Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Donate Unrestricted

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 301 posts

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#151

Post by doktorhladnjak »

ma2rten wrote: post #18
hirundo wrote: post #6

He didn't mention the little problem of the fungibility of money. If a school gets two $100k donations, and one comes with a "no stem cell research" restriction, then it usually isn't a problem to spend the other donation on that, and the restricted one on the road maintenance that would have been done anyway. So a restricted donation is really only effectively restrictive if it significantly outweighs the rest.

I wouldn't donate to universities in general. The have growing endowments which they don't spend. It also adds the income inequality in the US, you are essentially donating to the education of rich people. Note that PG talks about non-profits not schools.

It really depends on the university. Many do not have substantial endowments. Many educate a disproportionately high number of first generation or low income students.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#152

Post by bar101 »

closeparen wrote: post #144
ralmidani wrote: post #94

Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…

Shareholder return and the wages of skilled labor/management are very different things! No one is getting rich off a nonprofit merely for putting capital into it, is the point. Nonprofits still buy things that are expensive, including the efforts of skilled and effective people.

> efforts of skilled and effective people.

This has been a truism for more than 100 years and has been mocked for as long it exists. There are entire "Yes Minister" episodes about "we use the usual formula: comparison with wages of industry leaders" (they use chairmen of BP and IBM for comic effect).

Also highly recommended is the episode where Sir Arnold leaves the civil service and looks for a suitable successor who will put jobs his way ... sorry, ask him to undertake the jobs.

Excerpt:

  Sir Arnold: Also, I would like to be chairman of the
              Anglo-Caribbean Association, which would
              give me an opportunity ...

  Sir Humphrey: ... to be of service.

  Sir Arnold: Precisely, especially during the winter months.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#153

Post by lowercased »

arp242 wrote: post #141
lowercased wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... I dug in a bit and found that and... as progressive as I would like to think I am, I'm 100% confused as to how "focus on getting the 'right' answer" and "independent practice is valued over teamwork" is... 'white supremacy' showing up in math. HN may not be the place to discuss this, but... am I missing something obvious?

A number of these things are just good general advice. Others a bit less so. The explainer on "focus on getting the 'right' answer" (page 65) is actually pretty okay. For example it encourages to "Engage with true problem solving" such as "What are some strategies we can use to engage with this problem?". That seems pretty good to me. It goes on to say that "teaching math isn't just about solving specific problems. I…

I'd initially missed 'explainer' pages - I was clicking what looked like links, but they weren't initially working.

Even after reading some of these pages, things still don't make much sense. If there's a link to 'racism', I'm still not seeing it.

Another weird one was "teachers enculturated in the USA teach math the way they were taught math". But... I was under the impression that we'd been using 'common core' stuff for the past 10+ years, and a big complaint is that teachers can't teach it because it's not how they learned.

Very little of these explainers seem to make any attempt to connect the racism angle, which is disappointing.

As you pointed out, bad teaching can just be bad teaching, and doesn't have to have any other explanation.

A few others I saw:

"Have students create mathematical definitions in their own words in groups, and bring the groups together to co-construct mathematical definitions as a class."

Unless there are agreed-on definitions up front, how would you determine if anyone is correct or not?

"Let’s get into partners and do a thinkpair-share. We will incorporate everyone’s ideas and try to synthesize them."

I had 'group work' 30+ years ago. It sucked. It assumes that everyone even cares, or cares enough at the same level.

"How do I dismantle power structures in the classroom?"

Classroom Activity: Flipped learning, where students teach concepts to other students.

That's just creating other power structures.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#154

Post by lazyasciiart »

jdavis703 wrote: post #114
ernestipark wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any way to do this easily from a legal and contractual perspective? The other piece here is that if it's a loan you miss out on tax deductions, thereby potentially reducing the total amount you could give. That also limits the more tax-advantaged ways you can give money (e.g. long term appreciated stock if you're in the US).

I imagine someone donating millions is using a donor advised fund to do the lending. By using a fund, they can recognize the donation for tax purposes while lending the money to a separate non-profit.

I'd be surprised if any donor-advised fund could or would do this. You don't have control over that money once you donate it, you can only ask for it to be granted to a nonprofit.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#155

Post by lazyasciiart »

stephen_greet wrote: post #101
ralmidani wrote: post #94

Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…

I think that's a really interesting middle ground. Do you think it can fall into the same trap as mentioned in the article, where it can become "sub-optimal" due to not being as expert as the non-profit?

It's exactly the problem in the article, taken to a ludicrous extreme. If you want to be able to decide how a nonprofit should spend their money, go take a seat on the board (or staff).

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#156

Post by dan-robertson »

remote_phone wrote: post #133
xirbeosbwo1234 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that is, in part, that they ignored the spirit of the donation, but also that the proper amount for a university to spend on a scoreboard is twelve dollars and thirty-seven cents. OK, that's a bit unrealistic. I could build them one for a few hundred, though, and they could pay a student $50 to flip over the numbers during the game.

> I could build them one for a few hundred No, you couldn’t. It has to keep working for years/decades, be maintainable, survive bad weather conditions, etc. even if you made the scoreboard out of wood and painted it, it would have to be large enough so that the stadium could see, the paint would fade and it would take weeks to make it, etc.

So rebuild it every time as necessary. It will take a long time to eat into $1MM

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#158

Post by ojnabieoot »

temp8964 wrote: post #137
ojnabieoot wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is unfortunately the extremely wrong place to discuss this :( Language like that can be used by bad-faith folks here to push the (false and ridiculous) idea that the Equitable Math people don’t care about mathematical rigor or logical reasoning. The idea is that those attitudes encourage hypercompetitiveness among children and inappropriately reinforce the idea that math grades are a measure of “inherent ability.”…

You are exaggerating lots of things here. - The link between “Independent practice is valued over teamwork” to "private tutoring" is very weak. - The link between “focus on getting the right answer” to "private tutoring" is very weak. - No. Those measures do not particularly unfairly penalize students from rough backgrounds. No matter what other measures you propose, affluent students can benefit more. - No. Racism i…

Racism in US teachers is in fact a big problem, as is racism among doctors and bankers[1]. And focusing on standardized test scores almost always hurts poor students because it rewards families who can afford private test preparation[2]. These are scientific facts with a great deal of evidence - evidence which is considerably more compelling than “it sounds good to Hacker News.”

You are just wrong. You cannot just make things up because they are ideologically convenient. And I am so sick of having the same zombie arguments with people who are recklessly indifferent to the facts at hand.

> In this sample, we found no significant association between occupation and level of bias (see Table 4). That is, teachers held levels of implicit bias, explicit bias as operationalized using a feel- ing thermometer, and symbolic racism that were not statistically different from the levels of nonteachers. This result persisted through all five models. That is, this lack of relationship held despite controlling for demographic factors (Model 2), educa- tion (Model 3), political preference (Model 4), or all of these characteristics combined (Model 5).

> In conclusion, we have found that teachers’ [anti-Black and pro-White] bias levels are quite similar to those of the larger population. These findings challenge the notion that teachers might be uniquely equipped to instill positive racial attitudes in children or bring about racial justice, instead indicating that teachers need just as much sup- port in contending with their biases as the population at large.

> Researchers, including those who work for the test companies, have known wealth is strongly correlated with outcomes on standardized tests for years. There are several reasons why. Wealthy students attend higher ranked schools within more financially resourced districts. Richer families can afford more tutoring, test prep and enrichment activities. The College Board never claimed that test prep could improve scores until it was available for free online, at which point the evidence of improvement came rolling in. Standardized tests are better proxies for how many opportunities a student has been afforded than they are predictors for students’ potential. Consequently, tests weed out budding low-income students instead of creating equitable access to institutions that help build wealth. This is why many colleges have abandoned using standardized test altogether.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0013189X2091275...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/05/17/student...

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#159

Post by lazyasciiart »

temp8964 wrote: post #128
Viliam1234 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine that it will turn out to be a mixture of a few valuable insights, and a lot of politically motivated bullshit. The insights will be used as an excuse to push the politics. It would be nice if someone could extract the good insights and publish them separately, maybe just on one page of paper. For example, here are some ideas that come to my mind: * For minority students, make sure that the language itself i…

You are 100% correct. It is critical race theory (CRT) decorated with a few pedagogical insights. Those pedagogical insights have been well known. They can stand alone and do not need those CRT BS at all. Also, they are never a major issues in math education.

Never? Really? That's a strong claim.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#160

Post by [deleted] »

kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote: post #147
doktorhladnjak wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you already choosing to donate to a non-profit that is focused on this mission? If they're mission-focused, they presumably know how to best spend their money to support that mission.

No, because there are literally no organizations that would have helped children like me. Not a single one.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN