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

208 points by gjenkin 14y ago

aramadia 14y ago
Bill Gates treating the world like a computer optimization problem. First profile the world (program) and construct suitable benchmarks. Figure out some reasonable goals and test if your various health care and education programs affect the benchmark results.
- pbw 14y ago
  As Gates points out in the article, these techniques existed before computers. So I agree given Gates's background, he is probably applying what he learned from computers to wider problems. But in the grand scheme of things, computer science adopted these techniques from other disciplines.
  - johnchristopher 14y ago
    I know Gates was a really good (strike that, he was really, really good) hacker and software engineer. But I think he was an even better bussinessman. I am pretty sure he's applying more from the latter background than from the computer field.
    - Peaker 14y ago
      Gates was a good business man. I've not heard many call him a good hacker before. I'd like to hear more...
- hnriot 14y ago
  No, it's called science, we've been using it for a little while now and it seems to be working out pretty well.
  - pbw 14y ago
    I don't think optimization of the world is exactly science. Science is about the acquisition of knowledge. Understanding what causes Polio is science, how it spreads, etc. Changing the world in such a way as to get rid of Polio strikes me as something different, not sure what. For example studying global warming is science, but injecting particles into the stratosphere to cool things down would be a step further.
    - chongli 14y ago
      The "optimization" characterization was invented by "aramadia". You can't assume that premise if you want to make a valid argument against the characterization of Bill Gates's method as science.
      - pbw 14y ago
        Granted, so let's put optimization out of the picture. I still claim what Gates is doing is more than unqualified "science". I suppose it is "applied science" but that seems like a weak term. My point is just there is a difference between acquiring knowledge about the world, and actively engineering change in that same world. He is doing both.
        chongli 14y ago
        It's not rigorous science, it's informal science. The sort of science you do when you discover and investigate the source of a leak in your plumbing fixtures. It may not be ideal but there's still a lot more value to it than just throwing up your hands and dismissing the problem as un-explainable/impossible to solve.
nealabq 14y ago
How to rid the world of all known diseases (the Python method) "Well, first of all become a doctor and discover a marvelous cure for something, and then, when the medical profession really starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right so there'll never be any diseases ever again." http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/toridof.htm http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/toridof.htm
- SHIFTHAPPENZ 14y ago
  Also on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNfGyIW7aHM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNfGyIW7aHM :-)
- bitwize 14y ago
  Isn't that basically the strategy behind DRACO?
- Raphael 14y ago
  Oh, Monty Python. I was racking my brain trying to think of how this is a dig at the programming language.
gesman 14y ago
Dear Bill Gates. Here's yardstick to measure residual value of your efforts: If you'd stop doing whatever you're doing, will the world continue benefit from your past efforts for ages to come? Compare "buying food for the hungry" and "teaching the man to fish" - which effort carry more residual value? You developed DOS, and then Windows. Even when you stopped - the world continued rolling with your software and building more and more great stuff on top of it. Even Ballmer with all his powers couldn't derail your past efforts. Dear Bill Gates, please stop taking consequences for causes, stop fighting with shadows. See where you can turn on the light so it will shine when you'll be long gone. Money + creativity goes the long way. It's time to add creativity. You can do that! You can do that!
- thechut 14y ago
  Could you elaborate on what it is he "can do"? Also I'm not sure his creation of DOS and Windows really has much bearing on his more recent philanthropic efforts.
- gesman 14y ago
  Dear Bill Gates. Stop buying stuff for people. Be that vaccines or portable toilets or donations to some vague "research" causes. Invest in helping people to discover the powers within. Do not invest in making people think they need to depend on some external rich power to pull themselves out of their misery. That is misservice. This is lie. That warm, fuzzy feeling you get after spending billion on buying stuff for poor people comes with deeper unease - deep inside you know that you did not really make a lasting difference. Difference yes. Lasting - only until that billion ran out and your vaccines are used, food is eaten and very soon they will want more. This is not a difference. Invest in helping people to learn the skills, invest in helping people to find inspiration within, invest in helping people to express their own creativity and power. Invest in helping people to discover how each of them can help other million people without spending billion dollars.
  - jackowayed 14y ago
    He's trying to eradicate polio. That would be incredible lasting good. Research does serious lasting good as well. Research funding built the Internet, for example.
donniezazen 14y ago
This reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell talk on why future generation will remember Bill Gates and not Steve Jobs and also why he will be remembered as a humanitarian and not as a computer genius.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
krie 14y ago
The biggest problem is resource depletion and overpopulation. Overpopulation will be "fixed" through starvation and death. Resource depletion will leave the current young and future generations with far less extravagant lives. Adding to the overpopulation through vaccination programmes und su weiter is a misstep.
- fideloper 14y ago
  Decreasing child mortality rates and increasing healthcare availability is statistically shown to decreased birth rate (among other improvements), resulting in fixing the issue of overpopulation (over time).
  - krie 14y ago
    Whether it stops at 8 or 9 billion doesn't really make an impact until 2150 at best. IF we had the resources to keep everything puffing till then. We don't. :)
    - adventured 14y ago
      We sure do. The human race will be just fine resource wise. And that's just accounting for the existing base of resources and knowledge we have today. What we'll have in just another 50 years will be astounding, and further ensure that we won't have a resource problem. :)
      - krie 14y ago
        You're not even able to moderate yourself to "could" be astounding, it WILL be astounding, categorically? Is there anything pointing toward such being able to reach fruition? Not really.
- notdrunkatall 14y ago
  Dear god, another Malthusian.
  - 14y ago
dubya 14y ago
Not everyone is as confident in Bill Gates's magical abilities as he is. http://dianeravitch.net/2013/01/10/how-bill-gates-wasted-50-million/ http://dianeravitch.net/2013/01/10/how-bill-gates-wasted-50-... http://seattletimes.com/html/dannywestneat/2014437975_danny09.html http://seattletimes.com/html/dannywestneat/2014437975_danny0...
- pbw 14y ago
  That 2nd link is an obvious straw man. If you read what Gates is actually saying [1] it's far more reasonable. There is a huge dynamic range in teacher abilities. He is saying take the very best, and give them a slightly higher load. Just as you can take the very best programmers and have them write more code. But then people freak out and say Gates wants big classes across the board, it's silly. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/27/AR2011022702876.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02...
ilaksh 14y ago
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 that has a sound basis. Our current 'economic' models, since they do not take into account equality, health, education, or any other important scientific data, are fundamentally unsound, and that is why we have the problems of gross inequality and inadequate distribution of resources. We should frame this as less exploitation and more fairness rather than more charity.
- specialist 14y ago
  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 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.)
cs702 14y ago
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 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wasted around $1.7 billion on a broad-ranging, intensive, national effort to study small schools... based on a flawed measurement of Bayesian probabilities! The foundation looked only at the probability that a school would be small given high school performance, and seemingly forgot to look at the probability that a school would be high-performing given a small school size. The two are not the same. $1.7 billion, poof! The following analysis, by a professor of statistics, explains in more detail how the foundation got it wrong: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8863.pdf http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8863.pdf
- Snoptic 14y ago
  The math should be trivial to fix, the expensive collected data is still valid.
- adaml_623 14y ago
  Guy spent $1.7 Billion testing a hypothesis. Admitted he was wrong. Probably would have been better to fail faster, etc. But it was his money. Kudos to him.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  The $1.7B was not necessarily wasted, if it provided the BMGF learnings that improve future efforts.
reasonattlm 14y ago
So 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-outrage-1.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2002/12/death-is-an-outra... You'll see a number of mainstream foundations in the Methuselah Foundation lists, and those also support the SENS Research Foundation, working on the basis for ways to reverse the cellular and molecular damage that causes aging. The Gates foundation isn't there: http://mfoundation.org/?pn=donors http://mfoundation.org/?pn=donors But that's not entirely surprising: from the beginning, the Gates Foundation has been a very traditional Big Philanthropy operation. Wealth does not grant vision. Where there is innovation or stepping away from the norms it is of the incremental type, with none of what Peter Thiel calls "radical philanthropy". Is this is a criticism of Gates? Sure. But it's equally a criticism of everyone else. The Gates Foundation is doing what most people think Big Philanthropy should do. The blind spot for aging is near universal.
- paganel 14y ago
  > So far as I'm aware, the Gates Foundation does nothing in regard to the world's biggest problem, which is aging I'd say aging and, yes, death are two related things that have helped us evolve from organic Carbon molecules to a species that is thinking of colonizing other planets in the Solar system. And I also do believe that if "we" as a species (or an evolved species based on our own) ever are to go beyond our Solar System we would only do that if we let this process of evolution continue. To say nothing of the fact that you cannot have a non-dying and increasing in numbers species such as ours without resorting to eugenics. Eugenics is bad.
  - Peaker 14y ago
    Humans are not evolving (in the Darwinian sense). The closest thing is selection based on which parts of the population have the most children. We are devolving in many ways: diseases that kill us or make us infertile are being treated so as to not kill us and make us infertile. With time, we might devolve to the point where we completely depend on modern medicine to survive and reproduce.
dos1 14y ago
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 results, and then using those measurements to continually refine our approach This sounds like a pretty pragmatic plan to me. I know that I don't necessarily agree with the direction he's going (I would personally pick other problems to tackle), so I just hope someday I'm in a position to do something along the same vein and learn from the lessons he's willing to share.
- jayferd 14y ago
  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.
  - TDL 14y ago
    So you would rather have him do nothing?
    - specialist 14y ago
      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.
      - TDL 14y ago
        I actually agree with you on this point. I was more reacting to the "White mans burden" comment.
nerdfiles 14y ago
Money elf found a new way to spend money (that just applies "The Lean Startup.") Good on Money elf! "Huzzah!"
- nerdfiles 14y ago
  "Keep your comments to yourself!"
  - nerdfiles 14y ago
    C'mon, dude, it's another Bill Gates thread. This is News.
gogobyte 14y ago
I can't believe it, Bill Gates is a narrow-minded and stupid person.
dear 14y ago
Windows is one BIG problem of the world. How is he going to "solve" it?
zb 14y ago
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 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_Theory_of_Planning.pdf 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.
- rfrey 14y ago
  "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.
  - zb 14y ago
    Well, to answer your specific question, see the link in my reply to tptacek. But I want to clarify that I am not condemning them (and I wasn't trying to use the term "ruthless" in a pejorative sense, so it was probably a poor choice). I am simply pointing out that if you want to use the engineering method to effect change on a global scale - and I think that is absolutely the right approach - then you first need to make sure that it is good engineering. Gates, who by all accounts is an excellent engineer, is (if the quote is genuine) aware of the problems with software metrics. It is less clear whether he is carrying that scepticism over to the use of other metrics, and that is my concern.
lenkite 14y ago
I 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.
- dubya 14y ago
  I am pleased to hear that Gates's money is doing good somewhere in the world. In the US, I think, the Gates foundation has a much higher profile in education reform, which is very controversial because it drags in all of the baggage of accountability, slipping standards, unions, privatization, big government, etc.
- forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
  "But Gates as a philanthropist deserves praise." At least he deserves respect.
realcertify 14y ago
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 they are not helping sick kids, but only doing research work. One came up to cover up to $3.500(!) if I provide a bunch of documents I was sure I wouldn't be able to gather in a short term. On web pages of such funds you normally can easily find a button to make a donation. But try to contact them if you need help - you will be surprised how difficult it is. So we (relatives and friends) collected as much money as we could, the kid was receiving treatment in one of the local hospitals, in the end both of his eyes got removed. Maybe the same would have happened in those best hospitals too, but if there was even the slightest chance to keep his sight it certainly would worth any money. Bottom line is - I don't believe in cancer funds any longer, and will never donate any dime. In fact I'm not even sure that they spend all money for "Research", they might be just another way to avoid taxes. May be Bill Gates fund is different, I hope so...
- MichaelGG 14y ago
  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.
  - realcertify 14y ago
lampe 14y ago
We will fix nothing if we don't change the OS on that we are running... OS = what we see(input) and what we do with that knowledge(output) We can Install this software and this firewall and this make things easy tool but at the end we still are on the same OS.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
wildranter 14y ago
Hey Bill Gates! Fix what Aron Swartz was fighting for.
- onlyup 14y ago
  Which was?
  - michaelbuddy 14y ago
    Well for one, he was wanting to make sure that corporations weren't able to convince government for any self-interested group to control the internet and in general, the freedom of knowledge and fighting corruption. In regards to the JSTOR stuff, he was against their locking up of open source, public domain scientific information behind a paywall. He wanted information to be available and people to communicate freely. Which helps societies knowledge grow.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Hmm, would love to see Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet in a competition to see who can solve more of the worlds problems.
- lancewiggs 14y ago
  In a way there are, or at least BillG and Elon Musk. Buffett is giving his money to the Gates Foundation. Musk and Gates each identified what they saw as our greatest issues where they could have impact, and went from there. Whether we agree with their priorities or not, it's inspiring to watch.
adrianbg 14y ago
Who has more power to do good in the world? A rich business person or a "powerful" politician in a democracy? I'm going to go with the business person. They're free to do anything they can afford, unlike politicians who are at the mercy of government processes and political opponents.
forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
Interesting read. What is not measured, can not be controlled.
deleted 14y ago
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singingfish 14y ago
The best I can say is that BG sure made the right decision stepping down from Microsoft to do something useful.
MTWomg 14y ago
Didn't read the article; is getting rid of Balmer somewhere in there?
derpmaster 14y ago
Bill Gates eradicating disease is pretty awesome. His weird school ranking system in the US is pretty bizarre and utilitarian. "Students would be better served by measures of which colleges were best preparing their graduates for the job market." is total corporatist bullshit. How about more free courses online like what MIT and Stanford are doing.
jaakl 14y ago
Sometimes it seems that some think that the world biggest problem is that there are too few people on earth. No, it is not. We are killing our ecosystem already now. These other human problems like child mortality, poverty etc are of course emotionally and personally big ones, but resolving them would make world more crowded and not better place at all. My suggestion: if you put X amount of money to increase human population, then you must put also at least same amount to resolve all the next problems what we people generate: over-harvesting, co2 and other greenhouse gases, pollution etc.
rdl 14y ago
I'm very glad he's doing what he's doing. It is also fair that when someone proposes a certain set of objectives, and then declares a plan to accomplish those, that you can criticize the plan to accomplish those objectives as being less than optimal. IMO, since this is his own money, he has every right to pick the objectives he thinks most important. I think a marginal $1b spent to end the drug war would do more for his stated goal of fixing underperforming urban schools than a marginal $1b spent on teacher measurement. The irony is he wouldn't even need to spend $1b to make a huge impact on ending the drug war -- just showing through data that the drug war is responsible for many of the problems in schools and urban culture ($10mm to study this?) and then having the courage to promote that result (free or priceless) would accomplish it.

208 points by gjenkin 14y ago

Bill Gates treating the world like a computer optimization problem. First profile the world (program) and construct suitable benchmarks. Figure out some reasonable goals and test if your various health care and education programs affect the benchmark results.

pbw 14y ago
As Gates points out in the article, these techniques existed before computers. So I agree given Gates's background, he is probably applying what he learned from computers to wider problems. But in the grand scheme of things, computer science adopted these techniques from other disciplines.
- johnchristopher 14y ago
  I know Gates was a really good (strike that, he was really, really good) hacker and software engineer. But I think he was an even better bussinessman. I am pretty sure he's applying more from the latter background than from the computer field.
  - Peaker 14y ago
    Gates was a good business man. I've not heard many call him a good hacker before. I'd like to hear more...
hnriot 14y ago
No, it's called science, we've been using it for a little while now and it seems to be working out pretty well.
- pbw 14y ago
  I don't think optimization of the world is exactly science. Science is about the acquisition of knowledge. Understanding what causes Polio is science, how it spreads, etc. Changing the world in such a way as to get rid of Polio strikes me as something different, not sure what. For example studying global warming is science, but injecting particles into the stratosphere to cool things down would be a step further.
  - chongli 14y ago
    The "optimization" characterization was invented by "aramadia". You can't assume that premise if you want to make a valid argument against the characterization of Bill Gates's method as science.
    - pbw 14y ago
      Granted, so let's put optimization out of the picture. I still claim what Gates is doing is more than unqualified "science". I suppose it is "applied science" but that seems like a weak term. My point is just there is a difference between acquiring knowledge about the world, and actively engineering change in that same world. He is doing both.
      - chongli 14y ago
        It's not rigorous science, it's informal science. The sort of science you do when you discover and investigate the source of a leak in your plumbing fixtures. It may not be ideal but there's still a lot more value to it than just throwing up your hands and dismissing the problem as un-explainable/impossible to solve.

nealabq 14y ago

How to rid the world of all known diseases (the Python method) "Well, first of all become a doctor and discover a marvelous cure for something, and then, when the medical profession really starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right so there'll never be any diseases ever again." http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/toridof.htm http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/toridof.htm

SHIFTHAPPENZ 14y ago
Also on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNfGyIW7aHM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNfGyIW7aHM :-)
bitwize 14y ago
Isn't that basically the strategy behind DRACO?
Raphael 14y ago
Oh, Monty Python. I was racking my brain trying to think of how this is a dig at the programming language.

gesman 14y ago

Dear Bill Gates. Here's yardstick to measure residual value of your efforts: If you'd stop doing whatever you're doing, will the world continue benefit from your past efforts for ages to come? Compare "buying food for the hungry" and "teaching the man to fish" - which effort carry more residual value? You developed DOS, and then Windows. Even when you stopped - the world continued rolling with your software and building more and more great stuff on top of it. Even Ballmer with all his powers couldn't derail your past efforts. Dear Bill Gates, please stop taking consequences for causes, stop fighting with shadows. See where you can turn on the light so it will shine when you'll be long gone. Money + creativity goes the long way. It's time to add creativity. You can do that! You can do that!

thechut 14y ago
Could you elaborate on what it is he "can do"? Also I'm not sure his creation of DOS and Windows really has much bearing on his more recent philanthropic efforts.
gesman 14y ago
Dear Bill Gates. Stop buying stuff for people. Be that vaccines or portable toilets or donations to some vague "research" causes. Invest in helping people to discover the powers within. Do not invest in making people think they need to depend on some external rich power to pull themselves out of their misery. That is misservice. This is lie. That warm, fuzzy feeling you get after spending billion on buying stuff for poor people comes with deeper unease - deep inside you know that you did not really make a lasting difference. Difference yes. Lasting - only until that billion ran out and your vaccines are used, food is eaten and very soon they will want more. This is not a difference. Invest in helping people to learn the skills, invest in helping people to find inspiration within, invest in helping people to express their own creativity and power. Invest in helping people to discover how each of them can help other million people without spending billion dollars.
- jackowayed 14y ago
  He's trying to eradicate polio. That would be incredible lasting good. Research does serious lasting good as well. Research funding built the Internet, for example.

donniezazen 14y ago

This reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell talk on why future generation will remember Bill Gates and not Steve Jobs and also why he will be remembered as a humanitarian and not as a computer genius.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

krie 14y ago

The biggest problem is resource depletion and overpopulation. Overpopulation will be "fixed" through starvation and death. Resource depletion will leave the current young and future generations with far less extravagant lives. Adding to the overpopulation through vaccination programmes und su weiter is a misstep.

fideloper 14y ago
Decreasing child mortality rates and increasing healthcare availability is statistically shown to decreased birth rate (among other improvements), resulting in fixing the issue of overpopulation (over time).
- krie 14y ago
  Whether it stops at 8 or 9 billion doesn't really make an impact until 2150 at best. IF we had the resources to keep everything puffing till then. We don't. :)
  - adventured 14y ago
    We sure do. The human race will be just fine resource wise. And that's just accounting for the existing base of resources and knowledge we have today. What we'll have in just another 50 years will be astounding, and further ensure that we won't have a resource problem. :)
    - krie 14y ago
      You're not even able to moderate yourself to "could" be astounding, it WILL be astounding, categorically? Is there anything pointing toward such being able to reach fruition? Not really.
notdrunkatall 14y ago
Dear god, another Malthusian.
- 14y ago

dubya 14y ago

Not everyone is as confident in Bill Gates's magical abilities as he is. http://dianeravitch.net/2013/01/10/how-bill-gates-wasted-50-million/ http://dianeravitch.net/2013/01/10/how-bill-gates-wasted-50-... http://seattletimes.com/html/dannywestneat/2014437975_danny09.html http://seattletimes.com/html/dannywestneat/2014437975_danny0...

pbw 14y ago
That 2nd link is an obvious straw man. If you read what Gates is actually saying [1] it's far more reasonable. There is a huge dynamic range in teacher abilities. He is saying take the very best, and give them a slightly higher load. Just as you can take the very best programmers and have them write more code. But then people freak out and say Gates wants big classes across the board, it's silly. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/27/AR2011022702876.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02...

ilaksh 14y ago

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 that has a sound basis. Our current 'economic' models, since they do not take into account equality, health, education, or any other important scientific data, are fundamentally unsound, and that is why we have the problems of gross inequality and inadequate distribution of resources. We should frame this as less exploitation and more fairness rather than more charity.

specialist 14y ago
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 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.)

cs702 14y ago

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 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wasted around $1.7 billion on a broad-ranging, intensive, national effort to study small schools... based on a flawed measurement of Bayesian probabilities! The foundation looked only at the probability that a school would be small given high school performance, and seemingly forgot to look at the probability that a school would be high-performing given a small school size. The two are not the same. $1.7 billion, poof! The following analysis, by a professor of statistics, explains in more detail how the foundation got it wrong: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8863.pdf http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8863.pdf

Snoptic 14y ago
The math should be trivial to fix, the expensive collected data is still valid.
adaml_623 14y ago
Guy spent $1.7 Billion testing a hypothesis. Admitted he was wrong. Probably would have been better to fail faster, etc. But it was his money. Kudos to him.
sliverstorm 14y ago
The $1.7B was not necessarily wasted, if it provided the BMGF learnings that improve future efforts.

reasonattlm 14y ago

So 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-outrage-1.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2002/12/death-is-an-outra... You'll see a number of mainstream foundations in the Methuselah Foundation lists, and those also support the SENS Research Foundation, working on the basis for ways to reverse the cellular and molecular damage that causes aging. The Gates foundation isn't there: http://mfoundation.org/?pn=donors http://mfoundation.org/?pn=donors But that's not entirely surprising: from the beginning, the Gates Foundation has been a very traditional Big Philanthropy operation. Wealth does not grant vision. Where there is innovation or stepping away from the norms it is of the incremental type, with none of what Peter Thiel calls "radical philanthropy". Is this is a criticism of Gates? Sure. But it's equally a criticism of everyone else. The Gates Foundation is doing what most people think Big Philanthropy should do. The blind spot for aging is near universal.

paganel 14y ago
> So far as I'm aware, the Gates Foundation does nothing in regard to the world's biggest problem, which is aging I'd say aging and, yes, death are two related things that have helped us evolve from organic Carbon molecules to a species that is thinking of colonizing other planets in the Solar system. And I also do believe that if "we" as a species (or an evolved species based on our own) ever are to go beyond our Solar System we would only do that if we let this process of evolution continue. To say nothing of the fact that you cannot have a non-dying and increasing in numbers species such as ours without resorting to eugenics. Eugenics is bad.
- Peaker 14y ago
  Humans are not evolving (in the Darwinian sense). The closest thing is selection based on which parts of the population have the most children. We are devolving in many ways: diseases that kill us or make us infertile are being treated so as to not kill us and make us infertile. With time, we might devolve to the point where we completely depend on modern medicine to survive and reproduce.

dos1 14y ago

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 results, and then using those measurements to continually refine our approach This sounds like a pretty pragmatic plan to me. I know that I don't necessarily agree with the direction he's going (I would personally pick other problems to tackle), so I just hope someday I'm in a position to do something along the same vein and learn from the lessons he's willing to share.

jayferd 14y ago
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.
- TDL 14y ago
  So you would rather have him do nothing?
  - specialist 14y ago
    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.
    - TDL 14y ago
      I actually agree with you on this point. I was more reacting to the "White mans burden" comment.

nerdfiles 14y ago

Money elf found a new way to spend money (that just applies "The Lean Startup.") Good on Money elf! "Huzzah!"

nerdfiles 14y ago
"Keep your comments to yourself!"
- nerdfiles 14y ago
  C'mon, dude, it's another Bill Gates thread. This is News.

gogobyte 14y ago

I can't believe it, Bill Gates is a narrow-minded and stupid person.

dear 14y ago

Windows is one BIG problem of the world. How is he going to "solve" it?

zb 14y ago

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 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_Theory_of_Planning.pdf 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.

rfrey 14y ago
"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.
- zb 14y ago
  Well, to answer your specific question, see the link in my reply to tptacek. But I want to clarify that I am not condemning them (and I wasn't trying to use the term "ruthless" in a pejorative sense, so it was probably a poor choice). I am simply pointing out that if you want to use the engineering method to effect change on a global scale - and I think that is absolutely the right approach - then you first need to make sure that it is good engineering. Gates, who by all accounts is an excellent engineer, is (if the quote is genuine) aware of the problems with software metrics. It is less clear whether he is carrying that scepticism over to the use of other metrics, and that is my concern.

lenkite 14y ago

I 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.

dubya 14y ago
I am pleased to hear that Gates's money is doing good somewhere in the world. In the US, I think, the Gates foundation has a much higher profile in education reform, which is very controversial because it drags in all of the baggage of accountability, slipping standards, unions, privatization, big government, etc.
forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
"But Gates as a philanthropist deserves praise." At least he deserves respect.

realcertify 14y ago

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 they are not helping sick kids, but only doing research work. One came up to cover up to $3.500(!) if I provide a bunch of documents I was sure I wouldn't be able to gather in a short term. On web pages of such funds you normally can easily find a button to make a donation. But try to contact them if you need help - you will be surprised how difficult it is. So we (relatives and friends) collected as much money as we could, the kid was receiving treatment in one of the local hospitals, in the end both of his eyes got removed. Maybe the same would have happened in those best hospitals too, but if there was even the slightest chance to keep his sight it certainly would worth any money. Bottom line is - I don't believe in cancer funds any longer, and will never donate any dime. In fact I'm not even sure that they spend all money for "Research", they might be just another way to avoid taxes. May be Bill Gates fund is different, I hope so...

MichaelGG 14y ago
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.
- realcertify 14y ago

lampe 14y ago

We will fix nothing if we don't change the OS on that we are running... OS = what we see(input) and what we do with that knowledge(output) We can Install this software and this firewall and this make things easy tool but at the end we still are on the same OS.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

wildranter 14y ago

Hey Bill Gates! Fix what Aron Swartz was fighting for.

onlyup 14y ago
Which was?
- michaelbuddy 14y ago
  Well for one, he was wanting to make sure that corporations weren't able to convince government for any self-interested group to control the internet and in general, the freedom of knowledge and fighting corruption. In regards to the JSTOR stuff, he was against their locking up of open source, public domain scientific information behind a paywall. He wanted information to be available and people to communicate freely. Which helps societies knowledge grow.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Hmm, would love to see Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet in a competition to see who can solve more of the worlds problems.

lancewiggs 14y ago
In a way there are, or at least BillG and Elon Musk. Buffett is giving his money to the Gates Foundation. Musk and Gates each identified what they saw as our greatest issues where they could have impact, and went from there. Whether we agree with their priorities or not, it's inspiring to watch.

adrianbg 14y ago

Who has more power to do good in the world? A rich business person or a "powerful" politician in a democracy? I'm going to go with the business person. They're free to do anything they can afford, unlike politicians who are at the mercy of government processes and political opponents.

forgottenpaswrd 14y ago

Interesting read. What is not measured, can not be controlled.

deleted 14y ago

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singingfish 14y ago

The best I can say is that BG sure made the right decision stepping down from Microsoft to do something useful.

MTWomg 14y ago

Didn't read the article; is getting rid of Balmer somewhere in there?

derpmaster 14y ago

Bill Gates eradicating disease is pretty awesome. His weird school ranking system in the US is pretty bizarre and utilitarian. "Students would be better served by measures of which colleges were best preparing their graduates for the job market." is total corporatist bullshit. How about more free courses online like what MIT and Stanford are doing.

jaakl 14y ago

Sometimes it seems that some think that the world biggest problem is that there are too few people on earth. No, it is not. We are killing our ecosystem already now. These other human problems like child mortality, poverty etc are of course emotionally and personally big ones, but resolving them would make world more crowded and not better place at all. My suggestion: if you put X amount of money to increase human population, then you must put also at least same amount to resolve all the next problems what we people generate: over-harvesting, co2 and other greenhouse gases, pollution etc.

rdl 14y ago

I'm very glad he's doing what he's doing. It is also fair that when someone proposes a certain set of objectives, and then declares a plan to accomplish those, that you can criticize the plan to accomplish those objectives as being less than optimal. IMO, since this is his own money, he has every right to pick the objectives he thinks most important. I think a marginal $1b spent to end the drug war would do more for his stated goal of fixing underperforming urban schools than a marginal $1b spent on teacher measurement. The irony is he wouldn't even need to spend $1b to make a huge impact on ending the drug war -- just showing through data that the drug war is responsible for many of the problems in schools and urban culture ($10mm to study this?) and then having the courage to promote that result (free or priceless) would accomplish it.