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

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

#101

Post by technoslut »

notJim wrote: post #94
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…

There are a number of flawed assumptions here. The first one is that population growth is naturally unbounded, but that idea has been outdated for a long time. Population growth follows a logistic growth curve. Another bad assumption you're making is that the West's population is growing rapidly, but it's not. In fact, populations in Western countries are barely growing, and often are only growing due to immigration,…

>There are a number of flawed assumptions here. The first one is that population growth is naturally unbounded, but that idea has been outdated for a long time. Population growth follows a logistic growth curve.

The curve is on an upward climb while available resources have been declining.

>Finally, yet another bad assumption you're making is that we should limit population growth through draconian measures like… well murdering people, or allowing them to die unnecessarily.

I never said murder anyone. Nature's been doing that for a very long time.

Ever been to Africa? Do you think that the tribes care about education.

If the world had enough jobs to support everyone, then Western countries would have low job rates. Maybe you should have read my replies to similar comments.

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

#103

Post by kenjackson »

Alex3917 wrote: post #85
kenjackson wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? I've heard complaints about KIPP, but never anything about any sort of metaphorical enslavement. Could you expand?

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:/…

There is data to support this. There's a well known phenomena called summer learning loss. Some of the research suggests that the majority of the gap between rich and poor students can be explained by summer learning loss.

And remember, parents have to enroll their children in KIPP. How is that any different than rich parents sending their children to afterschool and summer programs that are commonplace? In many ways their completely identical. Except that historically poor students haven't even had the option of good afterschool and summer program.

This is a voluntary program. If you think your child will thrive outside the program then don't send them there. Analogies to enslavement don't help. And saying that a parent who sends their child to KIPP is somehow denying their child some culture, yet not calling out middle-class/upper-class children who enjoy these benefits today, seems hypocritical.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_learning_loss#Vulnerable...

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

#104

Post by LarrySDonald »

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 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).

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

#105

Post by technoslut »

MichaelGG wrote: post #100
technoslut wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>You can expand as much as you want. Nature will fight back like it has with adaptive viruses and the Ice Age. Ice Age? Can you point me to the theory that shows how Earth or "Nature" is somehow an entity that performs massive climate shifts in response to too-successful lifeforms? There is no necessary balance in nature. It's a constant struggle and what you see just might be a somewhat stable state. If an actor in…

>Ice Age? Can you point me to the theory that shows how Earth or "Nature" is somehow an entity that performs massive climate shifts in response to too-successful lifeforms?

I can point to scientific theses about how it will occur in the future. Are you willing to bet against 95% of the scientific community?

>why a human killing elephants to feed his family is somehow invalid, whereas if lions do the same thing, it's OK.

Are lions wiping out a species?

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

#106

Post by 9392732 »

anewguy99 wrote: post #86
jneen wrote: post #38

Earlier 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.

Am I the only one that gets uncomfortable when white people are treated as an undifferentiated, malevolent mass?

It was a racist comment

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

#107

Post by cadlin »

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 is it population that is the metric and not something else, e.g. energy use? The developed world may have lower population growth, but it uses much more energy and it makes as much sense to reduce that as the number of humans.

Westerners who think population growth are usually talking about people living in underdeveloped countries, and are doing so in a way that is both prejudiced and dehumanizing. To me it looks like nothing more than people with power and money advocating for blatant cruelty towards those without either.

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

#108

Post by Alex3917 »

kenjackson wrote: post #103
Alex3917 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:/…

There is data to support this. There's a well known phenomena called summer learning loss. Some of the research suggests that the majority of the gap between rich and poor students can be explained by summer learning loss. And remember, parents have to enroll their children in KIPP. How is that any different than rich parents sending their children to afterschool and summer programs that are commonplace? In many ways…

I understand summer learning loss, but that doesn't mean that KIPP is actually the best model (or even beneficial) in practice, especially at scale. Also, summer learning loss only measures math and reading performance on standardized tests, not executive function, intrinsic motivation, etc. And even on those measures, the difference isn't especially huge in math, so we're really only talking about reading ability. (Neither high-SES nor low-SES are doing math problems over the summer.) Is year round schooling really the best way to close the literacy gap?

Also, KIPP is voluntary now, but my understanding is that Gates is trying to make it the standard model of schooling. I have less of an issue with parents sending their kids to the program voluntarily, though I still think it's a bad idea.

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

#109

Post by rbanffy »

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…

> 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.

From my experience, it seems the solution the software industry used was very much like putting rocket engines on planes made of lead.

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

#110

Post by dmhdlr »

anewguy99 wrote: post #86
jneen wrote: post #38

Earlier 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.

Am I the only one that gets uncomfortable when white people are treated as an undifferentiated, malevolent mass?

Rich whites were specified.
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