?
- illuminate 14y ago
  "Sounds like "Rich White Guy" is the best person to solve the problems, then" 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.
  - dllthomas 14y ago
    But measuring what you're doing and the impacts you're having and adjusting as you go is likely to have a better outcome than those with similar goals who lacked such introspection.
    - illuminate 14y ago
      I don't disagree with this at all.
mc32 14y ago
Doers it matter who is solving problems, so long as problems are getting solved? 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)?
pg 14y ago
Precisely what do you mean it "ends up being really condescending?" 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.
- djt 14y ago
  Its a tough problem to shake for a lot of people by the sounds of it. 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.
  - derefr 14y ago
    It looks like there are three problems at work here: 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.

technoslut 14y ago

>I don't get the negativity in this thread. Bill Gates is trying to solve hard problems and people here are complaining. 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-narrator-david-attenborough-calls-humans-a-plague-on-the 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.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago
The answer to that problem is education, not killing off an underclass. Educated societies have far fewer children than non, to the point that some first world countries are losing population. 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.
- technoslut 14y ago
  It's not about killing an underclass. Human beings are selfish. >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.

Alex3917 14y ago

"Bill Gates is trying to solve hard problems and people here are complaining." 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.

kenjackson 14y ago
Huh? I've heard complaints about KIPP, but never anything about any sort of metaphorical enslavement. Could you expand?
- Alex3917 14y ago
  One of the main components of the program is extending both the school day and the school year, so that schooling is 10 hours a day and 11 months a year or whatever. Why? The logic is basically that low-income minorities can't be trusted to raise their own children, so the government needs to step in and separate them from their kids. 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 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.

LarrySDonald 14y ago

I think it's partly because so many of us grew up basically hating him for the software we had to work under (and before it's brought up, no, no gun to the head, but usually there were few options and for the most part you work with what the boss tells you to work with), rightly or wrongly. 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).

jhuni 14y ago

This negativity could be directed against the authoritarian attitude towards problem solving. If you have a problem with Microsoft Windows you have to ask the Microsoft authorities to solve it for you because they won't give you the source code so that you can handle the problem yourself. In a similar sense, Bill Gates isn't asking for the community to democratically decide where money could be best spent, he is spending money wherever he wants to solve problems he personally deems to be the most important.

corporalagumbo 14y ago
It's his money, so he gets to decide what to do with it. Likewise, Microsoft Office was his product, so he got to decide what privileges to offer users. If you didn't like Office, did you build a competitor program? No? Then don't complain. 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...
- jhuni 14y ago
  > It's his money, so he gets to decide what to do with it. Microsoft Office was his product, so he got to decide what privileges to offer users. 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.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

javajosh 14y ago

> I don't get the negativity in this thread. 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.

adaml_623 14y ago
Are you disagreeing with all the studies that have observed that decreases in child mortality lead to a decrease in the birth rate. 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.
- javajosh 14y ago
  I don't think I said anything close to that, actually. It may be that the BMGF is doing exactly the right thing to improve overall quality of life; but I would like them to be explicit that quality of life is more important than quantity. Saving a baby just so that it can starve to death later in life is not a good outcome.
14y ago

natural219 14y ago

I am beyond disgusted with every negative poster in this thread. I have never met or heard of anybody so horrible, awful, and heartless that they would condemn one of the wealthiest people in the world for giving away his entire fortune and retirement to try and save the lives of millions of people. 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.

gnarbarian 14y ago
I'll say them. I assume it was one of these three: Fuck You! Fuck off! Eat Shit! These four are from me though: Fuck off and die.
- userulluipeste 14y ago
  Mr. Steve Jobs was your role model, wasn't he?
  - gnarbarian 14y ago
    Not at all, I can't stand the guy. I'm more of a Carmack and Torvalds fan actually. But I really can't stand pussyfooting around and shielding people from negative perceptions. If something is bad they ought to know it and know why it is bad. One of the more valuable traits of a good professional is having the guts to say what needs to be said, albeit with quite a bit more tact than I demonstrated above and without resorting to insults of course. Truth to power and all that. Get it out in the open or it will fester quietly and blow up at the worst possible time. I think it's also very important not to take personal offence when someone disagrees with a design decision or says they don't like your implementation of something. Entirely too many people take engineering critiques personally and that simply should not happen. How many structural engineers would be butthurt if you showed them how to do something cheaper stronger and safer?
14y ago

spigoteater 14y ago

> I don't get the negativity in this thread. 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.

stcredzero 14y ago

> 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. Sounds like a good outline for startups.

megablast 14y ago
I am pretty sure this is the standard approach for doing almost anything int the business world.