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

Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems

online.wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 212 posts

Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems

#61

Post by MichaelGG »

technoslut wrote: post #51
dos1 wrote: post #31

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 result…

>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. Da…

Why exactly does Earth itself have any intrinsic value greater than humans? We evolved to expand; we're machines to replicate DNA. I'm not sure how you can state that we now must be custodians and not expand more.

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.

Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems

#62

Post by Snoptic »

cs702 wrote: post #25

Mr. Gates writes, "I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition. You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal — in a feedback loop ... This may seem basic, but it is amazing how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right." He's talking from experience. Between the late 1990's and early 2000's,…

The math should be trivial to fix, the expensive collected data is still valid.

Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems

#63

Post by technoslut »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #56
technoslut wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Da…

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.

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.

Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems

#64

Post by SoftwareMaven »

specialist wrote: post #44
ilaksh wrote: post #23

Feedback 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 pub…

On the firing, my first real job almost didn't happen. It was for a government contractor and another group was trying to slot its bad apple into the position. She was minority woman who was often found sleeping on the job, hanging out for hours in the women's restroom, etc. As a minority woman in a government job, she was impossible to fire. It wasn't until the politics settled that I could be hired.

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.

Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems

#65

Post by specialist »

jbooth wrote: post #55
specialist wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pub…

Great post. 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 leadersh…

Many friends and relatives of mine are teachers.

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.

Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems

#67

Post by zb »

tptacek wrote: post #49
zb wrote: post #43

He 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?

I was referring in particular to the "small schools" initiative: http://www.forbes.com/2008/11/18/gates-foundation-schools-op...

Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems

#68

Post by technoslut »

MichaelGG wrote: post #61
technoslut wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Da…

Why exactly does Earth itself have any intrinsic value greater than humans? We evolved to expand; we're machines to replicate DNA. I'm not sure how you can state that we now must be custodians and not expand more. 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 vali…

>Why exactly does Earth itself have any intrinsic value greater than humans?

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.

Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems

#69

Post by MichaelGG »

realcertify wrote: post #58

A couple of years ago my wife's 2 years old nephew was diagnosed with retinoblastoma (eye's cancer). I contacted the world's best hospitals and was told that the treatment will cost hundreds of thousands dollars. 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…

In the past, the foundation has explicitly stated that they are not looking to fund clinics and specific work. While that kind of charity provides immediate help to people, it does not provide any long-term solutions.

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.

Re: Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems

#70

Post by DanBC »

MichaelGG wrote: post #61
technoslut wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Da…

Why exactly does Earth itself have any intrinsic value greater than humans? We evolved to expand; we're machines to replicate DNA. I'm not sure how you can state that we now must be custodians and not expand more. 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 vali…

We need Earth until we can survive without it. We're a long way from that point.
Post reply on HN