6 ms·

Bill Gates on the future of education and programming

54 points by wx196 13y ago

Arun2009 13y ago
I think what we need today are competent generalists - super-teachers if you will - who have deep (i.e., at least post-graduate level) proficiency in what are currently considered separate fields such as Physics, Philosophy, Mathematics or Biology. There's a goldmine of new breakthroughs waiting to happen at the intersection of disparate areas of knowledge. Generalist teachers/professors at the first/second year university levels can help the next generation be more adept at recognizing the connections between fields of study. Currently unfortunately you are not recognized at higher-rungs of academia unless you super-specialize and churn out papers. We really need to acknowledge generalization as well, even when it happens at the cost of any original contributions.
- helloTree 13y ago
  This. This is also an argument against doing a PhD where you are expected to focus on a very narrow field. The problem is that we want to measure academic progress by numbers in form of papers so scientists need to publish a lot otherwise they run out of funding. But if there is always this pressure to publish there is less time to step back to see the big picture.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    The scientists who do that are lazy then. Publish less, but high quality papers, reflect a lot more. Ya, it's tricky, but then why are we doing this anyways?
    - throwaway1979 13y ago
      Wow ... this is so off the mark, it is hard to come up with a coherent response. Scientists don't operate in a vacuum - if everyone around you publishes two strong papers a year and you don't ... well, you aren't going to last very long. How do you judge quality? I've had friends who are far smarter than me, worked on more important problems, yet failed out of academia just because idiotic reviewers didn't appreciate their work. Science has fads, and scientists as a whole act worse than high schoolers. The publish early and often mentality that is prevalent today is the same as how aspiring high schoolers compete for spots in the Ivy League. Seriously ... 16-17 year olds writing books? founding international charity organizations? All this is great stuff but really ... what is the motivation behind it if not to have a great college essay? If a high school student were to merely focus on his course work, study diligently and try to have a balanced life, would that kid get into an Ivy League school? That is the bar that academics must deal with. The difference is that if you don't get into an Ivy League university, life isn't over. You go some place else and keep up the good work. When you fail out of academia, it is far more challenging to integrate into the regular work force. Some of my friends who are thinking about getting out of CS research are mortified ... the technology landscape seems very alien to someone who did their undergrads during the late 90s-early 00s. sigh.
      - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
        Your response definitely isn't very coherent. If that is my fault, I apologize. As an almost-academic who did his undergrad in the mid 90s, I'm not too afraid of getting out of research, though it's a nice place to be since we have so much freedom. It helps to be in a less theoretical field. The reality of academia, especially in computer science, is that the system encourages a lot of bad behavior like crap publications. It is the job of the scientist to work around this bad behavior and still try to do good...tough yes, but necessary. If you can't juggle this, then failing out is more honorable than degenerating to fit the system, which would be a quite pointless existence.
        throwaway1979 13y ago
        Apology accepted. <quote>If you can't juggle this, then failing out is more honorable than degenerating to fit the system<quote> Science isn't what you think, or I think. Rather, it is what the community thinks to be true at any given point in time. If the community as a whole judges by quantity instead of quality, that's what most scientists will conform to. It is important to understand why this is the case. I believe the primary reason is that quality is extremely hard to judge. Most conference program committees will tell you this. You can easily spot the diamonds and the turds. How do you sort out amongst the rest? I also disagree with your overall attitude in which you consider academics dealing with their reality to be a "pointless existence". However, you are certainly entitled to your opinion as I am entitled to disagree with it :)
        seanmcdirmid 13y ago
        The established part of a community wants a system that protects their best interests. "Dealing with reality" is not a pointless existence, but just pandering to and playing the system is. The system must be worked or worked around for good (whatever you think that is). This makes me happy at least, but to each their own rationalizations. I have been on enough PCs to know how it works. Sometime that diamond is just a well written turd, and sometimes there is a diamond hiding inside the turd. Reviewing is much more than just sorting the rest.
zanny 13y ago
Now this is completely hive mind, unnecessary, off topic, and not really related to the OP, but: > I frankly don’t see that much of a downside. I think Windows taking over the world from 1995 to 2008 has absurdly destroyed lot of hacker interest in computing devices. I'm talking about those born around 93 - 96 that grew up during complete Microsoft dominance. There is no (good) terminal, until recently the development environments and toolchains were behind paywalls or not included, and terrible habits like "reformat when something breaks" emerged because of how undocumented and malignant a lot of DOS / NT's behavior acted. By raising a generation on closed platforms, they completely avoid realizing the inherent mutability of internal systems in these devices, and I think this promoted a huge amount of the computer illiteracy we see rampant today. Microsoft did give people what they wanted - brainless easy computing that takes no thought and was effectively consumable and disposable - but at the cost of a lot of engineering potential if they had distributed a tinker-able sandbox rather than a black box. Rather than be knowledgable about the workings of their devices (which are more and more taking over their lives) they are dependent on them but know nothing about them besides how to smack the keyboard or tap the facebook button. Bill has done a lot of good in education outside this, but the undercurrents of the Microsoft takeover of consumer electronics for 2 decades will have lasting negative implications on computing for probably an entire generation. We don't know what the alternative might have been, but I know from my peers (I'm 21) there is an absurd amount of illiteracy and apathy to these devices because they were raised on Microsoft products and expect it to work or just replace it, rather than hack it to fix it. This doesn't even start on how the majority of web devs seem to be 25 - 40 explicitly because they grew up on netscape, telnet, etc and not IE. I see a firm line right around where XP came out when the entire browser space collapsed into IE where anyone currently 15 - 20 I know had a significant drop in web tech interest as a result. > “Anybody who thinks getting rid of [patent law] would be better … I can tell you, that’s crazy,” Gates said. “My view is it’s working very well.” Patents seem to still work (due to their short duration), so I'm not arguing patents, but copyright has destroyed a supermajority (I see estimates in the ballpark of 95%) of media and content created for the last hundred years because it all died and all copies were lost while still outside the public domain. There is a reason all modern media takes its roots from 16th - 19th century media - that is the only place you can reference without landing in a lawsuit minefield. However, I see no reason at all why all this nonsense can't be abolished and culturally we could move towards a systemic crowdfunding approach where people propose ideas, everyone invests in the creation of their ideas, and the result is inherently public domain. The creator eats, the public benefits from any idea someone may have, and we don't end up with a huge fraction of culture and innovation lost under a rug of time. I love Bill Gates for the good he does with his money, but I'm not going to blindly agree with him just because hes a genius or because hes rich and popular. I think Microsoft had a lot of systemic societal damage, and that IP law is completely out of control and unnecessary in this day and age.
aristidb 13y ago
Kind of funny that Bill Gates would have reverted his position on patents. (But maybe Gigaom is misquoting there, maybe he is referring to "intellectual property" in general.)
zargath 13y ago
see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdHGhSeYcq0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdHGhSeYcq0
zdw 13y ago
> "A skeptic might say that’s like robbing from the not-so-rich to give to the poor." More like 'indoctrinating 90% of the population in one sphere to demand the substandard, then profiting massively, then flailing around wildly with charitable work to try to cover your shame"
- calibraxis 13y ago
  Personally, I just see that we're in a world where super-elites decide when and how to allocate resources. Many don't have a right to life, except to the extent that it fits in a framework acceptable to elites. For instance, with healthcare, Gates explicitly supports intellectual property regimes, like medical patents. This is in keeping with his decades-long ideologies, and vital to how he went beyond his wealthy parents. (http://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable-giving-ethics/ http://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable-...) Or with education, helping push privatized schools. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundati...) I'm not really discussing Gates himself. (Despite him putting his name in the forefront of his actions and press releases.) I imagine his charity is far better than how the Koch brothers allocate their wealth. Rather, these points apply to depending on the benevolence of elites in general.

54 points by wx196 13y ago

Arun2009 13y ago

I think what we need today are competent generalists - super-teachers if you will - who have deep (i.e., at least post-graduate level) proficiency in what are currently considered separate fields such as Physics, Philosophy, Mathematics or Biology. There's a goldmine of new breakthroughs waiting to happen at the intersection of disparate areas of knowledge. Generalist teachers/professors at the first/second year university levels can help the next generation be more adept at recognizing the connections between fields of study. Currently unfortunately you are not recognized at higher-rungs of academia unless you super-specialize and churn out papers. We really need to acknowledge generalization as well, even when it happens at the cost of any original contributions.

helloTree 13y ago
This. This is also an argument against doing a PhD where you are expected to focus on a very narrow field. The problem is that we want to measure academic progress by numbers in form of papers so scientists need to publish a lot otherwise they run out of funding. But if there is always this pressure to publish there is less time to step back to see the big picture.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  The scientists who do that are lazy then. Publish less, but high quality papers, reflect a lot more. Ya, it's tricky, but then why are we doing this anyways?
  - throwaway1979 13y ago
    Wow ... this is so off the mark, it is hard to come up with a coherent response. Scientists don't operate in a vacuum - if everyone around you publishes two strong papers a year and you don't ... well, you aren't going to last very long. How do you judge quality? I've had friends who are far smarter than me, worked on more important problems, yet failed out of academia just because idiotic reviewers didn't appreciate their work. Science has fads, and scientists as a whole act worse than high schoolers. The publish early and often mentality that is prevalent today is the same as how aspiring high schoolers compete for spots in the Ivy League. Seriously ... 16-17 year olds writing books? founding international charity organizations? All this is great stuff but really ... what is the motivation behind it if not to have a great college essay? If a high school student were to merely focus on his course work, study diligently and try to have a balanced life, would that kid get into an Ivy League school? That is the bar that academics must deal with. The difference is that if you don't get into an Ivy League university, life isn't over. You go some place else and keep up the good work. When you fail out of academia, it is far more challenging to integrate into the regular work force. Some of my friends who are thinking about getting out of CS research are mortified ... the technology landscape seems very alien to someone who did their undergrads during the late 90s-early 00s. sigh.
    - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
      Your response definitely isn't very coherent. If that is my fault, I apologize. As an almost-academic who did his undergrad in the mid 90s, I'm not too afraid of getting out of research, though it's a nice place to be since we have so much freedom. It helps to be in a less theoretical field. The reality of academia, especially in computer science, is that the system encourages a lot of bad behavior like crap publications. It is the job of the scientist to work around this bad behavior and still try to do good...tough yes, but necessary. If you can't juggle this, then failing out is more honorable than degenerating to fit the system, which would be a quite pointless existence.
      - throwaway1979 13y ago
        Apology accepted. <quote>If you can't juggle this, then failing out is more honorable than degenerating to fit the system<quote> Science isn't what you think, or I think. Rather, it is what the community thinks to be true at any given point in time. If the community as a whole judges by quantity instead of quality, that's what most scientists will conform to. It is important to understand why this is the case. I believe the primary reason is that quality is extremely hard to judge. Most conference program committees will tell you this. You can easily spot the diamonds and the turds. How do you sort out amongst the rest? I also disagree with your overall attitude in which you consider academics dealing with their reality to be a "pointless existence". However, you are certainly entitled to your opinion as I am entitled to disagree with it :)
        seanmcdirmid 13y ago
        The established part of a community wants a system that protects their best interests. "Dealing with reality" is not a pointless existence, but just pandering to and playing the system is. The system must be worked or worked around for good (whatever you think that is). This makes me happy at least, but to each their own rationalizations. I have been on enough PCs to know how it works. Sometime that diamond is just a well written turd, and sometimes there is a diamond hiding inside the turd. Reviewing is much more than just sorting the rest.

zanny 13y ago

Now this is completely hive mind, unnecessary, off topic, and not really related to the OP, but: > I frankly don’t see that much of a downside. I think Windows taking over the world from 1995 to 2008 has absurdly destroyed lot of hacker interest in computing devices. I'm talking about those born around 93 - 96 that grew up during complete Microsoft dominance. There is no (good) terminal, until recently the development environments and toolchains were behind paywalls or not included, and terrible habits like "reformat when something breaks" emerged because of how undocumented and malignant a lot of DOS / NT's behavior acted. By raising a generation on closed platforms, they completely avoid realizing the inherent mutability of internal systems in these devices, and I think this promoted a huge amount of the computer illiteracy we see rampant today. Microsoft did give people what they wanted - brainless easy computing that takes no thought and was effectively consumable and disposable - but at the cost of a lot of engineering potential if they had distributed a tinker-able sandbox rather than a black box. Rather than be knowledgable about the workings of their devices (which are more and more taking over their lives) they are dependent on them but know nothing about them besides how to smack the keyboard or tap the facebook button. Bill has done a lot of good in education outside this, but the undercurrents of the Microsoft takeover of consumer electronics for 2 decades will have lasting negative implications on computing for probably an entire generation. We don't know what the alternative might have been, but I know from my peers (I'm 21) there is an absurd amount of illiteracy and apathy to these devices because they were raised on Microsoft products and expect it to work or just replace it, rather than hack it to fix it. This doesn't even start on how the majority of web devs seem to be 25 - 40 explicitly because they grew up on netscape, telnet, etc and not IE. I see a firm line right around where XP came out when the entire browser space collapsed into IE where anyone currently 15 - 20 I know had a significant drop in web tech interest as a result. > “Anybody who thinks getting rid of [patent law] would be better … I can tell you, that’s crazy,” Gates said. “My view is it’s working very well.” Patents seem to still work (due to their short duration), so I'm not arguing patents, but copyright has destroyed a supermajority (I see estimates in the ballpark of 95%) of media and content created for the last hundred years because it all died and all copies were lost while still outside the public domain. There is a reason all modern media takes its roots from 16th - 19th century media - that is the only place you can reference without landing in a lawsuit minefield. However, I see no reason at all why all this nonsense can't be abolished and culturally we could move towards a systemic crowdfunding approach where people propose ideas, everyone invests in the creation of their ideas, and the result is inherently public domain. The creator eats, the public benefits from any idea someone may have, and we don't end up with a huge fraction of culture and innovation lost under a rug of time. I love Bill Gates for the good he does with his money, but I'm not going to blindly agree with him just because hes a genius or because hes rich and popular. I think Microsoft had a lot of systemic societal damage, and that IP law is completely out of control and unnecessary in this day and age.

aristidb 13y ago

Kind of funny that Bill Gates would have reverted his position on patents. (But maybe Gigaom is misquoting there, maybe he is referring to "intellectual property" in general.)

zargath 13y ago

see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdHGhSeYcq0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdHGhSeYcq0

zdw 13y ago

> "A skeptic might say that’s like robbing from the not-so-rich to give to the poor." More like 'indoctrinating 90% of the population in one sphere to demand the substandard, then profiting massively, then flailing around wildly with charitable work to try to cover your shame"

calibraxis 13y ago
Personally, I just see that we're in a world where super-elites decide when and how to allocate resources. Many don't have a right to life, except to the extent that it fits in a framework acceptable to elites. For instance, with healthcare, Gates explicitly supports intellectual property regimes, like medical patents. This is in keeping with his decades-long ideologies, and vital to how he went beyond his wealthy parents. (http://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable-giving-ethics/ http://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable-...) Or with education, helping push privatized schools. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundati...) I'm not really discussing Gates himself. (Despite him putting his name in the forefront of his actions and press releases.) I imagine his charity is far better than how the Koch brothers allocate their wealth. Rather, these points apply to depending on the benevolence of elites in general.