Bill Gates Enrolls His Kids In Khan Academy

theodp writes "At some schools, a teaching load of five courses every academic year is considered excessive. But Sal Khan, as an earlier Slashdot post noted, manages to deliver his mini-lectures an average of 70,000 times a day. BusinessWeek reports that Khan Academy has a new fan in Bill Gates, who's been singing and tweeting the praises of the free-as-in-beer website. 'This guy is amazing,' Gates wrote. 'It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.' Gates and his 11-year-old son have been soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. And at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave Khan a shout-out, touting the 'unbelievable' Khan Academy tutorials that 'I've been using with my kids.'"

Comments

Gates Foundation

[sourcerror]

It would cool, if the Gates Foundation donated for Khan Academy, because as far as I know Khan is now burning his savings.

Re:Gates Foundation

[gilesjuk]

It would be nice if Microsoft hadn't been overcharging education establishments for their software for years. Perhaps then they would have had more money to spend on other things.

All that money Gates and Microsoft have is down to them emptying everyone's pockets for mundane software like Office, adding the Microsoft "tax" to every PC sale and so on. Gates's charity is all about recognition. The best charity is that where the donors are anonymous, that way they have no agenda, they aren't trying to change the way people think about them.

I'm sure if we all had more money than we could possibly spend we would give it away.

Plenty of criticism here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Criticism

Re:Gates Foundation

[thenextpresident]

The criticisms presented there seem to essentially be criticisms that could be thrown at any charity. None of them registered as problem with the foundation itself. In some of the cases, the only solution to resolve the complaint is to lower or eliminate the amount donated.

Sorry, but those people complaining are going to complain whatever happens.

Re:Gates Foundation

[IamTheRealMike]

The website says that "generous individuals" have donated enough that he can do it full time. Given Gates' well known financial commitments to education it wouldn't surprise me at all if Gates has donated.

To a lesser extent I guess Google is also donating by hosting the projects infrastructure for free, notably YouTube but also AppEngine and other things.

Re:Gates Foundation

[Aquitaine]

Wow. What an angry, narrow-minded post. 'Insightful' indeed.

I have no more love for Microsoft than the next guy, but you act like we're all being forced to buy MS products and that every cent they've earned was all but stolen from our pockets, and that, if it weren't stolen from our pockets, we'd be giving all that money to charity ourselves. Yeah, right.

Gates believes that recognition will drive more people to charity than anonymity. As an un-involved businessman who gives a small piece of his small profit to charity every year, I share your preference for anonymous donations, because the cause (whatever it may be) is certainly more important than the donor. This isn't what Gates is arguing. He's saying that whatever harm comes from the recognition factor, at the end of the day, you'll have an order of magnitude more money coming in from people who want that recognition such that, if the cause is so important, funding it an extra order of magnitude is much more important than our anonymity principle. That's a tough case to argue, because vanity is definitely a big piece of philanthropy, and as much as I think stamping people's names on university buildings or theater/classroom seats is dumb, I'd rather have a theater or a classroom with some stranger's name on everything than not have it.

Gates' charity is not 'all about recognition,' either. He honestly believes that recognition is an important piece of the cycle; you're free to disagree, but as I imagine that neither you nor I have achievements that even come close to what his charity accomplishes in a single year, I think it's very easy for us to throw stones and paint him as a jerk.

As it happens, I actually don't completely support a big piece of what his charity does -- focusing on disease in Africa -- but it's foolish and simply wrong to suggest that Gates is just a successful crook rather than an accomplished individual who is free to spend the fruits of his labor as he pleases.

Re:Gates Foundation

[Beetle B.]

The criticisms presented there seem to essentially be criticisms that could be thrown at any charity.

This. Essentially, the criticisms are saying that the money could be better utilized, and not saying that it is doing any damage as it is. Put another way, had Bill Gates never provided the money in the first place (which is his right), nothing would be better. The Foundation isn't making anything in the world worse.

Re:Gates Foundation

[Aquitaine]

I was just talking about that subject this morning, as it happens. The argument against fighting disease in Africa basically says that, when you spend hundreds of millions fighting diseases and starvation that kill children in Africa in countries without well-developed, democratic societies, what you get in 20-30 years is a large population of healthy young adults who are still in a country without a developed society, without even a semi-modern economy, and without much modern healthcare outside of what other countries donate. In other words, you have a population that is vastly larger than what the country can economically support, and you don't have jobs for them, so you get a lot of militant young guys whose pasttimes are either making lots of babies or causing problems.

Now, that's a gross oversimplification of the problem, and I'm actually not sold on it as a reason to say 'bah, let disease kill millions!' as that's a pretty cold stance to take. You'll sometimes hear opponents of this kind of charity point out that disease is Nature's way of controlling population, but you could justify quite a few scary things with that reasoning.

I do think that the 'feel good about yourself by donating to starving children' drive of the last 60-70 years is shortsighted in this respect, but of course it's much easier to feed even large numbers of starving people than it is to set up a modern government and economy in some of these African countries, assuming even that you have the right to try and do so (which is a big assumption).

In other words, not unlike Mr. Gates himself, the 'disease and starvation in Africa' subject is a complex one that has a lot more going on than the sound bytes you usually hear. I haven't reached a conclusion on Africa because most of the conversation about it goes like this:

Feels Good Guy: I just gave $1,000 to charity and saved the lives of 100 kids in Africa!
Skeptical Guy: What about their education? Their future health care? Do they have a chance at being self-sufficient later or will they simply need even more external support as they get older?
Feels Good Guy: Racist!

Anyway, that's what's (potentially) wrong with it. I tried to paint a pretty neutral picture because I really do want to hear more actual conversation on the subject rather than the knee-jerk stuff that's out there.

Re:Gates Foundation

[BasilBrush]

But given that the Gates Foundation spends money on third world development as well, that seems to mostly satisfy that reservation of yours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation

Of course the foundation and every other charity can do little about the politics of some countries. But letting people needlessly die because they are in a country which currently has a bad government is not really on. Besides citizens of those countries will not concern themselves with fixing their politics whilst they are still concerned with basic survival. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

Re:attention to the polarised

[Sponge Bath]

"He's an overflowing cup filled with the very cream of human goodness. In all the time I've known him he's never done anything immoral." - Hanover Fiste

I love LaTeX, but really, now

[Mathinker]

> started using LaTeX, which is older but vastly superior to Word

I love LaTeX, it produces beautifully typeset math, but for your average biologist, English professor, etc., I can see that something a bit less high-powered and easier to use ("what you see is approximately what you get") would be more optimal.

In other words, it's not chance that many academics don't use LaTeX.

Re:attention to the polarised

[drinkypoo]

Gates Foundation makes for-profit investments that are killing the very people they claim to be helping

Gates is personally heavily invested in big Pharma

You have stuff to learn from this guy.

Yeah, how to hide in plain sight and control governments.

Re:attention to the polarised

[hedwards]

No it doesn't. He started giving money away because his dad yelled at him about not giving anything back. William Gates Sr has been well known around Seattle for a long time. And one of the things he's known for is his generosity and more recently his push for an income tax on only high earners to compensate the state for the relative free ride that those individuals get under the current sales tax system.

Gates complains a situation he created

[walterbyrd]

Gates complains about smart Americans all going to Wall Street instead of R&D. But Gates has gone before the US congress, many times, and argued that even more US tech workers should lose their jobs to H1B visa workers.

Just last year, even as Microsoft was firing US tech workers by the thousands, Microsoft was simultaneously hiring their H1B replacements.

Due to the situation that Gates himself has helped create, smart Americans would be stupid to train for STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) jobs.

Re:Gates complains a situation he created

[DarkFencer]

No - what often happens with H1B is the lying. You ever see those job postings which ask for impossible things like 20 years experience with Java or 7 years experience with Windows 7? The companies that want an excuse for H1B will accept (knowing its false) that the H1B applicants actually have that experience. They will use that excuse to say "Look - we can only find people with H1B that have this experience! We need to hire internationally!".

I'm not saying all the time impossible skill requirements are because of this (there are ignorant people often writing job requirements) but it is true sometimes.

Re:attention to the polarised

[FuckingNickName]

Yeah, what's happening here is that someone with a lot of capital is investing it to increase the amount of money available. This is what almost all well-funded foundations do. It would be, you hopefully realise, fucking stupid to either stuff the money under the mattress or give it all away immediately.

Now, such investments will almost certainly in some ways trickle down to operations which are harmful to some people in some way. Every cent you have in a bank or other investment account is doing a similar thing. It is perfectly legitimate to call a foundation up on this in the hope that you can encourage them to make investments you consider more ethically sound, but it doesn't imply some sort of plot to exploit / harm the ones you're helping.

In Gates' specific case he's tried to stop the investment side from interfering with the giving side and vice versa to prevent conflicts of interest. The inevitable result is that sometimes an investment will appear in some indirect way to harm a charitable effort. Perhaps you can argue that each side should keep a closer eye on what the other is doing.

Re:attention to the polarised

[FuckingNickName]

Even if his giving today is completely the result of his dad persuading him, what exactly is wrong with that? Are you saying that goodness is only goodness if the decision to be good is made in a vacuum?

"Yeah, he saved my life, but he only saved my life because last Thursday his grandmother encouraged him to attend a First Aid course." The guy still considered the options and made the final decision to attend the course / give away the money. He didn't have to.