

Bill Gates on the future of education and programming - wx196
http://gigaom.com/2013/07/15/bill-gates-on-the-future-of-education-programming-and-just-about-everything-else/

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zanny
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.

~~~
johansch
I disagree.

As a counter-example: I am 36 years old and have worked professionally
creating software since I was 20. Sure, I tinkered with BASIC programming on
my first computer (the fabulous ZX81), but I first _really_ got into
programming in the early 90s with Turbo Pascal/Turbo Assembler in MS-DOS. In
my world, Microsoft was completely dominant at this time.

My own little pet theory on why younger people don't seem to do as much
programming:

Being online and having so easy access to so much information, entertainment,
communication etc has generally made people more impatient and less willing to
really commit to the kind of single minded focus that is needed to get into
and really develop programming knowledge.

~~~
rdouble
Intuitively I want to agree with you, as I've had similar thoughts , but is it
really the case that younger people don't do as much programming? I'm around
your age and almost nobody did programming when I was a kid, or even when I
was first getting into the workforce. Now it seems like there are hacking
meetups everywhere, millions of people posting their code to github, and more
young people than ever to compete with for work.

~~~
zanny
We'll nobody programmed in general since computing was so new. The industry is
just significantly larger now. The trend though I think is that computing has
gotten huge but actually developing that computing hasn't grown at all in the
youth group, just the consumption of that computing. You lose a lot of tinker-
ability when you move to GUIs and especially when you don't distribute
developer tools or learning resources.

I mean, think of the generation growing on iphones. How would they ever get
exposure to programming or tinkering on a device like _that_?

~~~
oscilloscope
Paragraf is a great app to make graphic shaders. It's easy to use touch x/y
coordinates and the camera feed as a texture.

The results look beautiful on retina displays. I've gotten several kids hooked
on it, even overcoming some of the GLSL syntax hurdles to get their programs
to work. I also gave them cheap $5 jeweller's loupes so they could inspect
pixels as the program runs.

Lots of kids genuinely want to create stuff.

------
Arun2009
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.

------
zdw
> "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
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-...](http://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable-
giving-ethics/))

Or with education, helping push privatized schools.
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundati...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Criticism))

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.

------
zargath
see it here:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdHGhSeYcq0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdHGhSeYcq0)

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aristidb
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.)

