The concentration of wealth with the few is an abomination. It means that a few, with their idiosyncrasies are determining the future of the rest. Their biases are amplified instead of averaged out by the opinions of the many. It's not a harbinger of a sane society. And we're seeing the results everywhere.
From the rise of the alright funded by the thiels and musks and putins. To the money burnt of useless educational startups.
> Small children will touch a hot stove only once yet billionaires will fund personalized learning initiatives again and again and again and we might wonder why.
The author doesn't answer and I don't have an answer either. But the interesting observation is that billionaires don't learn from experience. This is a sure sign of ideology at work.
The author doesn't answer because that "question" is blatant and manipulative nonsense. Don't fall for it.
What worries me more than billionaires funding learning initiatives is how many people fall for this kind of "reasoning" when it's about something they're primed to not like - where they'd reject it in any other context.
I mean, seriously. Small children will touch a hot stove only once, yet try to walk despite repeatedly tripping up. Obviously they don't learn from experience.
When small children fall over, the furthest they usually fall is a couple of feet. It might make them cry, but it won't lea ve them with injuries, like a hot stove will.
And you can make a small child cry without hurting them at all, e.g. by saying "Boo!".
what would have happened if Mark Zuckerberg saw the failures of other social networks and "learned from experience" and didn't create Facebook? these billionaires keep trying precisely because they've succeeded in areas where others have failed, so they believe they can do it again. are they always right? no, but eventually someone will come up with something that works. if no one ever tries, no one ever will.
What failures did he learn from? The other two social networks at the time, Friendster and Myspace were both hugely popular still when he launched Facebook.
Even setting that aside, your premise doesn’t hold: you can’t “learn from experience” by watching others. The whole point of the phrase is that you have to do it yourself to learn.
They're not the same ideas, they don't look a priori stupid, and you won't know for sure until you try.
The only stupid thing is following this absurd "argument" from the article. Kids, stoves. Seriously, what the fuck? Giving up on things after first negative experience is no way to live a life - literally, you would not survive to adulthood if you followed that brilliant idea.
Wishful thinking. "Don't say we can't travel the stars, maybe someone will come up with FTL, you never know until your try, look at the wright brothers", etc.
At some points you have to stop trying stupid things.
Here the stupid idea is thinking education is a solo activity while in truth it's a social one. A 50's multiple choice quiz on papers is the same as a quiz on computers. It's a very small part of what learning is about.
I run a small science club where the kids learn and experiment in small groups guided by tutors who enjoy the stuff. And I'm running out of money fast: I cannot charge much for the courses and workshops (those without money run along free of charge anyway) and I need to spend money on rent, materials and especially the tutors. And the last expenditure is growing linear with the amount of classes I offer and is easily the biggest.
People in business, especially in tech business, try to set things up in a way where you can automate stuff away and it's easy to see schools and classroom education as a great opportunity to try the same approach.
> But the interesting observation is that billionaires don't learn from experience.
This is my personal speculation, but self-learning can be extremely helpful for people with a lot of investment in a specific topic and high intrinsic motivation - a description likely to fit most people that made a vast fortune by themselves and their usual peer group. This is probably a serious filter bubble making them believe that self-learning is the way forward for everyone, since it worked for (nearly) everyone they know.
> The author doesn't answer and I don't have an answer either.
The answer is in the analogy: the billionaire didn’t get burned. If the child touched the stove but it was merely warm, they wouldn’t learn to avoid it.
Losing millions when you have billions is not a big deal.
Yes...but, in the bigger picture: For self-absorbed, A-list young billionaires, the educational outcomes for the little kids were never all that important. Their never-miss-it-anyway $1e8 bought boatloads of arbitrary power over little people, ~8 years of favorable PR, cool talking points when hanging out with their uber-rich social set, and other things that were valuable to them.
I'll admit that there's a flip-side viewpoint here: If you're a billionaire, in a society that very obviously has a lot of problems, and all you've got for tools and skills is a billion-dollar hammer that you're real handy with...well, okay - try hitting some things with your hammer. When the world is screwed up badly enough, even kinda-clueless change has a decent chance of improving something...right?
I suspect most humans with a billion dollars under their belt would be quite inclined to believe they can succeed where others have failed. After all, most people "fail" to become billionaires like they did.
Yes...but your phrasing suggests that is a rational belief. Vs. I'd attribute it far more to over-inflated self-esteem. Anybody who is both rational and has made it to billionaire has failed many times, at a wide variety of things. And knows the world is vastly more complex than any human actually understands.
I don't think it is possible to have a true understanding of what these (tax exempt) foundations are really intending - we only have what they tell us, which is a form of spin.
As far as I am concerned, these foundations are about paving the way for commercial interests - their job is to prepare the ground with a view to the long term benefits that the corporate side will then reap. They are simply structuring society for their benefit; it's not for the love of Man.
In this particular case, how would personalised learning work, with all the collectivisation that is planned and being implemented? Perhaps the intent was to personalise within narrow bands to give the illusion of an individual personalised education..
No, these wealthy few are not paltry compared to governments, they used to be. But not anymore. Plus, they took control the government through corruption.
Wikipedia is mostly a success of the many, both with the many contributing content and editing and by the many contributing the funds to operate. If it wouldve been funded by someone like gates, it'd be a corrupt for profit ad ridden platform. Not because gates is evil, mind you, it's because gates bias leads him to believe for profit enterprises are the solution for everything.
Anyway, i agree experimentation is needed, that's why I was talking about averaging out biases.
I just don't agree that the darwinistic model that caused wealth to concentrate to be the best model to achieve this.
That wealth is mostly an unhelpful value based on number of shares in businesses multiplied by that business's share value today. Those businesses are valuable because they do useful things. We can't release that wealth to pay for things. This is the problem with the word "wealth".
Well yes you can sell shares, maybe not all of them at once if you have enough. Still not sure what your point is, that doesn't mean wealth is not extremely unevenly distributed.
"can do things others can't" isn't the thing we want to stop, though. Wealth isn't bad for those who focus on creating value, just as strength isn't bad for those who are in the gym 6 days a week.
Is that the right statistics here though? Billionaire classes ability to spend should be compared with governments ability to spend. This is not same as wealth.
> The few with money are still a fairly large class. They are also paltry in wealth as compared to the masses aka govt spending.
Governments must spend much more of their treasure chest (when they have one) than billionaires and are scrutinized more heavily. Risks are not the same. Ultra rich are way more capable of corrupting governments than the masses which gives them even more power.
I'm of the opinion that money concentrated in few hands actually leads to better big projects.
Sure, some will fail, but it's better than the alternative, which is everything run by committee.
Committee 's tend to never manage to agree on any big bets - and therefore all resources get ploughed into low risk mundane things with no ongoing benefit. The town hall gets repainted frequently, rather than resources being spent building a cathedral.
If you reduce the social organizational structure aka the government system of democracy to "mass voting" or "voters opinion" you pretty much end up in an incentive structure where being "irrational" i.e. doesn't cost you or or in the words of Caplan:
>when it is [relatively] cheap to believe something (even when it is wrong) it is rational to believe it.
"Engineering" (manipulation of the environment) is the most intuitive for humans to sort out irrational beliefs.
"Science" is a method of eliminating human bias (preconceived notions) beforehand as much as possible as to maximize the space of possibilities in terms of technology ("knowledge").
"Anarchy" in the realm of social order in its most basic form minimizes the abuse of power of the few by optimizing structures of hierarchical order.
Every single one of the human enterprises is non-telic, a constant work in progress. My sense is that through its accelerated atomized structure and loss of power "the West" has lost itself in delusions and constant anxiety resulting in disproportionate numbers of megalomaniac leaders free of account and apathetic citizens giving up agency.
Everyone wants to live in "interesting times" but no one wants to live through it with one lifeline and a 52.5% chance of belonging to the bottom 1.2% in terms of credit points (wealth) and dependent on highly corrupt structures. I surely wouldn't play that game, so what do I care what my rational beliefs are (no participation) as long as every belief I fancy has an underlying cynicism it is a far effective short-term strategy to avoid being "scammed" which could potentially cost the lifeline.
I think about this on a number of levels a lot. I think things have changed a lot less than we tell ourselves (though they have changed a little bit, in that we are no longer bound to each other by feudal oaths - possibly for the worse).
The idea behind governments, even the most liberal, has always been that you give up some of your freedom in exchange for security against violence. This was also the primary motivator for swearing serfdom to a feudal lord. And the idea behind corporations is effectively giving up a large share of your labor value (the other part of serfdom) nominally in exchange for security against economic instability, in that you get a steady paycheck regardless of revenue fluctuations.
In practice, I think many people are finding that security is dubious since corporations lay off employees, but they don't understand what the tradeoff is that they made. Lack of loyalty by employers has then fueled lack of loyalty by employees, and overall the situation is more tenuous now for employees.
And for that matter when people complain about crime (and why crime against its own citizens is particularly heinous), they're complaining that the government is not holding up their end of the contract with protection from that. I'm not sure whether it's easier or harder today to find a different "lord" in the form of emigration. On one hand we're not bound by feudal oaths so leaving as such is usually pretty easy, but on the other hand the process of living somewhere long-term and changing citizenship can be very difficult on the other side depending where you go.
How are you measuring concentration billionaires have very little concentration of wealth compared to the budget did the countries they live in, it’s only when comparing to the average joe.
How is that engaging with what I said? There are many ways to fail. I pointed out one of them. Which is pretty dominant in our age.
Such a low effort reply...
You praised the decisions “averaged out by the opinions of the many,” which burn billions and billions of dollars in failed experiments every year. Happy to help.
