8 ms·

"There's no reason only poor people should have the experience" - TED video of Bill Gates

142 points by wyday 18y ago

keltecp11 18y ago
My new favorite TED.
- cubix 18y ago
  I always feel a little frustrated when I listen to Gates. He's notorious for his bluntness in business, behind closed doors. However, in public he can come across as disingenuous -- passive-aggressive even. Why doesn't he chastise the incompetent teachers and rapacious unions more directly? You can tell he wants to, and probably does at the dinner table. Perhaps he fears a backlash against MS.
  - ewanmcteagle 18y ago
    What more would it accomplish? It would just be emotional ranting. Often that kind of thing adds more adversarial elements to the problem and improves nothing.
    - cubix 18y ago
      I'm not suggesting he work himself into a foaming-at-the-mouth sort of rage, but there's an unsettling disconnect between the subject matter -- the plight of generations of students caught in bad public schools -- and his emotional tone. Personally, I value sincere communication and feel a little anxious when someone is forcing me to read between the lines. There is a place for justified anger in communication, as long as it remains civil. As for the practical consequences, if there is a congruency between the words and how they are expressed (body language, tone, etc.), the message tends to land a little heavier.
chriskelley 18y ago
He releases them at 5:10... but it's a great talk, be sure to listen to the whole thing.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
rudyfink 18y ago
The stuff on teaching was just amazing. His graph on what makes a good teacher was jaw dropping to me. Once he put it out there, it was really hard for me to avoid the question of why we are not focusing more on what makes good teacher performance.
- uuilly 18y ago
  In my opinion teacher accountability is the most pressing social issue of our time. Gates has been all over this for a while now...
  - access_denied 18y ago
    What about paying them decently? Other than some positions at Ivy-League, becoming a teacher is just bad math, financially speaking. Why would anyone intelligent want to become a teacher?
    - jballanc 18y ago
      In economics, how much you get paid is a function of the value society puts on your skills divided by how common your skills are. So, Lebron James makes millions because we value the ability to throw a ball through a metal ring, and we demand that someone be so good at this that only a handful of Americans can fulfill these positions. I'll let you continue the reasoning for teacher pay as a homework exercise...
      - andreyf 18y ago
        how much you get paid is a function of the value society puts on your skills divided by how common your skills are This is a statement of fact, not opinion of what ought to be. Part of what Gates (and others) are saying, I think, is that to have a better functioning society, we need to increase the value society puts on teaching. If we provide the educational opportunity that Bill Gates, John Resig, or Larry Page got to every child in America, we will all be a lot better off.
Klonoar 18y ago
Eh, I don't really see the big deal about releasing some mosquitos into the crowd. I did enjoy his talk, though, pretty well thought out.
- vinutheraj 18y ago
  Yea ... if they were malaria infected, it would have been a different story though. I thought that's why there was a big deal, that maybe he released infected ones. Dont know whats the big deal over simple mosquitoes !
  - randallsquared 18y ago
    Just an awareness thing. Since he was talking about malaria-carrying mosquitos when he released them, releasing them had a greater psychological impact than otherwise.
netcan 18y ago
What you often see on TED presentations is that these people know how to make a single simple powerful argument. It's actually quite difficult. They get the right graph up there.The right numbers or facts that make the combination of reason & emotion click.
JesseAldridge 18y ago
One very interesting question he touched on but didn't really answer: If the market is heartless and government is incompetent, then how do we address issues such as these? Is philanthropy really the only way?
- adamsmith 18y ago
  I know what you mean. I also got the sense that he was talking about a new kind of entity. Or we could just go with Bill Gates for President in 2016.
- patio11 18y ago
  If the market is heartless and government is incompetent, then the government should decide on goals and pay actors in the private sector for implementing them. Want to figure out which teachers are the best ones? Pay for student performance. The market will sort everything else out. You don't have to publish standards of what makes a good teacher, heck you don't even have to make pursuit of good teachers a defined goal, any more than you need to pass a law saying "Make sure you hire those programmers who are ten times as effective as the other ones." (I know there is one glaring problem here, namely that a politically powerful lobby considers that solution anathema, but it would work.)
  - jbert 18y ago
    > I know there is one glaring problem here More than one, really. State schools in the UK are incentivised in a way similar to this. What it results in is gaming of the performance measures. For example, pupils are steered into softer subjects where results are easier to attain. Pupils below-but-close-to a grade increment are given more intensive teaching at the expense of those who will attain the relevant grade left to their own devices. Push that down to the per-teacher level and good teachers would not want to work with difficult pupils, since they will get poor results and less pay. "So make the pay conditional on improvement rather than absolute attainment". OK, in which case you've just made an incentive for children to be labeled as behaviourally difficult and academically poor so that they can be improved more. Want to get better teachers? Pump more damn money in. Get good managers and get good quality people teaching. Make it a profession people aspire to work in once more. The thing is, you'll have to keep it up for about a generation (with not much to show for it), to flush the system through. Good luck with that politically. Markets are not a panacea. Particularly so with subjective measures. Education (in the broader sense of what we want to achieve) is subjective - even academic results are more subjective than one might think - how many mathematics qualifications is a history qualification of the same level 'worth'?
rmobin 18y ago
He's right about the importance of education and the poor state of it in the US, but I'm not convinced that the private sector can't handle it. Inside American Education (http://www.amazon.com/Inside-American-Education-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0029303303 http://www.amazon.com/Inside-American-Education-Thomas-Sowel...) is a really interesting book on what our current system is like (although a bit dated, it's from 1992).
- benzim 18y ago
  The private sector could handle it. He points to private schools that are already succeeding with the poorest children. The problem is how to get the government and unions out of the way so successful ideas can be widely applied. I think a voucher system would quickly begin to solve many of Americas education problems. Such systems have already succeeded in Sweden and parts of the US.
meat-eater 18y ago
I read somewhere that Chris Anderson was quoted as saying that the caption for this talk should be that "Bill gates releases more bugs into the world".
icode 18y ago
Maybe Bill Gates should be put in a jar and be told: There is no reason only animals get treated like objects. I know, most people will think mosquitoes aint important and have no feelings. That they are like machines. Personally, when I look at the behaviour of mosquitoes, they have a lot in common with me and you. So I would prefer to leave them alone and let them decide on their own where to go. What if some more complex animal then humans comes along and decides "Oh, humans are so simple. We can just treat them like stones or wood". Would we agree?
- nazgulnarsil 18y ago
  if this bothers you enough to spend time commenting the meat industry should have you out bombing buildings at night. I devote my resources to the sentient first.
- davidw 18y ago
  Having spent more than my share of time in the mosquito-infested plains of northern Italy, I am more than happy to mercilessly squash any of the damn things that are around me. I wouldn't react very well to a person who spent their nights making buzzing noises in my ears and biting me, either.
known 18y ago
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I DO and I UNDERSTAND. -- Confucius
adamc 18y ago
Made me think of the Lorax: "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing's going to get better. It's not."
- mynameishere 18y ago
  It was Lorax-style thinking that got ddt banned throughout much of the world, resulting in millions of deaths.
lecha 18y ago
Re: education So Gates has been all over this, and there are many components to it. The question to this forum is, what technology is needed to help make great teachers? To Tim O'Reilly's slogan, this is clearly the stuff that matters.
mynameishere 18y ago
Do people really need charity in order to get bednets? How much does a damn net cost? How much does ddt cost?
- DXL 18y ago
  In 2001, 1.1 billion people had consumption levels below $1 a day and 2.7 billion lived on less than $2 a day. When you're living with such an income, you're probably starving and hoping you make it through another week. Even if it were possible for someone to save the amount needed, there may still not be a shop around where you can buy one, especially in rural areas.
  - mynameishere 18y ago
    Eh, if people can buy clothing, they can buy a net which is a cheaper item. They cost 15 dollars on amazon, and the wholesale price is probably about 50 cents. It's not like the whole continent is still living with bones through their hair, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/international/africa/25africa.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/international/africa/25afr...
    - whughes 18y ago
      These people aren't going to be buying clothing either. 50 cents is your daily meal.
- chez17 18y ago
  Not to be mean, but this is a little ignorant. The areas in which Gates does his work are extremely impoverished. Getting food is a real issue, having a bed net is a luxury.
schmave 18y ago
As a few other people here have suggested, standardized test scores are a pretty narrow measure of education quality. Bill Gates mentioned that everyone in the room had probably had a few great teachers to get them to where they are now. When I think about the great teachers I have had, I certainly don't think they were great because they raised my standardized test scores. They were great because they gave me a much deeper understanding of a topic, or opened my eyes to something I hadn't seen before. Yes, the best teachers I had may have increased my standardized test scores some as a side effect, but it would be an insult to them if that's why I admired them so much as teachers. Test prep can be done in a factory, but not education.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
baddox 18y ago
Isn't he AGAINST malaria? If so, shouldn't he say, "There's no reason ANYONE should have the experience"?
steveblgh 18y ago
Watched until 1:40. That chart could be taught in school as "how to lie with data": reduction from 20 to 10 made to look more dramatic by changing the scale.
cunard3 18y ago
Another (earlier) thread on a similar theme: Ken Robinson says that the teachers who can encounter their kids and allow them to be creative can thereby allow them to have tools they'll need in the present post-industrial world. He specifically mentions what he calls "inflation" meaning a BA used to be something, then it was an MA, and now a PHD. I've watched it a few times now. His point about valuing math above music or art is well taken, by me anyway. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools...

142 points by wyday 18y ago

keltecp11 18y ago

My new favorite TED.

cubix 18y ago
I always feel a little frustrated when I listen to Gates. He's notorious for his bluntness in business, behind closed doors. However, in public he can come across as disingenuous -- passive-aggressive even. Why doesn't he chastise the incompetent teachers and rapacious unions more directly? You can tell he wants to, and probably does at the dinner table. Perhaps he fears a backlash against MS.
- ewanmcteagle 18y ago
  What more would it accomplish? It would just be emotional ranting. Often that kind of thing adds more adversarial elements to the problem and improves nothing.
  - cubix 18y ago
    I'm not suggesting he work himself into a foaming-at-the-mouth sort of rage, but there's an unsettling disconnect between the subject matter -- the plight of generations of students caught in bad public schools -- and his emotional tone. Personally, I value sincere communication and feel a little anxious when someone is forcing me to read between the lines. There is a place for justified anger in communication, as long as it remains civil. As for the practical consequences, if there is a congruency between the words and how they are expressed (body language, tone, etc.), the message tends to land a little heavier.

chriskelley 18y ago

He releases them at 5:10... but it's a great talk, be sure to listen to the whole thing.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

rudyfink 18y ago

The stuff on teaching was just amazing. His graph on what makes a good teacher was jaw dropping to me. Once he put it out there, it was really hard for me to avoid the question of why we are not focusing more on what makes good teacher performance.

uuilly 18y ago
In my opinion teacher accountability is the most pressing social issue of our time. Gates has been all over this for a while now...
- access_denied 18y ago
  What about paying them decently? Other than some positions at Ivy-League, becoming a teacher is just bad math, financially speaking. Why would anyone intelligent want to become a teacher?
  - jballanc 18y ago
    In economics, how much you get paid is a function of the value society puts on your skills divided by how common your skills are. So, Lebron James makes millions because we value the ability to throw a ball through a metal ring, and we demand that someone be so good at this that only a handful of Americans can fulfill these positions. I'll let you continue the reasoning for teacher pay as a homework exercise...
    - andreyf 18y ago
      how much you get paid is a function of the value society puts on your skills divided by how common your skills are This is a statement of fact, not opinion of what ought to be. Part of what Gates (and others) are saying, I think, is that to have a better functioning society, we need to increase the value society puts on teaching. If we provide the educational opportunity that Bill Gates, John Resig, or Larry Page got to every child in America, we will all be a lot better off.

Klonoar 18y ago

Eh, I don't really see the big deal about releasing some mosquitos into the crowd. I did enjoy his talk, though, pretty well thought out.

vinutheraj 18y ago
Yea ... if they were malaria infected, it would have been a different story though. I thought that's why there was a big deal, that maybe he released infected ones. Dont know whats the big deal over simple mosquitoes !
- randallsquared 18y ago
  Just an awareness thing. Since he was talking about malaria-carrying mosquitos when he released them, releasing them had a greater psychological impact than otherwise.

netcan 18y ago

What you often see on TED presentations is that these people know how to make a single simple powerful argument. It's actually quite difficult. They get the right graph up there.The right numbers or facts that make the combination of reason & emotion click.

JesseAldridge 18y ago

One very interesting question he touched on but didn't really answer: If the market is heartless and government is incompetent, then how do we address issues such as these? Is philanthropy really the only way?

adamsmith 18y ago
I know what you mean. I also got the sense that he was talking about a new kind of entity. Or we could just go with Bill Gates for President in 2016.
patio11 18y ago
If the market is heartless and government is incompetent, then the government should decide on goals and pay actors in the private sector for implementing them. Want to figure out which teachers are the best ones? Pay for student performance. The market will sort everything else out. You don't have to publish standards of what makes a good teacher, heck you don't even have to make pursuit of good teachers a defined goal, any more than you need to pass a law saying "Make sure you hire those programmers who are ten times as effective as the other ones." (I know there is one glaring problem here, namely that a politically powerful lobby considers that solution anathema, but it would work.)
- jbert 18y ago
  > I know there is one glaring problem here More than one, really. State schools in the UK are incentivised in a way similar to this. What it results in is gaming of the performance measures. For example, pupils are steered into softer subjects where results are easier to attain. Pupils below-but-close-to a grade increment are given more intensive teaching at the expense of those who will attain the relevant grade left to their own devices. Push that down to the per-teacher level and good teachers would not want to work with difficult pupils, since they will get poor results and less pay. "So make the pay conditional on improvement rather than absolute attainment". OK, in which case you've just made an incentive for children to be labeled as behaviourally difficult and academically poor so that they can be improved more. Want to get better teachers? Pump more damn money in. Get good managers and get good quality people teaching. Make it a profession people aspire to work in once more. The thing is, you'll have to keep it up for about a generation (with not much to show for it), to flush the system through. Good luck with that politically. Markets are not a panacea. Particularly so with subjective measures. Education (in the broader sense of what we want to achieve) is subjective - even academic results are more subjective than one might think - how many mathematics qualifications is a history qualification of the same level 'worth'?

rmobin 18y ago

He's right about the importance of education and the poor state of it in the US, but I'm not convinced that the private sector can't handle it. Inside American Education (http://www.amazon.com/Inside-American-Education-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0029303303 http://www.amazon.com/Inside-American-Education-Thomas-Sowel...) is a really interesting book on what our current system is like (although a bit dated, it's from 1992).

benzim 18y ago
The private sector could handle it. He points to private schools that are already succeeding with the poorest children. The problem is how to get the government and unions out of the way so successful ideas can be widely applied. I think a voucher system would quickly begin to solve many of Americas education problems. Such systems have already succeeded in Sweden and parts of the US.

meat-eater 18y ago

I read somewhere that Chris Anderson was quoted as saying that the caption for this talk should be that "Bill gates releases more bugs into the world".

icode 18y ago

Maybe Bill Gates should be put in a jar and be told: There is no reason only animals get treated like objects. I know, most people will think mosquitoes aint important and have no feelings. That they are like machines. Personally, when I look at the behaviour of mosquitoes, they have a lot in common with me and you. So I would prefer to leave them alone and let them decide on their own where to go. What if some more complex animal then humans comes along and decides "Oh, humans are so simple. We can just treat them like stones or wood". Would we agree?

nazgulnarsil 18y ago
if this bothers you enough to spend time commenting the meat industry should have you out bombing buildings at night. I devote my resources to the sentient first.
davidw 18y ago
Having spent more than my share of time in the mosquito-infested plains of northern Italy, I am more than happy to mercilessly squash any of the damn things that are around me. I wouldn't react very well to a person who spent their nights making buzzing noises in my ears and biting me, either.

known 18y ago

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I DO and I UNDERSTAND. -- Confucius

adamc 18y ago

Made me think of the Lorax: "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing's going to get better. It's not."

mynameishere 18y ago
It was Lorax-style thinking that got ddt banned throughout much of the world, resulting in millions of deaths.

lecha 18y ago

Re: education So Gates has been all over this, and there are many components to it. The question to this forum is, what technology is needed to help make great teachers? To Tim O'Reilly's slogan, this is clearly the stuff that matters.

mynameishere 18y ago

Do people really need charity in order to get bednets? How much does a damn net cost? How much does ddt cost?

DXL 18y ago
In 2001, 1.1 billion people had consumption levels below $1 a day and 2.7 billion lived on less than $2 a day. When you're living with such an income, you're probably starving and hoping you make it through another week. Even if it were possible for someone to save the amount needed, there may still not be a shop around where you can buy one, especially in rural areas.
- mynameishere 18y ago
  Eh, if people can buy clothing, they can buy a net which is a cheaper item. They cost 15 dollars on amazon, and the wholesale price is probably about 50 cents. It's not like the whole continent is still living with bones through their hair, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/international/africa/25africa.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/international/africa/25afr...
  - whughes 18y ago
    These people aren't going to be buying clothing either. 50 cents is your daily meal.
chez17 18y ago
Not to be mean, but this is a little ignorant. The areas in which Gates does his work are extremely impoverished. Getting food is a real issue, having a bed net is a luxury.

schmave 18y ago

As a few other people here have suggested, standardized test scores are a pretty narrow measure of education quality. Bill Gates mentioned that everyone in the room had probably had a few great teachers to get them to where they are now. When I think about the great teachers I have had, I certainly don't think they were great because they raised my standardized test scores. They were great because they gave me a much deeper understanding of a topic, or opened my eyes to something I hadn't seen before. Yes, the best teachers I had may have increased my standardized test scores some as a side effect, but it would be an insult to them if that's why I admired them so much as teachers. Test prep can be done in a factory, but not education.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

baddox 18y ago

Isn't he AGAINST malaria? If so, shouldn't he say, "There's no reason ANYONE should have the experience"?

steveblgh 18y ago

Watched until 1:40. That chart could be taught in school as "how to lie with data": reduction from 20 to 10 made to look more dramatic by changing the scale.

cunard3 18y ago

Another (earlier) thread on a similar theme: Ken Robinson says that the teachers who can encounter their kids and allow them to be creative can thereby allow them to have tools they'll need in the present post-industrial world. He specifically mentions what he calls "inflation" meaning a BA used to be something, then it was an MA, and now a PHD. I've watched it a few times now. His point about valuing math above music or art is well taken, by me anyway. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools...