4 ms·

> Do not invest in schooling in the industrialized world. This brings miniscule returns on investment. Invest in bringing the web to all kids in all corners of

> Do not invest in schooling in the industrialized world. This brings miniscule returns on investment. Invest in bringing the web to all kids in all corners of the world. This will change this planet! Wow, was this written in 1995 or something? Reads ridiculously out of date and wrong today. "The web" today is Facebook and Instagram and exploitative mobile games. Not what you want your kids to be exposed to.

mhh__ 6y ago
The web is also access to almost all knowledge ever acquired by humanity
- xrisk 6y ago
  The web is useless without basic priors.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    So is a library, a hospital etc.
    - bilbo0s 6y ago
      Sure, but there are safeguards against crack pot theories being employed in a hospital. To make that analogy work, you would have to compare building out access to the web to building out access to public healing centers that don't require the use of clean water, nor the sterilization of instruments, nor doctors and nurses with any medical training. All while encouraging the provision wildly unproven treatments.
      - mhh__ 6y ago
        There are also safeguards against writing crackpot material on Wikipedia. Medical malpractice happens all the time, the comparison isn't invalid. The difference is the cost to the user, i.e. building yourself an echo chamber is free whereas even a suspiciously cheap (say) plastic surgeon is not. This argument works on multiple levels, the internet has crackpots on it but it also has easily indexable alternatives who are only n degrees away from offline authority figures. The issue is more to do with psychology than the internet's intrinsic (sociological) properties.
- input_sh 6y ago
  ...assuming you know a second language, which odds are children are gonna learn in school.
  - darawk 6y ago
    Wikipedia is translated into many languages.
    - input_sh 6y ago
      And yet I only look at Wikipedia in my native language(s) when I'm looking up local history, people, or events, despite understanding perfectly four non-English Wikipedias. For general knowledge, Wikipedia is only useful in handful of mostly European languages.
  - watwut 6y ago
    Access to web help a lot in learning second language. It makes massive difference.
    - input_sh 6y ago
      Depends on the individual, plenty of people have access to the Internet and remain in their own language bubble, never bothering to step outside of it. Schools pretty much force you to at least know the basics to get a passing grade. The web only helps if you have self-initiative.
      - watwut 6y ago
        I can compare the two. The school passing grade does not imply any useful command at all. And it is eternally boring. And if you are not languages talent, you don't like it cause you are only failing and never feel good. The internet makes massive difference in availability of movies with subtitles you can watch over and over, songs, later easy to read blogs. Discussion forums also provide super simple english to begin to read. Books and articles are too hard in comparison, both in vocabulary and sentence structure. Duolingo is massive thing. Yes, teacher is necessary too. But if you actually want your kids to learn other language, the web and games available easily for free now make massive massive difference.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  > The web is also access to almost all knowledge ever acquired by humanity This is such a lie. Can you point me to a sustainable website with useful knowledge? Almost all knowledge has been artificially fenced off in order to allow the elite to extract rents from it. Patents and copyrights monopolize vital production processes, and put it in the hands of knowledge Capitalists. "Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier." [1] Wendy Liu adds: "Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction. Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime. Seen in that light, tech’s recent development begins to look rather different. Far from launching a new era of global prosperity, it has facilitated the further concentration of wealth and power. By virtue of their position as digital middlemen, Silicon Valley companies are able to extract vast amounts of capital from all over the world. The most salient example is Apple: recently crowned the world’s most valuable company, Apple rakes in enormous quarterly profits even as the Chinese workers who actually assemble its products are driven to suicide. Whereas we were once led to believe that the network society would produce an egalitarian world, we increasingly see tech as a machine for the commodification of information itself. Something that has the potential to be abundant is made artificially scarce, because capital finds it profitable to enclose the digital commons and dictate its terms of access. Facebook wants a monopoly over your social network so it can show you ads; Google is the internet’s directory; Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music are your tollbooths for cultural production; Amazon is the gateway for your retail needs. These corporations serve social functions integral to modern life, [...] yet, not only are they not publicly owned, they are immune to any sort of democratic control." [2] [1] Aaron Swartz, https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... [2] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
- em500 6y ago
  Sure, my daughter has access to more knowledge than I could have ever dreamt of in my youth. But left unsupervised, she'll spend probably 99.99% of her time on TikTok and Instagram and 0.01% on Wikipedia. Access is great and necessary, but far from sufficient. edit: I don't know if I would have chosen differently, if all were available in my youth. edit2: I think do know. I probably spent much more time on video games than on Encarta.
  - phaus 6y ago
    I spent more time with videogames than encarta. However, trying to get pc games to run in the 90s taught me how to troubleshoot computers. When I had Internet access I still played a lot of videogames but I also learned a ton of stuff from poking around on websites. The Internet taught me networking, programming, digital forensics and lots of other useful stuff.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    That's up to the user. I was in the maths group for the write-offs when I was 14/15, and thanks to almost entirely my own reading I am now studying theoretical physics and writing compilers (amongst other things you tend to see on HN, that kind of stuff). That would still be possible without the internet but there's no way I could've done it almost entirely of my own volition (i.e. online resources) In my case I'm not particularly intelligent (My IQ is probably about 110ish) but my ego drives to learn ever more difficult looking things, that and the having the attention span of a child (I've recently noticed I can barely read aloud without stumbling). Having the internet available to do that on my own terms is why I know anything at all today, I really don't do well being sat in a classroom. I still do the usual gaming and the like, but I really don't buy that you can force people to learn if their hearts not in it (maybe my parents were too laissez-faire, who knows - if all goes to plan I'll be the first in the family to have a degree worth the paper it's written on). My best friend had that kind of very-structured upbringing and I could just feel that I could run rings around him because I'd got to the same place (We ended up at the same University) the long way round - even though we're basically made of the same stock mentally. That's my ode to the internet, anyway.
  - Izikiel43 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Barrin92 6y ago
  the vast majority of knowledge acquired by humanity isn't even written down, on the web or anywhere else, because knowledge can be institutional, tacit, incorporated in organisations, embodied in cultural practises, families, even biological systems and so on. If your six year old learned to swim on wikipedia, do you throw her into a pool? The kind of knowledge that facilitates economic development is of that sort, it's institutional and tacit. In How Asia works Joe Studwell makes an interesting observation. When South Korea and Taiwan had already taken off economically, significant parts of the population still could not read. The expansion of education lagged, not preceded economic growth. Beaming markup text around the world is not all that it's made out to be for real world development.
cblconfederate 6y ago
The web is an incredible resource. I fear that people in america have equated the web with profit , not because it's true, but because all they care about is profit
postingpals 6y ago
The problem with this statement isn't even that the web is bad, it's that traditional education is a number one priority for any country that wants to progress. They suppose that in an industrialised country, everyone is educated properly. One look at America will tell you otherwise.

mhh__ 6y ago

The web is also access to almost all knowledge ever acquired by humanity

xrisk 6y ago
The web is useless without basic priors.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  So is a library, a hospital etc.
  - bilbo0s 6y ago
    Sure, but there are safeguards against crack pot theories being employed in a hospital. To make that analogy work, you would have to compare building out access to the web to building out access to public healing centers that don't require the use of clean water, nor the sterilization of instruments, nor doctors and nurses with any medical training. All while encouraging the provision wildly unproven treatments.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      There are also safeguards against writing crackpot material on Wikipedia. Medical malpractice happens all the time, the comparison isn't invalid. The difference is the cost to the user, i.e. building yourself an echo chamber is free whereas even a suspiciously cheap (say) plastic surgeon is not. This argument works on multiple levels, the internet has crackpots on it but it also has easily indexable alternatives who are only n degrees away from offline authority figures. The issue is more to do with psychology than the internet's intrinsic (sociological) properties.
input_sh 6y ago
...assuming you know a second language, which odds are children are gonna learn in school.
- darawk 6y ago
  Wikipedia is translated into many languages.
  - input_sh 6y ago
    And yet I only look at Wikipedia in my native language(s) when I'm looking up local history, people, or events, despite understanding perfectly four non-English Wikipedias. For general knowledge, Wikipedia is only useful in handful of mostly European languages.
- watwut 6y ago
  Access to web help a lot in learning second language. It makes massive difference.
  - input_sh 6y ago
    Depends on the individual, plenty of people have access to the Internet and remain in their own language bubble, never bothering to step outside of it. Schools pretty much force you to at least know the basics to get a passing grade. The web only helps if you have self-initiative.
    - watwut 6y ago
      I can compare the two. The school passing grade does not imply any useful command at all. And it is eternally boring. And if you are not languages talent, you don't like it cause you are only failing and never feel good. The internet makes massive difference in availability of movies with subtitles you can watch over and over, songs, later easy to read blogs. Discussion forums also provide super simple english to begin to read. Books and articles are too hard in comparison, both in vocabulary and sentence structure. Duolingo is massive thing. Yes, teacher is necessary too. But if you actually want your kids to learn other language, the web and games available easily for free now make massive massive difference.
bergstromm466 6y ago
> The web is also access to almost all knowledge ever acquired by humanity This is such a lie. Can you point me to a sustainable website with useful knowledge? Almost all knowledge has been artificially fenced off in order to allow the elite to extract rents from it. Patents and copyrights monopolize vital production processes, and put it in the hands of knowledge Capitalists. "Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier." [1] Wendy Liu adds: "Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction. Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime. Seen in that light, tech’s recent development begins to look rather different. Far from launching a new era of global prosperity, it has facilitated the further concentration of wealth and power. By virtue of their position as digital middlemen, Silicon Valley companies are able to extract vast amounts of capital from all over the world. The most salient example is Apple: recently crowned the world’s most valuable company, Apple rakes in enormous quarterly profits even as the Chinese workers who actually assemble its products are driven to suicide. Whereas we were once led to believe that the network society would produce an egalitarian world, we increasingly see tech as a machine for the commodification of information itself. Something that has the potential to be abundant is made artificially scarce, because capital finds it profitable to enclose the digital commons and dictate its terms of access. Facebook wants a monopoly over your social network so it can show you ads; Google is the internet’s directory; Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music are your tollbooths for cultural production; Amazon is the gateway for your retail needs. These corporations serve social functions integral to modern life, [...] yet, not only are they not publicly owned, they are immune to any sort of democratic control." [2] [1] Aaron Swartz, https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... [2] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
em500 6y ago
Sure, my daughter has access to more knowledge than I could have ever dreamt of in my youth. But left unsupervised, she'll spend probably 99.99% of her time on TikTok and Instagram and 0.01% on Wikipedia. Access is great and necessary, but far from sufficient. edit: I don't know if I would have chosen differently, if all were available in my youth. edit2: I think do know. I probably spent much more time on video games than on Encarta.
- phaus 6y ago
  I spent more time with videogames than encarta. However, trying to get pc games to run in the 90s taught me how to troubleshoot computers. When I had Internet access I still played a lot of videogames but I also learned a ton of stuff from poking around on websites. The Internet taught me networking, programming, digital forensics and lots of other useful stuff.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  That's up to the user. I was in the maths group for the write-offs when I was 14/15, and thanks to almost entirely my own reading I am now studying theoretical physics and writing compilers (amongst other things you tend to see on HN, that kind of stuff). That would still be possible without the internet but there's no way I could've done it almost entirely of my own volition (i.e. online resources) In my case I'm not particularly intelligent (My IQ is probably about 110ish) but my ego drives to learn ever more difficult looking things, that and the having the attention span of a child (I've recently noticed I can barely read aloud without stumbling). Having the internet available to do that on my own terms is why I know anything at all today, I really don't do well being sat in a classroom. I still do the usual gaming and the like, but I really don't buy that you can force people to learn if their hearts not in it (maybe my parents were too laissez-faire, who knows - if all goes to plan I'll be the first in the family to have a degree worth the paper it's written on). My best friend had that kind of very-structured upbringing and I could just feel that I could run rings around him because I'd got to the same place (We ended up at the same University) the long way round - even though we're basically made of the same stock mentally. That's my ode to the internet, anyway.
- Izikiel43 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Barrin92 6y ago
the vast majority of knowledge acquired by humanity isn't even written down, on the web or anywhere else, because knowledge can be institutional, tacit, incorporated in organisations, embodied in cultural practises, families, even biological systems and so on. If your six year old learned to swim on wikipedia, do you throw her into a pool? The kind of knowledge that facilitates economic development is of that sort, it's institutional and tacit. In How Asia works Joe Studwell makes an interesting observation. When South Korea and Taiwan had already taken off economically, significant parts of the population still could not read. The expansion of education lagged, not preceded economic growth. Beaming markup text around the world is not all that it's made out to be for real world development.

cblconfederate 6y ago

The web is an incredible resource. I fear that people in america have equated the web with profit , not because it's true, but because all they care about is profit

postingpals 6y ago

The problem with this statement isn't even that the web is bad, it's that traditional education is a number one priority for any country that wants to progress. They suppose that in an industrialised country, everyone is educated properly. One look at America will tell you otherwise.