yesterday on the status of our educational system. This was more of a
rant than a speech. I’ve not seen Bill so worked up before. He might
even have been a bit over the top with this comment on our educational
system:
"The
guys at Enron never would have done this! I mean this is so blatant, so
extreme that, is anybody paying attention to what these guys do?"
I suppose it is a good thing when a guy like Gates gets involved in
matters of public policy. He’s spending his own money. He has no axe to
grind. But nothing is as clear as it appears. It’s not at all certain to
me that Big Bucks Bill is on the right track.
Central to Gates’ educational agenda is his belief that American schools
do not turn out enough scientists. That we will inevitably fall behind
places like China or India as they have more scientists than we do. Bill
believes that we should redouble our efforts to improve math and
science education. If we do that our future as the global leader in
science and technology is assured.
Actually that is not true at all. The acute problem we face is that there are too many scientists. This (long) article by Beryl Lieff Benderly tells a much different story than Mr. Gates. I few quotes from the piece:
It is not, as many believe, that the nation is producing too few scientists, but, paradoxically, just the opposite.
“There is no scientist shortage,” declares Harvard economics professor Richard Freeman.
Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, cites the “profound irony” of crying shortage — as have many business leaders, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates — while scores of thousands of young Ph.D.s labor in the nation’s university labs as low-paid, temporary workers, ostensibly training for permanent faculty positions that will never exist.
I loved these words by Susan Gerbi, Chair of molecular biology at Brown University. This lady is on the top of the heap of scientists in America:
"Obviously, the “pyramid paradigm can’t continue forever,” Like any Ponzi scheme, she fears, this one will collapse when it runs out of suckers
— a stage that appears to be approaching. There has been relatively
little attention given to possible solutions for the scientist glut — in
no small part because the scientific establishment has been busy
promoting the idea that the U.S. has a shortage of science students."
So are we creating a Ponzi scheme of scientists? Or are we critically
short of scientists? I don’t really know. The evidence is pretty clear
that there is a very big glut today. And there is every indication the
glut will get bigger. These folks better find something “Big” to do. I
see no new “cutting edge technology” that is going to suck up the supply
of the underemployed scientists. We’ve already invented all the “good”
stuff. Inventing more stuff that extends lives is really not all that
helpful at this point.
I can hardly wait for Bill Gates' later years, when he becomes increasingly like Howard Hughes. As he comes to the realization that he is mortal and no amount of money or ingenuity or science will postpone his appointment with his maker, wherein he must hold account for the life that he has lived on this earth. Fuck you Bill, you are not God. You aren't even close.
If we made more here, my guess is that you would need more scientists and engineers to innovate and build around production capabilities, lowering costs faster.
If people were more fully in tune with the scientific method, they might be less likely to fall for all of the propaganda and doctored statistics fed to us.
A group of engineers could fix the US much faster than any of the ass clowns in power today who do nothing but take orders.
Bruce,
Gates' Enron comments were in relation to state budgets and pension funds:
As for his views on education, Sam Blumenfeld of the New American discusses Why Bill Gates' Billions Will Not Improve Education. I quote:
And I will add that there are way too many ''rocket scientists'' on Wall Street earning outrageous bonuses doing nothing but useless algorithms (and structured finance but it died) while the real scientists working at Bell Labs, MIT, Harvard and many, many other research centers get almost no funding whatsoever. It's scandalous that we have had little or no progress in finding cures (not just questionable treatments) for all sorts of diseases! Gates and other billionaires should focus the bulk of their attention there.
he actually is a big time proponent of the eradication of diseases e.g. smallpox though his motive is as much about population control as it is the reduction of suffering, Billy's thesis is that a healthy society has a lower birthrate.
As for MIT etc. D.E. Shaw comes to mind
http://www.deshawindia.com/InformationTechnology.html
Rs 9.3 lakhs is about $2100 US. A fantastic monthly salary in India, but not a very good one here
Maybe Bill should start hiring a few scientists. I haven't seen MS put up a lot of "Scientists Wanted" ads lately. Why train them if no-one wants them.
I'd suggest looking here, but Bill doesn't run MS anymore:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/jobs/default.aspx
This is what happens when socialism infects an entire economy. Markets exist in every arena and when those markets are allowed to function freely you minimize waste and fraud.
If people had to pay for an education, rather than having a ridiculous loan/grant/scholorship program that encourages the attendance at college without regard for ability or need, they would make different decisions.
If we relied on productive manufacturing of goods, there would be more opportunities for college educated engineers and managers.
Instead, we have morphed into finance ( very poor social use of mathematical degrees) and services with little need for higher education.
Worse still, the myopic concentration on specializations, rather than more generalized education, creates one trick ponies whose education is easily superceded and becomes useless. Great for universities requiring add on degrees, but terrible for creating the kind of thinking that drives new breakthroughs across disciplines.
We are creating an excellent workforce though, one that can be allowed to exist after the obligatory downsizing of the world's population through eugenics. Bill Gates is one of the eugenics kings.
Thank you Bruce, this is not information that is getting out.
Socialism is one big problem.There are others but if we don't deal with socialism once and for all, everything else is lost.
Can't fly like an eagle when held back by turkeys.
Turn the question around - not why is there a glut of researchers, but why is there a shortage of positions that could use their skills?
I can think of several reasons:
Unfortunately, we're riding the old 20th century horse until it dies, hoping another horse will miraculously gallup up just in time from out of nowhere to save us.
One point among many: regarding the NASA space vehicle, revolutionarily inventive thinkers aren't usually chosen for committees. Old-boyism usually selects among its own. So the real problem is that the inventive thinkers aren't sought out; they're deliberately shunted aside, overlooked, and avoided, again and again.
Solve that problem and see a new era of imaginative new products and institutions blossom.
You missed a big one - the brightest of American Youth are incentivized to go into finance instead of science, because that's where the money is.
If you're a young man who wants to get rich, you try to go to wall street, not a science lab.
True dat.
Within the past couple years, two PhD's who worked with me left to go to work at a hedge fund.
When I was finishing my PhD 15 years ago, many of the brokerage houses were heavily recruiting from the EE PhD's.
I graduated from the same college, about the same time as Mike Judge, (Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, Office Space) with a degree in art and communication, but I never met the guy. Why? he was getting a degree in Physics.
Gates’ educational agenda
go away and take your eugenics/population control vaccines with you.
"Everything that can be invented, has been."
US Patent Office Commissioner Charles Duell, 1899
He should have closed the place down when he had the chance.
See my comment about on the same topic.
Before stuff like this came along:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/amazonpatent.html
"No shortage of scientists, just ones that think critically." Yes, especially the ones that believe in monkeys to men crap.
I'm with you.
Take grant power away from congress and government but don't give it to universities either. Maybe it's time for research be paid for by those who have a special interest in the projects, or those who'll benefit from the results...I'm talking individual subscription, not tax money. If people want the results of research, they should pay for it. If the final outcome proves saleable, then put it on the open market.
Too True. Now wait for the junks from the zealots. Darwinism = Global warming but unfortunately, it stuck.
There's a fixed budget to be spread out to science, both in the sense of parsing out grants to principal investigators, and for each individual PI's budget. This money will be used for equipment, PI salary, postdocs/residents, graduate students, techs. PI's make the most money, and giving out fewer grants selects the best talent. If you give out even more money to a few PIs, you can shift the workforce from a healthy proportion of independent labs which can replicate each other's experiments, to a few big labs which control the publication flow in the journals, and thereby increase their share of the grant pie. Indeed, this creates a glut of postdocs (by definition a temporary position) for each lab head position, and many will have to find a new line of work after 8 or 10 years of work. The glut results from the largely non-scientific processes of grant accounting and journal editing. It's the result of political pressure, and it could very well have happened no matter the size of our undergraduate science education system. It's been happening to a greater extent as long as I've been paying attention. It's a good question as to how many scientists the education system should produce, but the glut described by Teitenbaum and Gerbi is something different, and I think that's what Gates was talking about. He thinks there should be more people who can at least think like scientists.
When Bill Gates can solve the riddle of the Blue Screen of Death, and prevent it from happening, he'll begin to build an ounce of credibility.
lmao! +Win98
Education reform is all about HUGE sums of money. Read "Waiting for Superfraud:"
http://ksdcitizens.org/2010/12/22/waiting-for-superfraud/
We need to scap the public school concept. Parents need to take responsibility, each for their own kids, one way or another. No one's going to do a better job than the kid's biologically-related kin, nor does anyone else care.
While I agree with your premise Bruce, this comment was woefully short sighted and should have been reconsidered. People have been saying this for several hundred years.
We humans are consistently and continuously myopic when it comes to seeing beyond our own present circumstances. Looking beyond three hots and a cot is extremely difficult for the vast majority of us.
Okay. What is the new frontier? Space? Cancer research? Microbiology? Heart disease? Solar? Wind? More medicines for dicks that don't work?
Remember the line from the Graduate, "Plastics". To some extent that was true. I don't see it in front of us today. What's the new plastic??
We must colonize space. We're behind the curve on this one. We need to see private firms expanding into this field.
Riiigght.
Because if we can't manage to get our act together on earth, then going out into space will make it all alright...
As Carl Sagan I believe said, anywhere and everywhere ON earth, is a hundred times more hospitable the OFF the earth.
(which would translate as 100x cheaper)
Where do these clowns get the idea that leaping off into space will solve our problems???
Who said it would solve all our problems? I may be a dreamer but I do still have a few brain cells that continue to function properly, so I wouldn't make that claim.
Of course outer space is inhospitable. So is Arizona. It doesn't stop 6.5 million people from living there.
Perhaps if we realized the importance of getting off this rock, we could find the motivation to work together toward that end. I mean, instead of spending trillions on weapons systems around the globe annually, imagine if we put that capital into infrastructure and technology that would eventually lead to the colonization of space.
You know how they say that you shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket? Well, all of humanity's eggs are in the earth 'basket'. I guess I really don't care if we all go extinct because if that is the destiny of our species then the universe will see to it that it happens. However, there is so much out there; an entire universe actually. Aren't you even just a little bit curious?
Bruce, you're making my point for me. I didn't claim I could see the future, only that people have been saying that the future won't be very different from the present for centuries. And yet....surprise.....radical change comes in swarms and waves.
To say that you can't "see" the future is natural. To claim that the future won't be much different because most of the good stuff is already here is short sighted. I'm not being insulting Bruce. Just observing that because I can't see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist or that it can't be created.
Our imagination creates the new world. Only a few select minds have the ability to break from the present and "see" the future. I don't claim to be one of those minds. But I would never say they don't exist.
This may be applicable to what you're saying.
telescopic evolution:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3478942683501293346#
"...only a few select minds..."
Actually I believe that lots of people have fantastic ideas everyday. Those ideas perhaps won't change the world, but they may change the way one business does its business and that may lead to other similar businesses changing also.
Or a doctor begins making slight procedural changes in a specific surgery, and it turns out that a year or so later that change is recognized as something that not only saves lives but is better/cheaper/easier.
Or someone has a client whose equipment or procedure doesn't work as well as it should, and the person invents a whole new system that is safer/cheaper/more effective than the client's original equipment. This is the story of a personal friend whose "baby company" is booming because of his ability to apply everything he has learned to creating solutions to other peoples' problems. Anyone could do it, and they do!
Creative thinking abounds in the US, but not always in big companies, big schools, or big government. We may not see it everyday, but it's happening.
I'm not sure this is still true.. I hope it is. The USA leads the world, or used to, in patents and patent applications. Our inventiveness is why we were once great and strong. Yes, we seem to have lost our way but that doesn't mean that creative thinking has stopped. It may have gone underground because of the ... I can't even think of a word bad enough for those who made this catastrophe happen ... anyway, because of those creeps, creativity may be stalled because of lack of money and credit but my friend's company is shipping thousands of dollars worth of products THAT HE CREATED out the door every single day, and other companies are too. So there's plenty of good news about creativity and inventiveness. It's certainly affected by the horrible things that have been done by people to whom terrible things should happen because of their deliberate actions, but the creative thinkers can't be stopped. They just keep on creating. Look in your mirror.
I wasn't talking about incremental changes and improvements, small ideas that help some here and there. I wasn't discounting creative thinking. Of course that is everywhere. I was clearly talking about radical change. I even used those words. Game changing things. Seeing the future is not incremental change.
Bruce said all the good stuff had been invented. He's talking about game changers, radiclaly different that will spark the economy into overdrive and add 10% to the GDP like the Internet and computing did. Read the rest of his comments.
Mankind is always trying new ideas and retesting old ones. I'm sure we've all gotten the email about how this year's college freshmen never had _______. One of the usual items filling that blank is a record, they've only had CD's. Think about 15 years from now, a CD will be a relic to them.
My favorite line from The Graduate is where Ben's father presses him about what he wants to be when he grows up to which Ben replies: Different.
We churn out millions of Different people every day, they all have ideas and dreams of how to change their corner of the world. Sometimes those ideas spark a tectonic shift in technology.
Having said that, radical shifts are much harder to accomplish nowadays where everything has standards determined by committee. Adoption costs of new technology can be significant and sometimes the better mousetrap doesn't win out over the entrenched technology.
"sometimes the better mousetrap doesn't win out over the entrenched technology"...
Like the $400 Dyson blade-less fan?
The new frontier is something that comes out of research labs and hits you in the face, a game-changer. In the 20th century, we saw electronics (vacuum tube to transistor to IC chip), the internal combustion engine, computers, radio and television, nuclear power, and many more.
Potential game changers for the 21st century include the mini nuclear fission reactor (and, may I say, nuclear fusion or even LENR), robotics, quantum computing and communication, and life extension (why do we grow old? maybe we can stop or slow it).
Right now, the Europeans are far ahead of the USA on the new reactors, the Japanese in robotics.
We're talking game changers here, not incremental advances in existing technologies.
BTW, I work as a research scientist, but the people I work for can't see innovation if it fell on them.
"I work for can't see innovation if it fell on them." All the more reason to do your homework and when you see the innovation they don't, buy it back from them and step out on your own. It has been done on numerous occasions. Just hope that your former employee does not have a strong lobby (the REAL problem with getting innovation out there) when you start taking too much of their market share. In a truly "free" market companies that can't innovated (lIke GM) should die. This ought to get some responses.
Maybe. I'm not so sure there is the demand for quantum computing. Robotics will surely get better and smaller but that is not a new frontier. On life extension, well, I'm not so sure that is money well spent. A critical problem we face is an aging population. Spending big bucks to make the problem worse is not a good trade off. Sooner or later we have to confront that.
You are so right, and the solution to the problem is to stop trying to "save" people who require "fixes" that necessitate public funding. If people want to pay, that's their business but don't ask anyone else to kick in. I can get behind a knee- or hip- replacement, because that person can then remain functional; I can't get behind extraordinary and extraordinarily expensive procedures. There is an inevitable end to life; we seem to believe that life extension means something. It doesn't. Quality of life is what matters. When that's over, life is over, and we should say good-bye without regret.
nano technology and AI will make orders of magnitude more difference than plastics ever did
I have been on that nano tech thing for more than a decade. I don't see folks making big bucks with this yet.
Thanks, Bruce, sometimes I disagree with you and sometimes I loves you -- and this blog post was pure love-in.
Billy Gates is one scarey dood, who is pushing Monsanto GMOs (which shows his expertise on science, right there) and paying for them with securitized debt pushed onto the backs of the masses (deja vu all over again!).
Gates wants to privatize education, as he's helped to offshore so many jobs, what else is left?
Anyone with a functioning brain who has ever worked as a contractor for one of the most inefficient corps in the world, Bill Gates & Company, realizes what is going on.
When Gates founded that software piracy foundation, it was to control software piracy by the biggest software pirate of them all, Bill Gates & Company.
If that dood had an honest bone in his body, he would know that Enron was simply a humongous money laundering operation, exactly what America is today.
'Nuff said.....it is telling that his Granddaddy's law firm, Bogle and Gates, was dissolved some years back; the reason (?), they kept hiring tech support people who had been fired from their previous jobs for embezzling (and one day the partners woke up to find all the money in the operational account gone!).
Guess there's a gene for that which runs in his family?
Bruce - there is a lot of work to do to prepare for a world of $1000/barrel oil.
We need to redevelop most of our suburbs to make them walkable communities. We need to prepare for a huge increase in urbanization. That means building a lot more infrastructure. We need to build huge numbers of nuclear power plants. We need to bulldoze a lot of urban sprawn and convert it back to agricultural use. There is a lot of productive work to be done.
Sorry. What you say may be true. But there is no money for what you describe.
BTW, we will shrivel up and die if oil hits 200. Forget your 1000.
You don't need "money" to do these things, you need tangible resources (e.g. you need to feed and house the workers and their families).
We will certainly not shrivel up and die at $200 oil. We will adapt and, perhaps, live more simply.
Excellent comment. The public's current perception of the world and accompanying assumptions and priorities are due for a correction.
You are assuming that what passes as our economy is currently alive...I think we are between shocks from the CPR paddles.