Money elf found a new way to spend money (that just applies "The Lean Startup.") Good on Money elf! "Huzzah!"
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C'mon, dude, it's another Bill Gates thread. This is News.
Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems
41–50 of 212 posts
Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems
#42I 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 result…
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.
So you would rather have him do nothing?
Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems
#43He is not wrong, but there is also a certain danger in this approach that goes unremarked upon. It is often difficult to measure the outcome you actually desire, and a lot easier to measure some proxy for it. But attaching incentives to optimising some metric - making an intermediate goal the goal in itself - tends to make it an extremely unreliable proxy for the original worthy cause.
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.
Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems
#44Feedback and data related to your actual goals is key to achieving anything, and of course education and health should be targeted, but a bigger underlying problem is the structural inequality causing a constant lack of resources for many countries and communities. 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 t…
I agree with what you say. What bothers me about the Gates Foundation is their education agenda. Their priorities reflect a naive reductionist worldview akin to Rudyard Kiplings' Just So Stories.
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.)
Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems
#45So far as I'm aware, the Gates Foundation does nothing in regard to the world's biggest problem, which is aging. Aging kills the most people, causes the greatest amount of suffering, causes the greatest loss of wealth and capital, falls most heavily on the poor without access to palliative medical technologies, etc, etc. http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2002/12/death-is-an-outra... You'll see a number of mainstream…
I'd put aging a lot farther down the list of big problems. I'd much rather him dedicate resources to stopping malaria in Africa, granting children and average people a shot at living, than to give money to extend grandma and grandpa's lives by a few more years.
Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems
#46He is not wrong, but there is also a certain danger in this approach that goes unremarked upon. It is often difficult to measure the outcome you actually desire, and a lot easier to measure some proxy for it. But attaching incentives to optimising some metric - making an intermediate goal the goal in itself - tends to make it an extremely unreliable proxy for the original worthy cause. We know that Gates is aware of…
"billions", "ruthlessly", "entirely counterproductive".
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.
Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems
#47So far as I'm aware, the Gates Foundation does nothing in regard to the world's biggest problem, which is aging. Aging kills the most people, causes the greatest amount of suffering, causes the greatest loss of wealth and capital, falls most heavily on the poor without access to palliative medical technologies, etc, etc. http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2002/12/death-is-an-outra... You'll see a number of mainstream…
Sure, but we don't really know how to fight aging. However the things Bill Gates is tackling (polio, malaria) have known cures. You don't have to innovate time find a solution and innovate in executiong, only innovate in execution, which makes you much more likely to succeed.
Additionally solving childhood mortality issues will do wonders for the average life expectancy.
Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems
#48I must say the comments here are extremely cynical and somewhat disturbing. Speaking as a citizen from India, (still third world despite our progress), I can say that the Gates foundation has done a turn of good in our corner of the world. You might dislike Microsoft the corporation, but Gates as a philanthropist deserves praise.
Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems
#49He is not wrong, but there is also a certain danger in this approach that goes unremarked upon. It is often difficult to measure the outcome you actually desire, and a lot easier to measure some proxy for it. But attaching incentives to optimising some metric - making an intermediate goal the goal in itself - tends to make it an extremely unreliable proxy for the original worthy cause. We know that Gates is aware of…
What are the counterproductive goals the Gates Foundation has driven towards?
Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So you would rather have him do nothing?
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.