Regarding the Fake News section and trust in media.
I would love to see a tool or company that holds the mainstream news sources accountable. Over the last two days the major news sources have been pushing a blatantly false "truth" ("Muslim Ban"). Intention of this post is not to get into a political discussion of this!
Every time I, as a heavy news consumer, see the BBC, NYT etc push a story which I know to be false or extremely misleading, I lose more and more trust.
I value the benefits that the mainstream press provides (checking sources, editorial discretion etc), but as I see more and more fake or misleading stories, I lose trust. I think this is a common feeling across many in the West.
edit: Could someone also clarify if these are intended for US only? I have a couple of ideas in mind for the UK which has a great amount of open source data regarding Gov.
edit edit: Apologies for mods if my example has derailed this thread a bit. Just used an example fresh in our minds.
I don't want to get too into this, but are you saying that calling the immigration order "Muslim Ban" is a false truth? I am really curious on why you think this?
Yeah me either as it is off topic. But in response, it is not a ban on people of one religion entering the country. It is a ban on people from 7 terror prone countries entering.
For the passing news consumer, it would be very easy to be led to believe that Muslims are banned from entering the US.
Does any of that change the hard facts that what was enacted is not a ban on people coming to the US based on their religion. Because that is the pure fact.
So we should just keep dismissing his obvious intentions because he hasn't fully executed on them at this precise moment? You can keep explaining away his actions based on technicalities all you want, but his intentions are clear to most people in the US and around the world.
We should absolutely not be dismissing his seeming intentions. There should be massive focus on this. But that does not excuse conflating opinion/analysis with fact.
Accurate reporting of the news is so tremendously important. Every single time that the mainstream media is called out for presenting opinion as fact, the public lose a tiny bit more faith in the veracity of the media.
The Trump administration media strategy is so crystal clear I do not know why there is any confusing about what is going on.
Every time a mainstream publication presents an analysis/opinion as fact, when it turns out Not to be true, Trump admin. calls them out on it and erodes trust further. This is their strategy. Keep the mainstream media falling into this trap and erode public confidence.
I think the ONLY way to counteract this very effective strategy is to clearly separate the two.
Report on the facts as they are. Also provide analysis and opinion that is clearly marked as such. This is so damn important, regardless of where you stand on the issue discussed.
"(b) Upon the resumption of USRAP admissions, the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, is further directed to make changes, to the extent permitted by law, to prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality. Where necessary and appropriate, the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security shall recommend legislation to the President that would assist with such prioritization."
Again disproves your claim about "A ban on 7 Muslim-majority countries with exceptions for minority religions".
The "ban" is religion-blind. In the future, as refugee claims processing resumes, minorities can be prioritized; it does not "ban" with religion-specific exclusions altogether... now, or then.
You're right, sorry - quoted the wrong passage. This is the one I meant to:
"(e) Notwithstanding the temporary suspension imposed pursuant to subsection (a) of this section, the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security may jointly determine to admit individuals to the United States as refugees on a case-by-case basis, in their discretion, but only so long as they determine that the admission of such individuals as refugees is in the national interest — including when the person is a religious minority in his country of nationality facing religious persecution"
Determining truth is hard, and as you say the trouble is that everyone does propaganda. We are in a "fog of war" situation.
Maybe a better approach would be to focus on ways of securely authenticating, signing, and delivering primary sensory data like photos, video, audio, and transcripts and doing so without interpretation.
This would be very useful, giving how easy it is nowadays to forge things. It's still a huge risk if discovered - that's why I think it doesn't happen that often - but from the technical point, every other kid knows enough Photoshop to make a convincing fake these days.
Another two things to focus on:
- a better way to get an overview of a story and its evolution - something to collate news reports in order to easy see what's the current aggregate knowledge (trivial example: see how causalty rates tend to fluctuate for the first few hours/days of a disaster, and how the blame gets shifted around before appropriate investigations conclude)
- a better way to follow redactions and corrections - it's too easy to read an outraging story that later turns out to be completely false, but to never get the memo that the story was invalidated
"Fake News" is completely making things up facts like "Trump punched the Pope today" for the sake of clicks. Calling recent actions as a "Muslim ban" is an interpretation of real events, including quotes by Rudy Giuliani and Flynn's son calling it a "Muslim ban" themselves. I would not consider it fake news, just an order executed with enough plausible deniability that they can prey on people's newfound obsession with fake news and call legitimate interpretations as such.
A high-profile author of the policy is on camera --- video you can easily find for yourself --- saying that they were tasked with devising a Muslim ban, and that he is proud of the legal chicanery they employed to make it "legal".
This subthread, of course, an entirely off-topic divergence from the subject at hand.
Yes you are right that he had done so. And if he had signed into law a ban people coming to the country based on their religion, then the papers plastering "Trump enacts Muslim Ban" would be accurate. But that is not the case.
When was the last time you saw a law that was in plain English saying exactly what it did such as "No more Muslim immigrants"? The intention was clear, putting it in such obvious terms makes it obviously unconstitutional, so the language puts a few restrictions that accomplishes it as well they could.
Would you prefer if the headline was "Trump Wants Muslim Ban, Gets as Close as He Can"?
I think "Trump's Travel Ban may be the first step to implementing Muslim ban" would be a fair headline for the topic. I agree with 'alva that news reports should make a clear distinction between what is, what was meant by that, and what some people say it might be.
> Over the last two days the major news sources have been pushing a blatantly false "truth" ("Muslim Ban"). Intention of this post is not to get into a political discussion of this!
Well, if you're going to try to build a mechanism to hold the mainstream media accountable, you'll really need to create a standard on when a summarization is inaccurate.
If the media was reporting on, "a ban on travelers from majority Muslim countries by a president who has promised his supporters a ban on Muslims" would that still be misleading? And if opponents of the ban called it a "Muslim ban", would media outlets be allowed to report on that fact?
For the record, I've seen NYT and BBC call this a "travel ban", "Trump's ban" and in quotes designed to indicate attribution "'Muslim ban'". All of these seem reasonable and factual.
Your thoughts?
== EDIT ==
A headline that reads simply "muslim ban" shouldn't be considered fake news (in my opinion), so long as it provides a full explanation of the ban and who is affected.
It is an editorializing title, but there's a massive difference between editorializing and fabrication. I believe calling something "fake news" should be reserved for publications that create falsehoods out of whole cloth. (e.g. "warehouse full of votes cast by illegal immigrants found")
>"a ban on travelers from majority Muslim countries by a president who has promised his supporters a ban on Muslims" would that still be misleading?
That would be a very accurate summary. Not misleading in the slightest.
>" And if opponents of the ban called it a "Muslim ban", would media outlets be allowed to report on that fact?"
Absolutely, but it should not be presented as fact that "Donald Trump has enacted a Muslim Ban". "People have described this as a Muslim Ban" is a fair representation.
>For the record, I've seen NYT and BBC call this a "travel ban", "Trump's ban" and in quotes designed to indicate attribution "'Muslim ban'". All of these seem reasonable and factual
That is far more responsible. However if you google news search Muslim Ban on the day it was announced, this is Not what the majority of news sources were doing.
One minor nit. "A ban on travelers from certain majority Muslim countries..." would be accurate. As written, it implies every majority Muslim country is affected, which is not true.
Of course, the more clarifications you add, the less it reads like a headline...
Exactly -- and this is a distinction that journalistic integrity is supposed to clarify. According to Wikipedia there are at least 22 majority Muslim countries[1]. If this were a "Muslim Ban", then much more than 7 (one third) would be listed.
I think this is the only relevant point here. For example, the Washington Post has only referred to it as a "travel ban". The phrase "Muslim ban" appears in opinion headlines, or a couple times when it is directly stated to be a quote. The New York Times uses "travel ban" and "immigration ban". It is newsworthy than members of congress and many organizations have called it a "Muslim ban" but news organizations are not directly using that phrase.
The Washington Post emailed a story ("News Alert Fri., Jan. 27, 2017 7:39 p.m.") that described the travel constraints as an unqualified "... 90-day halt to all entry from seven Muslim-majority countries". That's a flat lie, and it was eventually changed on the website.
If only the mainstream media would stick to following these principles enumerated here, rather than blatantly taking sides (even when it's unnecessary for them to do so):
I was pretty disillusioned already, but the reporting on the Dakota Access Pipeline has been such a pack of lies, the state actually had to throw up a page to explains some if it[1][2]. I remember the old saying that the person who cleans up after the elephants has a whole different view of the circus.
Nothing false about the example you cited. The architect of the ban, Rudy Giulani confirmed on air that the goal was to ban Muslims and his team's task was to create a legal mechanism for that to happen[1].
It is totally false to say Trump has enacted a law to ban people from entering the US based on their religion. Totally false.
Is it true that Rudy Giulani has said this. It also true Trump has said in the past he wants a Muslim ban. It is also true that many people believe this action is a step in the direction of a Muslim Ban.
But this is not a Muslim Ban at this stage and presenting it as such is a lie and misleading.
I agree that alarms should be going of all over the place in the mainstream news about this action and would encourage all of the opinion pieces to stress this could be a step towards a full Muslim Ban. That is for the Opinion pieces however.
He's instituted a ban based on ethnic origin from countries that are majority-Muslim (for that reason), has in the past called for a Muslim ban, and the architect of the ban has said it's a Muslim ban.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and in a feat of amazing linguistic ability for a waterfowl looks you dead in the eye and says "I'M A DUCK!" what are we supposed to call it, a giraffe?
To engage with pedantry for a moment, the ban may be more precisely an ethnicity or nationality one, but that's just as wholly unjust. Don't lose sight of the forest for the trees. The essential malfeasance here is bigotry written into law, the particular shade of that bigotry is immaterial.
Just a few days ago WaPo and NYT had articles like "OMG OMG entire state department leadership just quit! OMG". An hour later, those had all disappeared or were replaced, because they were actually just let go (their customary resignations were accepted).
Trump will do a lot of damage to the US, but hysterical reporting with such a negative bias does not cast a good light on the US media, and is not the way to go.
If you're concerned about jobs and democracy, open an office in a swing state. The way the us electoral system is organized, every young educated person who moves from the heartland to California is a vote for Trump.
Alternately find some way to get uneducated heartlanders to move to Fresno or something.
Also it would help if you show just the smallest amount of empathy people in the U.S. who don't live in one of two half states. (i.e. people whose tax dollars benefit Stanford and the origin of Silicon Valley in defense contracting, people who buy your products, whose stock market investments make it possible for you to get rich, etc.)
I'm going to pass along something my wife told me about, that happened when she was living in Idaho with her first husband. It was seriously suggested by some of the locals that she should undergo an exorcism. The evil spirit allegedly possessing her, that was to be the target of this procedure: her university education.
There are lot of people in rural areas in the US who not only do not have a lot of education but who have an active antipathy to it.
One shouldn't let this observation degenerate into a stereotype, but I don't think one should dismiss it either.
I try not to let the anti-vaxxers, hippies, or the Hollywood stars brand whole areas, or my experience in San Francisco in 1988 with a broken down car and told to go find a tow truck.
"a lot of education but who have an active antipathy to it."
An yet, I live with people who cherish it right here in rural America. Parents sacrificed to get kids in college. Doctors are listened to (yep, get your shots).
Its ok, really. It is socially acceptable to degrade and demonize all us NFL & MMA watching morons. You can feel superior based on one story, and frankly, most in these parts don't go in for the trouble to correct you. Its not like TV treats people much better.
The funny part is the little digs. The NYT article[1] on TV shows by region claimed folks in rural American liked "Walking Dead" because it is "for people worried about immigration". I'm more thinking that its a fun show and frankly most people here can imagine there survival a lot more than those goofballs in the show.
Oh well. As the graphic floating around Twitter said "you spent 8 years weaponizing the federal government" then you get this.
I guess, I ask if someone had the same story about say, a racial group, would you be passing it along on a board like this as an example of why "uneducated X" would be true?
I find his analysis good on top of being entertaining. Echos a lot of what I've heard living in Red states. Forgot to add that most people around here are just down-to-earth, working-class people who go to work, raise kids, have fun with friends, etc. Normal people.
> There are lot of people in rural areas in the US who not only do not have a lot of education but who have an active antipathy to it.
When a farmer's interaction with "educated folk" are people such as yourself who look down their nose at him because _he's a farmer_ and you have a degree in _gender studies_ ("I mean gawd, that poor hick doesn't know anything!"), can you blame them?
Your wording could have used some improvement, but I think you're onto something about the regional concentration of influence and money being a negative thing for the well-being of the nation.
We need to stop writing off states that aren't progressive enough as places unworthy of investment or business. Part of the problem is that "founder culture" isn't big in smaller cities away from the west coast. Some time and investment towards teaching students at state colleges and community colleges across the nation, along with some actual investments could go a very long way.
Of course, most VCs already have a deluge of bad ideas that will come to them, so they don't think there is much to be gained from seeking out new sources of ideas. But that's elitism and laziness. There are talented and driven Americans who may not talk with the same lingo or approach the same problems the same way, but leaving them out (or requiring them to move and be surrounded by others who do think how VCs want) will only entrench the existing divide.
It is more exit culture than founders culture. SV may not be the best place for a company with less than $500k in funding (say you want to start Twitter) but it probably is the best place if you need to scale up fast and seek progressively larger rounds or get acquired by a big player.
I don't think you understand how tolerance works. It goes both ways and is hard for a reason. If you demonize all the people not living in cities or west coast, no wonder they reject the ideas that come out of these places.
I've been working on a project that makes data-driven reporting more transparent: https://thegamma.net, which might very well fit with the accountable news theme. Any feedback on how to make it better would be much appreciated :-).
Hmm, we applied with our non-profit tool, Umbrella App, for managing the physical and digital security of journalists and activists (https://www.secfirst.org) a few years ago when we were only getting started but didn't get in. It seems like it's needed now more than ever, so we might look at making another application to help bring us to the next stage of our development.
I think we need something a little more revolutionary for news than holding current news sources to account, or fact-checking tools. Most of the problems we see in our news outlets are around the competition for attention as the article says, but also around old business models for newspapers/tv which still haven't changed to adapt to a world in which anyone can report from anywhere live using a simple phone and anyone in the world could contribute to a story, if only they'd let them.
Better something that encourages primary sources on the ground to contribute (video, text audio), and puts them in context chronologically, geographically and perhaps socially, but is not based on an advertising business model.
Difficult to know what it could look like to but we need something fundamentally new which uses the internet not just as another medium.
It's an interesting idea, and one I've been thinking about for a while.
Issue is, I think that's kind of what social media is meant for. Anyone can contribute news as a primary source and share it with others online via sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
So my worry is that any system like this would basically be just another social media service (albeit with a 'news slant' in the marketing material) and therefore be very difficult to promote.
User created news is an idea that seems obvious and logical in theory, just very hard to promote in a world where it's competing with thousands of other services offering (in your user's eyes) very similar functionality.
Yes sure, Twitter (moments) and fb (live) are converging on this to some extent.
I'm thinking of something less social and more verifiable source of info though. You'd need incentives to keep it real, probably some form of verifying in a local web of trust, and incentives to read/watch so grouping by geography and interest.
I'm thinking more make your own local newspaper than share videos to your friends. Probably you'd have to start in a niche like school news and expand out.
Twitter is really interesting here because they are making and breaking news and being used as a broadcast medium in spite of huge failings for that use (spam, trolls), I think they're the closest thing but still a long way from something letting people publish verified info to the world in chunks bigger than a procrustean tweet.
Thanks for clarifying on this. Such a system definitely needs a way to verify news, though I'm not quite how a web of trust might be integrated here.
Grouping by geography and interest is definitely needed (Medium/WordPress style tags can help with both here, especially if users can follow/subscribe to them).
Making your own newspaper sounds interesting as well. You mean like a sort of blog or Medium publication? Or a social network type feed?
I think you need the feeds from verified individuals first, then you need some new way to integrate those resembling neither Twitter nor newspapers but tailored to specific audiences who know their stuff and can contribute/correct too. There should be no comments section, the article should be made of comments with context and commentary. For example some people do stats, some do a map some do commentary from the ground, and maybe someone ties it together.
What are your thoughts on the way news should evolve, I'm genuinely really interested in this area.
I'm happily engaged in a DevOps startup and won't pursue this idea, but I proposed a new kind of news format shortly after the election at https://joshpadnick.com/2016/11/25/a-proposal-for-a-new-type.... Personally, I'd love to be a consumer of something like this, or to know if there are startups working on this.
I'm unfortunately otherwise occupied at the moment so I won't be jumping on the occasion right now, but I favourited your comment for further reference. There's lots of good thoughts you put into that post, and I'd love to help - time allowing - if someone is going to take responsibility for making this happen. Thank you for writing that post!
Reading what you wrote... It almost seems like facts in news is a dependency management issue?
I mean, it's going to be a way more complicated dependency situation than with code - imagine a fact determined by a study which had to make decisions about categories - but the gist remains:
An interpretation of facts depends on those facts, some of which themselves are collections/transforms on facts, but ultimately, there's a physical reality from which they stem.
I am now running my own news startup (oko.ai) and have secured a deal with the biggest news agency in Portugal. And fact-checking is on our pipeline of features, thank you for the share.
Also do you think we are in the right spot to go for this YC call?
I think an important question to ask with regards to Democracy is "why do people believe the things they believe" or "how do they acquire their political beliefs?" The biggest influencers are likely 1) their family and 2) their friends. Essentially, they come from social interaction.
People need a (fun) way to increase the number of real social interactions they have with other people. What's really dangerous right now is that many (including Liberals) are socially shunning those who don't share their political beliefs (or are not pure enough in their beliefs). Pushing people to the fringes of society will just force them to find a home in the most extreme among us.
For a long time, Americans relied on social clubs that allowed people to engage in diverse political discussions but also build friendly relationships with others. I would like to see startups try to revive long lived, persistent social organizations that are aimed first at building a friendly community among its members and second at making people listen to different points of view.
I don't think this is going to be possible until the basic arguments over what information sources are factual is resolved. Over the past decade I've seen the social structures that I grew up bifurcate because discussion between the two sides is basically impossible.
I don't think the basic arguments over facts are going to be resolved so long as people shun those who don't agree with them politically. Especially in the current social media climate, false claims spread like wildfire while the debunkings languish because people only spread or listen to stuff that supports their existing beliefs. My Twitter feed is probably typical for HN and I've been seeing this multiple times a day. There isn't even any media panic over it like the one over conservative "fake news" because it supports their existing beliefs too; often journalists are helping spread the claims on social media like everyone else.
Creating a more fair representation in government that doesn't only involve the duopoly parties as well as getting money out politics should be the two main priorities before anything else. Unless these two things are fixed first, everything else will continue to be broken.
@sama I'm heartened to see "Jobs" included in this list, but can you clarify whether this is a change in investment focus - will you be giving priority to startups which have greatest potential for job creation? If so, how would you qualify / prioritize those jobs (ie., part-time, full-time, educational requirements)?
A category of applications that I'd like to see YC helping along are those things that could help ordinary people run for office. The things off the top of my head I can see technology helping with:
* Leveraging social networking to generate social permission for people to stand for office, which I think is the most important obstacle facing people who might consider running --- far more so than money.
* Using technology to bypass the expensive outreach vectors traditional candidates are stuck with.
* Informing constituencies and potential candidates about the local offices available to run for.
* Crowdfunding campaigns with Kickstarter-like dynamics to make it safer to commit funds to speculative candidates.
* Capturing the stories of people who have or are standing for election, so that we can all compare notes and see what the challenges (or lack thereof) are.
* Building informal parties and coalitions of officeholders in states and major metro areas, to build tickets and slates of candidates around common ideals.
* Building common platforms for constituent services, so that fresh new officeholders can outcompete incumbents both in responsiveness and in making their newfound influence available to their constituencies to pressure other parts of government.
I've been calling my Senators about the Sessions nomination nonstop for the past 2 weeks and I've gotten calls through just 3 times. I haven't the slightest clue how to reach officeholders in my Chicago suburb. Clearly there's room for major innovation here.
Incidentally, if you're building things like this, I'd love to help in any way I can. I'm easy to contact. I've set a goal for myself to get a specific number of friends and acquaintances to run, and I'm happy with the progress I've been able to make and pretty excited about the concept.
> Using technology to bypass the expensive outreach vectors traditional candidates are stuck with.
This is a huge frustration of mine. It is nearly impossible to get the attention of politicians unless I'm willing to spend a vast amount of my time on the phone, because they don't pay attention to email, social media, etc.
It would be awesome to have a social media platform that is dedicated to political communication. And with ample features related to communicating about policy. Like for example:
1) The ability to search for a pending bill based on the text of the bill, highlight text, and comment directly on it.
2) The ability to +1 someone else's comments in a meaningful way.
3) The ability to publicly challenge a politician's claims through research, data citations, or other types of analysis.
4) The ability to find the appropriate politicians/appointees for a specific concern.
5) The ability to facilitate directional communication from politicians on specific issues. It would be great if a politician had a common platform to explain in detail why they voted yay/nay or abstained from voting for something, with quick crossreferences, data visualization, etc.
I have a feeling part of why they don't use tech solutions is that the 'cost' of making a statement is valuable information: if a ton of people are willing to spend 10 minutes to make a call, that tells you something. Having 100 people, half of them Russian bots, click on a "+1" button, might not tell you as much.
I know this to be the case. But then, that suggests to me that this is another place where tech has a chance to make a dent, not by short-circuiting the "proof of work", but by coordinating the effort so that people know how and when to put it in.
I know this to be the case. But then, that suggests to me that this is another place where tech has a chance to make a dent, not by short-circuiting the "proof of work", but by coordinating the effort so that people know how and when to put it in.
It's a costly signal [0], that's for sure. But what is unfortunate is that it is a signal that is far more costly for some than it is for others. It's the reason why minorities, immigrants, renters, etc., are underrepresented in local politics...angry white-haired retired homeowners with nothing better to do than complain about other people parking in "their" space are the ones that can show up to meetings. Everybody else has far more pressing things to do.
Having worked myself as a constituent contact in a Congressional office, I can tell you from experience that you are exactly right. Someone who's willing to hand-write a letter and pay for a stamp is seen as a more motivated constituent -- more likely to care enough about the issue to have it decide how they'll vote in November, in other words -- than someone who makes a call; and the caller is more motivated than someone who clicks "send" on an email; and the emailer is more motivated than someone who signs a Web petition.
For a long time, in fact, this mindset meant that a really effective way to "hack" the Congressional contact system was to send your message in a telegram -- because if you were willing to pay to have a messenger run your message across town and deliver it by hand, you were assumed to be very motivated indeed!
(I doubt that's true anymore, of course; not least because I'm not sure you can send telegrams anymore. But now I'm wondering if you could get the same effect these days by sending your message via FedEx's most expensive service...)
They legally aren't allowed to check but if a staffer or politician recognizes someone's name and remembers that they met at a fundraiser, it obviously influences them, at least subconsciously.
I was never asked to; Congressional offices and campaign offices are supposed to be legally distinct, and that information would have all been held by the campaign.
That being said, once the sums you contribute get large enough you will almost certainly get to be known around the office -- either explicitly (e.g. the Chief of Staff tells all the people who handle correspondence "Bob Smith is a good friend of the Congressman's, if you find any messages from him bring those straight to me") or implicitly (e.g. the staff of the Congressional office notices that when Bob Smith comes in to meet with the boss he's ushered right in and stays for a long time). So large contributors' messages can easily get special attention, even without that kind of direct connection to their contributions ever being made.
Yeah, I'm sure if you're a Big Donor that's one thing, but that's not what I want to do. Was just curious if by saying you're a donor on your phone call whether it might make a difference.
> It is nearly impossible to get the attention of politicians unless I'm willing to spend a vast amount of my time on the phone, because they don't pay attention to email, social media, etc.
Mail them a letter. Yes, a letter, on paper. They take those very seriously -- especially when so many of them come in that their office is filled to the rafters with them.
It is nearly impossible to get the attention of politicians unless I'm willing to spend a vast amount of my time on the phone
I almost hate to reveal this "secret" since I thought it was pretty well-known, but if you contribute to your Representative's campaign, there's a pretty good chance you can get a one-on-one or at least attendance to a dinner event. This is much easier with state politicians.
I wonder if they listen more to phone calls or letters if you're a donor. And if so, what kind of dollar amount makes your call 'matter'? I'd happily donate $5 to the local Republican congressman if he'd take my calls more seriously.
My understanding is that the staffs keep their bosses informed about the volume and tone of constituent feedback; if many people are calling in with similar views on an issue, the congressperson will do whatever the constituents want. Being a big donor, or even better, a representative of big donors means that you can influence the congressperson when there is no strong public sentiment, or if you have a very strong policy point.
Five dollars? No. Just search for "[your representative's name] dinner event" and you can find the typical cost of access. For instance, my Rep has required 500 dollar contributions in the past. If you're actually interested, just call up the local party HQ and ask for the next event.
I know that $5 isn't going to get you "real access". It's a token amount so that you can truthfully say you're a donor. My thought was along the lines of "Hi, I'm a donor to XXXX's campaign, and I feel YYYY about ZZZZZ". Make a difference, or not?
Legislating is an information processing task. They're just doing triage. It's your job to get their attention. The only way I've ever gotten my way is when I show up with a crowd. Then whoever's sitting in the chair will do whatever it takes to make you go away.
Nope. I have the wrong hair for it. But what I've learned in the past few weeks is that a suggestion to a friend that they run for office is almost always met favorably; it's a compliment, like "that's a nice jacket", so your worst case scenario is still a positive interaction, but your best case scenario is a small but real chance at changing the world. I'll take that bet any day.
You (and everyone here looking to engage their technological skills in the democratic process) should consider putting some time into the PROGRESSIVE CODERS NETWORK (ProgCode)[0]. They are a non-profit that helps organize and direct volunteer coders, programmers, designers into open-source political projects. They are about connecting and facilitating projects, not dictating what projects should be. They are party-neutral, but seek to empower the people and provide tools for running successful campaigns and being engaged as a citizen.
If you can take away the need for millions of dollars to run a campaign then policy makers aren't beholden to the few wealthy supporters that helped get them elected.
Many of your points are already being worked on and the projects would love more support and input.
Lovely list. I'd add ways to address problems with "congressional fund raising" as discussed by John Oliver (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylomy1Aw9Hk), so congress members can focus on the needs of their constituents rather than those who pay for their re-election run.
TLDR: Replace current campaign managers, consultants, fund raisers, etc.
Which I totally support. But how?
Please ask candidates (past, present and future) about running for office. Better yet, run for office. See what it's like. I highly recommend the training from http://wellstone.org and http://democraticfuture.org. I'm sure there's others.
Also, join some local campaigns and do the grunt work. See how the game is played. Especially fund raising and endorsements.
---
This is not a technical problem.
Like the nerdtopian legislative information systems (https://www.govtrack.us) before, geeks making fascinating tools without deep knowledge won't make a dent.
My direct observation is that (most) successful politicians are careerists. They started as pages, legislative assistants, etc. Makes perfect sense.
At the same time, most of the lowest rung (entry level) offices have a ridiculous number of candidates. Most first time candidates are walk-ons, having no idea how to play the game (me, for example). Most aspirants wash out after their first loss.
Politically, I work on local issues. We recently formed a local working group. So far we're researching and networking.
My personal policy goal is to have an open, transparent redistricting process. Regardless of the heuristics used. Modeled loosely on Iowa's system. Though I'm super partisan, all gerrymandering (disenfranchisement) makes me sick. I want to prevent scenarios like Ohio and Maryland.
I do not yet know how voter efficiency standards will change my plans, goals.
Thomas, I've been thinking about this as well. Here are some additional mechanics that could be used to build a "YC" for democratic candidates:
1) 8 week Training Program - an eight-week training program targeted at lawyers, entrepreneurs, and others who are interested in serving as state and federal legislatures. Candidates have their training and expenses paid for, and they learn all of the key things they need to know to win. It's an open process, where people all over the country can apply, and the program becomes prestigious over time, like Echoing Green or YC.
- Public Speaking Training
- Social Media Growth Hacking
- Fundraising and Donor Management
- Policy Issue Training
2) Shared News: A hacker news type site for democratically minded people to share political articles. Builds inbound attention to the accelerator.
3) Blog: Articles about what it is like to become a politician. It features lots of examples and profiles. Shows everyday people they can do it as well.
- What does the career path look like for someone who joins the House of Representatives?
- How do state senators support themselves?
4) Funder Network: Candidates get introductions to top funders from the state who can help. Each candidate gets a certain amount of intros, and the accelerator manages the process.
5) Fundraising Tools: the candidate is trained in how to use tools, such as a CRM, to manage the process. I've seen a lot of startups struggle with setting up the right infrastructure, and I'm sure candidates have the same challenges.
6) Public Speaking Training: Politicians need to be electrifying. Have politicians train with TV media experts to become compelling in front of the crowd.
7) Digital Profile: Help candidates set up a website, volunteer management tools, and social media tools. Create a standard set of tools for candidates.
9) Growth Hacking Team: a small squad of growth hackers who devise strategies for growth hacking political candidates. This team builds software and strategies, and these tools are disseminated to candidates through the training program. Think of it like a consulting firm within the program.
9) Intern Pool: Many early-stage state legislatures rely on interns to provide the manpower needed for the procedural aspects of campaigning and running office. The accelerator can help recruit thousands of interns from different sources, and it can provide each candidate with a constant stream of interns to provide the manpower needed to win. Interns are given credit for being part of the fellowship program (like YC fellows) and are part of a cohort with shared events, message board, hr people they can talk to.
10) MOOC: make a public MOOC to let people view the training program. This makes people excited about the program and interested in applying. It also helps scale the program, similar to How to Start a Startup.
If you'd like to follow up, my email is in my username.
Along with Crowdfunding/Kickstarter, a platform that allows for the White House's petition signature mechanics for city/state offices (with a lower threshold for "response required" correlated with population for the candidate's office/area) might be a good way to engage constituents: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/about
You could also possibly allow constituents to place donations that would go through if the petition succeeds and a response is given.
This is a great move by YC! I'd also love to see the "left behind" Americans addressed. There's a lot of people hurting in America who need training and jobs for the new economy and investment opportunity. I suggest opening YC branches in a former coal mining states and former manufacturing hubs in lake states. If folks can get their stability, hope and pride back, they'll be less likely to turn to fake news, placing blame on outsiders and divisive politics.
> If folks can get their stability, hope and pride back, they'll be less likely to turn to fake news, placing blame on outsiders and divisive politics.
Hear, hear, I think this is the key. Happy people tend toward stability for the societies they're in. I'm all for education, for anyone who wants it, as much as they want it (price and payer to be negotiated). That said, I suspect that education by itself will not fill the job supply-demand gap, nor that those educated jobs will be well-matched to the places where people live. And, if there's more to life than jobs, then maybe the jobs need to move to where people are, rather than making people move to where the jobs are. I think answers that will work will have to work for, say, everybody in the 'Rust Belt' as they are today, not as they might be if they jump through all the right hoops. For an example some people will dislike, a government run single payer health care system would take the financial burden off of employers as well as being cheaper for employees, supporting small business growth and entrepreneurship. Don't like that example? Fine. Bring on your favorites.
The root of all these problems stem from a lack of effective education.
1) The current methods are highly ineffective for teaching
By getting more effective at teaching children, and helping them to self educate, we get better informed citizens who can interpret news more accurately and effectively participate in democracy.
2) The current goals for education do not align with current & future needs
Our current system is designed to produce factory workers for the industrial economy, which was adapted to produce knowledge workers for the information economy. But we are moving towards full automation of most of those jobs.
We will need to prepare people to be adaptable in a fast changing automated world: more entrepreneurial type skills are needed.
There's been a YC RFS for Education for a long time; it's #7 on the list. YC has had some success in the space with companies like Clever, and for awhile had a sister-program dedicated solely to K-12 startups.
While nice, neither of these strikes me as truly disruptive. The downside is that to achieve the best educational environment, you'd have to open a school which doesn't scale nicely unless you plug into existing "world APIs".
I guess you could start by opening a co-working space with a supervising adult (not teacher, this adult will be there to ensure that the kids aren't killing each other).
There would be teachers accessible via video calls but most of the time would be spent reading or doing work, not passively listening/watching. If you pool these teachers together, you will be able to teach even the most obscure subjects.
In this system, everyone is literally going at their pace.
I think that fundamentally the main objection to this system is that some people learn better in a classroom setting, to which I reply: 21st century education needs to make a transition to turn graduates into self-learners. This can only be achieved with a system that fosters self-learning from very early on.
It's not like you can create self-learners by making students go through a process that's fundamentally as anti-self-learning as possible.
This will also make switching schools extremely painless. You will transition to a new desk. It's like a gym membership, you can totally have two if that's convenient for you for whatever reason.
I think you're exactly right in that the "world APIs" for education are the limiting factor. The major issue is that the assessment process is directly tied to the learning process within a single institution, leading to both being done incredibly inoptimally. It leads to the necessity of standardized tests and exams, and accredited institutions, which limits the potential learning opportunities available to the very few that are recognized on national or global scale.
If a "global assessment API" was decoupled from learning institutions it could capture educational experience as generated by any environment, from standard public schools to non-traditional schools, and we'd see a much more diverse set of educational experiences arise and be able to coexist fairly, meaning that individuals could better shape their individual academic paths without compromise and still be able to operate in the greater academic network.
A universal assessment system can exist in a very scalable way if its built upon social consensus. It would be absolutely impossible given our current models of assessment, especially the ones used on a national or international level. They are just simply far too expensive to begin to capture the breadth or depth of potential experience in academics in a meaningful way.
Today though we have the technology (i.e Ethereum and other decentralized technologies) to (relatively) easily design and deploy incentivized _secure_ systems for social consensus. It would enable systems like the one you're talking about to actually enable not just the teaching of the most obscure subject, but the _recognition_ of them too.
This is something I have been working on building for a while now. I truly believe its the answer to the flaws in our (global, not just American) education system and will be necessary for a truly effective, and universal, one.
> The major issue is that the assessment process is directly tied to the learning process within a single institution, leading to both being done incredibly inoptimally.
Very good point. There are no feedback looks between the two subsystems which makes them both suck.
One point I'd like to raise though is that I'm not sure if it's really optimal have 'assessments'. I have some fundamental issues with assigning numerical values to things that are sometimes hard to judge numerically.
I think that a much better system would be that each student's work is stored in the cloud where it's accessible and everyone can judge for himself.
And I think that we should move away from test to projects that are largely designed by the student under the guidance of teachers.
I don't think assessments are fundamentally numerical. Assessing is at its core simply about recognizing experience and I think systemized ways to do so would be incredibly valuable, as opposed to an ad-hoc system where everyone builds their own judgements. While that is more flexible its also far far less efficient. Companies hiring, other educational institutions, all need a way to efficiently parse experience without having do it themselves, and so a systemized assessment network I think will be necessary.
Experience could even just be a boolean value, has or doesn't have, instead of anything numerical. Or there could emerge separate numerical systems for each area of knowledge. The important part is that the system is based on social consensus of people who actually possess the experience, so that its the most relevant and applicable system possible.
I don't know whether either of these set out with the idea of creating the Primer, but they seem similar.
Osmo - https://www.playosmo.com/en/ - seems pretty cool. Uses the iPad camera and packets of materials for interactive learning experiences. It could evolve into something like the Primer.
"One Laptop per Child" has/had similar goals while not being nearly as advanced/cohesive as the Primer.
For sure, but the point is that YC is welcoming to educational disruption even if the submissions so far haven't been very impactful.
I think that fundamentally the main objection to this system is that some people learn better in a classroom setting, to which I reply: 21st century education needs to make a transition to turn graduates into self-learners. This can only be achieved with a system that fosters self-learning from very early on.
I grew up in a very traditional system that would remind most Americans of the 1950s, and it hasn't impacted my self-learning ability at all. I'm fortunate in that my parents liked books and I was able to read by age 3 and as long as I can remember I had firm opinions about what I wanted to read. I'm not altogether convinced by your vision of students as intellectual tabulae rasa that can be variously configured as drones, autodidacts, or innovators.
A student's home and socioeconomic life can have as much or more impact on their intellectual development as the kind of school they attend, and the idea that perfecting education will automatically nullify other factors is a rock on which many would-be reformers have come to grief.
I grew up in a very traditional system that would remind most Americans of the 1950s, and it hasn't impacted my self-learning ability at all. I'm fortunate in that my parents liked books and I was able to read by age 3 and as long as I can remember I had firm opinions about what I wanted to read.
Poor people's children self-teach. They definitely learn. They don't necessarily learn the culture and values that would allow them to function gracefully in the modern economy.
A student's home and socioeconomic life can have as much or more impact on their intellectual development as the kind of school they attend, and the idea that perfecting education will automatically nullify other factors is a rock on which many would-be reformers have come to grief.
People's subculture/tribe and actual community are a tremendous part of who people are and how well they can access resources and knowledge in the world. Religious and various civic organizations understand this. Often governments only understand this as a source of strength for their "opposition." Opposition movements and rebellions understand this.
Most significantly, school reform programs like Harlem Children's Zone understand this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Children's_Zone To fight poverty, you have to involve the whole community on your side. If your initiative is fighting the community, it cannot fight poverty.
But I think its worth bringing up again as it is seemingly at the root of all the issues surfaced by the Trump presidency, which is the main driver of this new RFS
Agreed - we're in the middle of an education bubble, as the growth in student loan debt has fast outstripped the growth in income for graduates.
As technological automation continues, there is demand for a system that is capable of retraining displaced workers, and doesn't create modern indentured servants in the process.
As others said, education was already on an earlier RFS. But it's still important, maybe more than ever.
As you stated, I also believe that education it's the root of most problems. Today, almost everyone learns the same way as they did 100 years ago: A teacher going through a non-customized textbook that was written by a small number people. It's a linear learning path and highly ineffective. It's also inefficient, as teacher to student ratios are mostly around 1-to-20 (I am talking about K-12, not college or MOOCs).
I believe that we can overcome a lot of problems of education by applying technology. More concretely, we should be able to provide more customized, higher quality content for people at young and old age. This, while creating more genuine excitement for science and scientific thinking. This means, we have to rethink the current teacher/student paradigm. And I don't mean by merely providing tools to teachers or copy/pasting textbooks to online videos.
I mean by curating content that excites, using some ML to create an optimal and dynamic learning path per student and making it fit to the busy daily lives of people who don't have time to watch 1 hour lectures every week when they get home from work. This might seem like advertising, by I am working on exactly such a project and thought it would be ok to mention it here, because it is relevant for the discussion and other startups were mentioned in the comments, too. It's called Humbot (humbot.io) and I am happy to hear your comments and start a discussion on what the radical improvements in education must be over the next decade.
Education and News are two sides of the same coin. At some point the majority of the adult population makes the decision to learn about the world from entertainment companies. We should reanalyze what news and continuing education mean, relative to each other.
As far as pure education companies, we need more software platforms for building curriculums collaboratively, some combination of wikia, github, wirecutter, and khanacademy.org. You may be thrown by my inclusion of wirecutter, but concensus based consumer reports type information, leading to populations making better decisions, helps cut through the paradox of choice. It also teaches people HOW to make decisions, and how to evaluate choices. It should be easy for anyone to fork, remix, contribute, or request corrections. Even collaborative documentary editing software, or the ability to sift through ALL the worlds lectures on a topic, and assessable the best bits. As long as teams of strangers can collaborate and fork, the world will have more shoulder standing giants, and less reinventing of the wheel.
As a teacher, I would kill for a collaborative curriculum and assessment tool. A "backend" service for creating, managing, and personalizing curriculum materials would go a long way to mitigate the absolutely astounding amount of redundant labor that goes on in schools (you're really creating a comprehension quiz for To Kill a Mockingbird from scratch?).
Contrary to popular belief - even here on HN - teachers are chronically making known sub-optimal instructional tradeoffs because they lack the time to complete tasks as they should ideally be completed. Very little seems to be done to create tools to improve the instructional process (that doesn't involve removing the teacher from that very process - e.g. MOOCs, Khan Academy, Knewton, etc.). Those digital alternative absolutely have a place, but there's a lot of opportunity to fundamentally improve the instructional work being done by teachers in classrooms every day.
Your suggestions are a great place to start:
- network instructional materials and lessons so they can be accessed in their entirety by other teachers
- network assessment materials that are tied (on the question/answer level) to standards and common goals (e.g. comprehension quip above).
Email is in profile if anyone would like to continue this discussion in a more detailed manner outside the thread.
dont you think at some point the optimul remix of Roman History 101 University lecture clips, might exist, and then it becomes a process improvement task to make it a little better all the time, rather than constanly recreating a nearly similar lecture for each school.
I really believe forking is important. People might disagree with concensus and have a better way to do things that is looked down upon by the mass. One curriculum for all sounds like every egg in one basket.
I think there's massive scope for improving the delivery of educational material, but most of my ideas have been related to later secondary education and university and to what I as a learner have wanted, not what the teacher/educator has wanted.
It's been an open question for me how to improve education in earlier years where there's probably less scope for self-learning, and more focus should be on how to improve the teachers' efficiency and effectiveness. Since my own kids are starting school now, these earlier years have taken on new significance, but since I don't have a background in education, I haven't known where to start. I'm more at the point of "How can I help?!", since I have very little visibility into the frustrations that teachers experience on a day-to-day basis, but I can build software, if software can be part of the solution.
Sent you an email, but I'm sure there are others who would love to be involved in the discussion...
I have a platform that can be used to build it all but could use a good business partner and extra JS/Mobile developers can't hurt.
The business partner would help make pilots in schools and colleges. Just maybe a class here or there at first, then prove it out.
Please see http://qbix.com/blog for how we could partner together. If you are interested to talk, see my HN profile.
I agree with Bernie that college should be free but disagree that it should be free in its current state. It can b made much cheaper if you flip the classroom in the way I indicated above. That is what should be made free (ie paid for by the government).
In Primary School (everything up to High School) we need to reform the terrible top-down dynamics. I know about them secondhand because my mom is a teacher. School is a daycare center for parents who work. Kids are overdiagnosed with ADHD. Paul Graham wrote about school being a veritable prison back in 2003 (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html) Things only got worse in the last 20 years.
We can start moving toward an education system that works once we agree on some core values.
Someone else said that the goal of education is to produce factory workers. I disagree. I think the goal of education is to allow one teacher to effectively babysit up to 30 children at once. With both parents working, it simply isn't possible for them to give kids the attention they need to keep them healty and sane, let alone educate them on how to be part of society. Schools are supposed to do this instead, but the primary goal is training the children to be manageable at a ratio of 30 to 1.
Before we can do anything else, we have to acknowledge that the first goal is getting the kids out of their parents hair. This is the fundamental truth that everyone knows but refuses to acknowledge when they're debating policy. After that, we can make other decisions that make more sense. The lecture-hall format really only makes sense when the number of students is unmanageable for a single adult. If was only 10 kids per teacher, they would actually have time for more useful activities, applying knowledge, giving guidance to students who are ready to strike out on their own.
Tripling the number of teachers is going to cost some money, and application-type lessons costs more than lecture-type lessons. Some ways to deal with this - as a society, acknowledge that creating educated, well informed citizens is not a fuzzy, feel-good liberal goal, but a necessary factor for everyone's safety, including the permanently child-free. I think most people agree with that already, but since many people voting are full grown adults who still aren't properly educated, not everyone will come to the same conclusion, and therefore a massive infusion of public money for this idea isn't likely to happen. So I think a successful, disruptive idea will be one that gets around the cost problem of a much lower student-to-teacher ratio. I don't think remote teaching is going to be the answer here.
My wife and I are fortunate enough that she can be a stay at home mom. I grew up the same way. Were middle class, though increasingly probably slightly mid to upper these days. We don't need the babysitter, and want our kids to be educated, so that is the focus. We help them with homework, etc. We're lucky.
So from my perspective, having both parents working is the root issue. It's an economic necessity for probably 80+% of the country, which I suppose is really the root issue.
Ultimately it all boils down to resources, time and money, and there is never enough to go around. I don't have an answer for that :(
I agree. And some men want to be stay at home dads, and sometimes both parents want to work, and sometimes there's a single parent who's falling apart trying to do everything. I wish we could agree that all those choices are valid, and allow some social safety nets that make it possible.
> I agree. And some men want to be stay at home dads, and sometimes both parents want to work, and sometimes there's a single parent who's falling apart trying to do everything. I wish we could agree that all those choices are valid, and allow some social safety nets that make it possible.
I think it goes back to what you said first. We need to agree on some core values.
I don't want any more of my money going to people who mocked the MSNBC host[0] when she said "children belong to the collective". It seems pretty obvious to me. If we are all paying for your children, I better have a say in how we raise OUR children.
Clearly, a lot of people do not see it that way. Why should we have tax deductions for people to have children? Why should we have tax breaks for people to put money away for their children to go to college? I for one support an end to these tax breaks. Lets send a clear message: If your children are your own and do not belong to the society, then you can raise them by yourself. If you can't afford to do so, we'll simply put you in a debtor's prison.
I grew up in post-communist Europe. In the past, we had state propaganda that told children to turn in their parents[1], among other wonderful products of that line of thinking. So I'd be very careful with ideas like this one. (I still support mandatory vaccinations and/or sane defaults.)
>Lets send a clear message: If your children are your own and do not belong to the society, then you can raise them by yourself. If you can't afford to do so, we'll simply put you in a debtor's prison.
This would undo a lot of progress that has been made on the human rights front in the past century.
I think the sentiment is better expressed by the greeks: "It takes a village to raise a child".
One possible model may be to enlarge the "nuclear family" to groups of friends. Get five couples who enjoy each other's company together, and everyone can work 80% (4 days) while two people are home each weekday for childcare/housework etc.
Many other models are possible and it would be best to make it as easy as possible to experiment. Relevant factors may be:
- a universal right to flexible work schedules, at least for larger companies (10+) where changes balance out
- Mixed-zoning housing allowing the creative use of space. Which also helps with:
- Neighbourhoods designed for street life, where you can actually meet neighbours and build these (real) social networks, and where children can explore. When I was 6 or so, I became friends with two families in my neighbourhood. One owned a bookshop which became my personal library. The other was a graphics designer and a racing car driver where I learnt computers and mechanics (and got to drive in a Formula 1 car). I was often invited for dinner at these families, or just hung out when they had guests, and I learned more from listening to adults debating the topics of the day than anywhere else.
Babysitting a single child is economically very inefficient. Its something teenage girls can do while they watch tv. A full grown adult with skills is worth considerably more to society working than babysitting.
Its not an economic necessity that both parents work, the incentive to do it is extremely large and probably pure conservatism had been keeping it at bay, if at all.
This perspective ignores the drastic difference in the quality between one caretaker and another. Among middle-class parents, the cost of an engaged preschool provider or nanny with a good teacher:child ratio that can match the quality of care of an invested parent meets or exceeds the median salary.
Especially for parents with multiple children, it is economically rational to have a parent at home to provide that customized 1-on-1 care with the child. The benefit is improved learning and opportunity for experiences (daily trips to museums, sports activities, classes) at the expense of less structured socialization with a peer group and a loss in net household profit.
Though the tax break afforded for day care should not be disregarded, there are plenty of situations where it makes sense to have a parent stay at home with children.
Most parents choose to have children so they can spend time with them. Maximizing this at the expense of some net household profit can be rational, given certain living situations. One could argue it is a luxury, and they would likely be right. Having children at all in advanced industrial societies is, in the individual case, usually a luxury.
Society underestimates the long-term economic value of a child raised by a full-time, invested parent. Parenting and babysitting are apples and oranges.
No it doesn't. Otherwise, every single teacher, caretaker, would quit their jobs as soon as they had a child and would get the same economical benefit.
If it were a productive investment it would be common because those that do it would easily outclass the rest.
? Of course it is. If every man and woman spent 18 years without producing anything at all to take care of their children, we would probably go extinct. Having 1 person take care of 10 at a time increases productivity by 19 people!
Of craouse we would all like to have the option to take as much time as we want to take care of our own, its akin to wanting to amass enough wealth to never have to work again.
Its mostly babysitting. You can divide the effort to raise a child as nursing, teaching and babysitting. The parent is most invested into doing it, but he cannot get very good as a nurse or a teacher (if its not his profession) and babysitting is very low value. You definitely cannot spend 8 hours a day teaching a baby things, and most of the things you teach are quite low skilled (exercise, playing, reading, etc).
If the parent can earn a lot more income by delegating responsibilities he will do it, or rather, most will do it.
The nuclear family is not always going to be viable in every scenario though and we really can't control all of the economic factors that go into that effectively. But we can effectively control a lot of what happens in schools. Things like curriculum, money spent, facilities used, after school offerings, etc. Even if the incentive existed to be a stay-at-home parent, there will always be parents who would rather have dual incomes for a variety of reasons.
> having both parents working is the root issue... resources, time and money, and there is never enough to go around.
> a massive shift toward automation... in the next five years, 5 million jobs in 15 economies will be lost. (from YC post)
We don't have enough workers. We have too many workers. When will we realize that our current economic system is doing a lousy job of allocating human resources?
We can't get enough teachers, but we have tens of millions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars allocated toward things that add, to be generous, questionable value to the world.
If you account for all the money that's gone into Products that have no real human value, and add on top the fact that the companies making them avoid taxes like the devil, we begin to see the scale of the tragedy.
Yeah, that whole "5 million jobs in 15 economies will be lost"... it's such a weird thing to say, that a job will be lost. Some kinds of jobs have to continue forever. Other types of jobs are tasks that will eventually be complete and the workers will have to move on to the next thing.
There is TONS of work that needs to be done though. Teachers like you said, health care workers, psychologists to help us deal with the inevitable mental problems, mountain bike trail maintainers, pickers of plastic trash out of the ocean, people to design apis for distributing government transparency data, designers of infographics to help the rest of us make sense of that data, and on and on and on. There's so much to do, when you stop thinking of a "job" as something provided for you by the government or a company, and rather as value that you can contribute to the world. Another disruptive business is going to figure out how to make it possible to pay people for contributing that kind of value.
It's not just about money. Even if parents can afford to have one of them be stay at home, neither parent might want to be the one staying at home.
Being a stay at higher parent is an incredibly difficult, stressful and under appreciated job so to many well educated couples, it's not appealing at all.
True that - not to mention tedious, mentally understimulating, and comes with a perceived lack of social status. Even for people who love it and can afford it, there are many downsides.
How about having one of the parents work part-time?
True, not all jobs can be offered as part-time, and working part-time limits your career growth if you work for a big corporation, but still, it is a viable option.
I don't think the 30-to-1 ratio is the problem. From my own experience the main problem is grouping by age. Children should be grouped by skill instead. [1] I was always top of the class in math and held back by the slow pace dictated by the national education plan for my age. At the same time there were other topics like Russian language where I didn't learn as fast as was expected of my age. This meant that as the years went by I understood less and less of the new material that was being taught because my Russian fundamentals were weak. I imagine other children experienced something similar in math. I think we could do much better if children advance in classes based on how much they've learned, not based on when they were born. Also advancement in different topics need to be decoupled from eachother as much as possible [2], because I think it's completely expected that everyone will have their own personal strong topics and weak topics.
--
[1] I think schools teach much more than just what's on the national education plan. Making friends, making enemies, dealing with puberty etc are all valuable lessons that have less friction when the group of people you're around have similar amount of experience with those things. Thus being grouped with people with wildly different experience levels in these areas can be detrimental. While the primary grouping factor should be skill, there's probably a good case for secondary range limits by age, which is a decent estimative measurement of children's experience in these social areas.
[2] I understand that full isolation isn't possible, because physics requires math knowledge, which in turn requires writing & reading skills. Still, even with these dependencies we could do a lot more decoupling than what is being currently done.
This is a fallacy inherent to the modern mentality of obsessing over your child's safety that is likely counterproductive on average.
Children of school age DO NOT need babysitting. When I was a kid, everyone's mom worked and we kids just stayed at home or played together and were perfectly fine. There were zero kids who had a babysitter when they were 7 years old. Zero. Never heard of it. This was the late 80s / early 90s during the breakup of socialism. There was even a war going on for a few of those years.
I can't even imagine the level of ridicule a child would have endured if their friends had found out they had a babysitter.
Children don't just randomly burst into flames if they're left alone.
And I seriously doubt 30:1 is a significant part of the problem. Look at countries with successful school systems. Ours also used to be, but slowly got worse with time as we adopted western attitudes towards children and parenting. The schools themselves didn't change significantly, yet the outcomes became worse.
True, but you were still in school for most of the day, right? You were probably alone for a couple hours in the evening and busy doing stuff with friends on the weekends, but don't you think it would have gone all Lord of the Flies if you were alone all the time? I remember staying home alone from age 10 or so and I was fine, but I also remember that bullying seemed to be a much more serious problem then than it is now.
Parents would be away for 4-5 hours at most while I was at home I guess, but we'd be without parents for more than that because we'd go out and do stuff with friends even when parents were home. Parents were kind of there to fulfill your basic needs, not your social needs. I think my parents would have probably loved to spend more time with me but kids prefer to be with other kids.
To be fair, it did go a bit lord of the flies on occasion, in the sense that we engaged in "wars" with kids from different streets and so on, sometimes someone would get a thrown rock to their head or get a beating, but nothing too serious. Also we were constantly getting injured while playing from falling, stepping on sharp shit, etc but kids are incredibly resilient, they recover from anything and quickly. The important thing is to teach the kid not to fuck around in traffic, that's where the real danger is. And if there is a war not to pick shit up that might be explosive.
For sure, but it's not like all other projects are being auto-rejected, I think YC will always be interested in forward-looking educational proposals. One other thing to bear in mind that educational is a multi-generational undertaking; every little helps, but short-term thinking brings you cheap PCs in schools one year and iPads the next. Long-term thinking requires a vision going out 25 years into the future and a plan to respond to and either incorporate or resist outside criticism, depending on how well founded it is.
Education is a great long-term solution, but we need a PSA/Marketing solution for rational thought today. Similar to the TRUTH anti-tobacco campaign. Make it 'cool' to use logic and base your decisions on rational thought. I'm not advocating any particular policy issues, but a lot of problems can arise if people can't tell the difference between real and fake news, and don't bother to. They don't bother because thinking rationally is not something we encourage.
TRUTH make me, quit for 10 years now, want to light up. That kind of half-truth fearmongering to kids is the posterchild of ineffectiveness. Moreover is sows distrust of the very channels to use to provide valuable public info. Calling it 'truth' was just the hypocritical icing on the cake.
Using public education for any form of job training is one of the gravest mistakes that has put us in the current position.
The reason for public education is to have an informed citizenry able to participate fully in society. Using it as job training is just corporate welfare, that is using tax money to pay for something businesses should do themselves.
There is often overlap in the skills needed in an informed citizenry and employees (e.g. reading, computer skills, etc.), but not always.
Trying to chase what business or the marketplace wants is a fools journey that create citizens poorly prepared to be fully empowered citizens with a solid understanding of the world.
I suspect entrepreneurial skills would be well covered by this approach as it should emphasis skills of leadership, self-reliance, consensus, and creative thinking.
Thanks for saying that; it's essential to reframe the discussion. A few thoughts:
1) The Obama administration's college rankings (I don't know if they are still around) at one point were using the earnings of graduates as a basis.
2) Often you hear people evaluating college based on their first job. Not only are employment skills not the goal, as you point out, but consider the absurdity of valuing education based on what is probably the least important, worst paying job you'll ever get, with a payoff of probably 1-2 years.
3) Looking at the shocking political and environmental problems in 'advanced' countries right now, perhaps more education in the non-vocational fields of liberal arts, including history, political science, and literary criticism, and in the sciences, providing an understanding of nature and scientific method, is more important than ever.
4) A useful way of looking at it: [0]
"The Yale Report of 1828" -- an influential document written by Jeremiah Day (who was at the time president of Yale), one of his trustees, and a committee of faculty -- distinguished between "the discipline" and "the furniture" of the mind. Mastering a specific body of knowledge -- acquiring "the furniture" -- is of little permanent value in a rapidly changing world. Students who aspire to be leaders in business. medicine, law, government, or academia need "the discipline" of mind -- the ability to adapt to constantly changing circumstances, confront new facts, and find creative ways to solve problems.
I'd add that it's not just leaders, but everyone who needs these skills.
----
[0] Richard C. Levin, President of Yale, in "Top of the Class: The Rise of Asia's Universities"
At one point, we had more trade schools. Somehow they fell out of fashion as the 70s became the 90s. Perhaps we should bring back publicly funded trade schools (including IT!), and allow universities to morph back into pure education.
I have found the current education methods to amazingly effective. I can literally sit down and choose any subject of interest and become well versed in it with not much more than a time commitment. And since you can get up to speed on a whim, you can stay as current for job market purposes as necessary. In fact, my current educational interest of the past several months, which wasn't even career motivated, has already generated one completely unsolicited job offer.
I'm a bit jealous of the younger generations, as these methods were primitive/not available when I was younger. I could have learned so much when I had more time to learn it. The old school system I grew up with was quite ineffective, but thankfully we've improved the options well beyond those days.
Not everyone is proactive as you are, and having skilled professional teachers who can engage students to motivate them to learn something they may not on their own, is a collective good.
Uneducated people (and I am distinguishing education from intelligence; uneducated most emphatically does not mean unintelligent) are bad for society. Witness climate change denial, Trump and his ilk, etc.
I'm not sure it needs to be mutually exclusive. While it is true that teachers are not strictly necessary to utilize our modern educational methods, there is no reason a professional cannot motivate a needing student in using the same tools to the same end.
Lack of "soft skills" is the problem. We are taught or force fed knowledge, but not taught how to be well adjusted people.
You were lucky, for some reason you came to understand the value of personal development and self education. This is something that needs to be taught to everyone. In the world.
Education which help creating people ready for the future is not education but to educate yourself dare I say in almost anything as long as you become really good at it.
The last thing we need is a bunch of people who have learned the same things, references the same books and inspirations. (yes there are obvious exceptions but even within those the landscape is normally so vast.
The first thing we need is people to start taking education on by themselves in todays world there is no excuse.
As long as education is controlled by government, directional decisions will be made politically. Try bringing up the idea of shrinking class sizes by eliminating the football program at your next town-hall and see what happens.
The only lasting solution will be to allow true market competition for education to replace the centralized top-down system we have. Yes, it's a libertarian pipe dream. No, I don't want to hear about how "poor people will not be educated" by such a system. You cannot know what a free market in education would look like, because we've never tried.
We've never tried what? Private schools? I don't see how this would work since schools are always expensive to run by nature and the working class is getting poorer (for those still having a revenue), I don't see this working very well.
Private schools are required to compete with "free" public schools.
> I don't see how this would work since schools are always expensive to run by nature and the working class is getting poorer (for those still having a revenue), I don't see this working very well.
That's why in my comment I said I don't want to hear this comeback. It's as predictable as sunset that every time someone mentions a free market in education, someone else can't imagine it working for educating the poor.
How well does the current system educate the poor?
So you don't want to hear about this argument but you have nothing else against it than "we never tried it"? It's does not seem to be very convincing.
It's already difficult for the working class with a free school so I can't imagine it would be better with a non-free one, the alternative to no public schools is simply no schooling at all for some people
> How well does the current system educate the poor?
You need to ask the US government for that, most public school systems are working well in western Europe so the US must be doing something wrong somewhere.
I love the idea of a "free market in education" in theory but I do think that we have enough data to know that '"poor people will not be educated" by such a system.'
Every implementation of a freer market for education that I've read about has had a significant amount of scamming and kids left behind.
We have a free market for food, we subsidize food for poor people, and the market for food is much 'thicker' and 'fluid' than the market for education -- but we still have food deserts. If the free market + subsidies can't make healthy food available to everyone, what chance do we have with education.
We also prop up US agriculture against foreign competition, so prices are not set on a free market.
Also, many of the poor don't get a good education with the current system.
Imagine if the current school system was completely free-market, and we were seeing the same performance as the public schools. There would be complete outrage and calls for nationalization. But somehow government gets the benefit of the doubt, and the only comeback is "but, but the poor."
Government schools do not respond to consumers, since the process is political. Thus, we have our current mess. There must be a better way. We've given the government over 100 years to get things right. Why don't we try something different?
>You cannot know what a free market in education would look like, because we've never tried.
Why doesn't the time before public schools existed constitute a try? Seems to me humanity had centuries to millenia of a free market in education: anyone was free to offer or purchase as much education as they could afford.
To fix education, our first priority should be to empower teachers. They're the ones who care the most about kids' learning and know the best how to make it happen. Teaching shouldn't be a low-paying, low-status profession. I'm not sure how you could change that with a YC startup.
See, I hear techies grumble about education constantly. Our education system is teaching the wrong skills or not challenging students or just an elaborate babysitting racket.
I hear teachers, on the other hand, complain that after decades of trying everything they can, they've realized that they cannot help students unless those students have safe, stable, supportive home lives.
It's easy to say we should introduce children to programming early, even easy to do. It is easy to complain about critical thinking skills and kids these days. It is easy to see that overtesting schools and overreacting to those test scores wastes resources and the time of children and teachers.
It's hard to find a way to ensure one in six children in the US subject to food insecurity always get three good meals a day. It is hard to figure out how to provide stability in a single family, let alone all families. It is hard to say a child shouldn't drop out of school and work whatever job they can when their parents have been unable or unwilling to provide for them.
We have been talking about and trying to fix "education" my entire life; maybe we should try fixing some of the underlying problems first, even if they are hard.
You can aim at other models that aren't trying to improve the 18-year batch model. The great stratification that happens at the end of that, where you're either raised to the great meritocracy in the sky or cast into the abyss, would probably still be unconscionable if it were done fairly, and it's not.
So focus on the parts that happen once you're an adult. MOOCs aren't a panacea but you don't have to miss a class because your shift moved. If the objection is they aren't taken seriously by employers, my objection is that's still playing the old prestige and rank game, and there is always going to be someone at the bottom of that anyway. So make them useful to themselves if employers don't want them.
(I believe fixing childhood poverty involves the US Government doing things it's not going to do soon, and that private business isn't going to do it. We must cultivate our garden.)
> they cannot help students unless those students have safe, stable, supportive home lives
As someone from a teaching family, this is absolutely true.
That said, the underlying problems can only be fixed by a combination of economic improvement and education. Education empowers in the future, but economic status empowers educational opportunities in the present.
And when it comes down to it, the government can't afford to replace the future wealth created by an educated citizenry.
Yes this is a problem that certainly deserves attention.
But the education issues also apply to the other five in six children who do have food security. The education problem is one that affects anyone who does not have access to the best private schools.
When I say fix education, I don't mean teach people programming or whatever skills or knowledge that might give them a marginal leg up. Those things are becoming increasingly less valuable.
I mean teach people how to be well adjusted people, teach them soft skills of empathy and understanding others, teach them why and how to continuously improve themselves, teach them how to identify areas where they can contribute to society without waiting for a teacher or boss to tell them exactly what to do.
Without these abilities, more and more will fall into the poverty trap as the need for worker bees diminishes.
None of those are particular hard. Start by ending snap and using the money to increase the number of meals in schools to three a day. Second those meals must be some protein, some veggies and potatoes, pizza, etc are not food.
One of the difficulties in guaranteeing adequate childhood nutrition is that children are only in schools for about 180 days a year, in the US, but need to eat approximately 365 days each year.
Agreed, education is probably the most high leverage investment out there for society. That being said, I'm highly skeptical that it will be fixed by a profit-driven, venture-backed business.
Much like healthcare, education's goals dont fit capitalisms mold.
I believe the curriculum has always been based on the ideal of the "well-rounded citizen" aka a liberal arts education. That includes the sciences, math, philosophy, government, history, languages, art, and sports.
None of those subjects are particularly relevant for factory work. Even at the height of manufacturing, high schools were geared towards universities – because 10 is not the age where you want to make the decision that someone has or doesn't have the potential to be a judge/chemist/artist.
Calls to more closely align education with the perceived needs of the future economy seems misguided:
- You don't actually know what will be needed 15 to 20 years in advance (including the time it takes to develop a curriculum and teach teachers)
- It reduces citizens to their role in the economy
- It doesn't work. History is at least somewhat exciting. Teaching the filing of tax returns (a staple of such discussions) is completely removed from a 16-years reality. When it becomes relevant after college, it will be completely forgotten and possibly obsolete.
The current system is very much geared towards teaching modes of thinking, learning and similar meta-skills. History and philosophy, for example, are possibly the most important to understand current affair (but have often been decimated by a drive towards the sciences). Throw in a bit of statistics and you'll also have a good foundation for entrepreneurs.
No! education should definitely not be on this list.
Education is a red herring, and the first thing people reach for.
But education is always misunderstood, and all research shows that there is vast amount of variability in things ranging from understanding to retention.
For example
1) Level of nutrition impacts grade outcomes
2) Level of food consumed on that particular day impacts retention/learning
3) Level of reading of parents impacts student scores
4) Level of grand parent nutrition impacts student health and nutrtion
5) Race and discrimination impacts educational outcomes
Leave aside things like bullying, student interest, intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, learning style and so on.
And this may or MAY not impact job and future outcomes either.
Education is NOT an easy fix, and a tool which magically does fix this is a tool too powerful to create because if it were misused it would be an indoctrination tool beyond any other ever developed.
> The root of all these problems stem from a lack of effective education.
Does it? Many people with a college degree hold political beliefs one would consider unwieldy; Bannon went to Harvard.
It seems startups themselves are part of the problem, so one can doubt they will bring the solution. "Disruption" is another word for tearing society apart, ignoring legal norms designed to protect citizens from corporations.
The shift to online shopping -- actually, to online everything -- let people do most things from the comfort of their homes without ever meeting anyone.
"Fake news" were never a problem before Facebook and the bubble economy, where money is made by keeping people in a safe environment.
A better request would be: how to make people quit Facebook and stop using smartphones.
When I gave my first college lecture, I actually started wandering off half way through in my head wondering how this model of me talking, them listening ever worked or even lasted. By the end of the semester, I was "flipping"lectures and trying to engage my students more instead of just me talking.
The current model doesn't need to be destroyed and rebuilt, just remodeled as you said for a different future
Democracy can be improved by having democracy in the workplace.
Modern corporations are run like totalitarian, authoritarian regimes with top-down orders being barked down. If you disobey, you're out.
People in Western democracies are no longer putting up with non-democratic control of their political institutions, but are completely oblivious to non-democratic control of their economic institutions and are perfectly willing to take orders where and when it matters most -- every day, 9 to 5.
When employees can directly vote and democratically elect the CEO/CFO and other executive and managerial positions, across the wide range of industries and in majority of organizations, it will be a huge win for democracy, and that will spill into a much more engaged population politically as well. Also, at that point, employees are no longer employees.
You don't have democracy in the workplace because democracy is inefficient. A company that expends great amount of money and resources on constant political shifting and backstabbing, and that can't present an unified vision on the market will soon get outcompeted by one that has its shit together.
We can tolerate authoritarian regimes in companies, because they're small (relative to countries) and compete in a heavily regulated space. If you want to leave or they fire you, you can generally find a new workplace. Companies play thier game by selling stuff (and doing accounting magic).
On the other hand, when two countries enter fierce competition, it's called "war". People on both sides end up dying. Even a less fierce competition ends up being miserable for everyone. The game has no bounds. And you can't easily quit it and move elsewhere.
That's why we prefer countries to be run with inefficient democratic process - because too much efficiency in a country will make many, many people very miserable.
> A company that expends great amount of money and resources on constant political shifting and backstabbing, and that can't present an unified vision on the market will soon get outcompeted by one that has its shit together.
That already happens anyway. You don't need to have a democratically governed workplace for constant political shifting and backstabbing to occur.
> If you want to leave or they fire you, you can generally find a new workplace.
Which will also be non-democratically governed, so that doesn't work.
> because too much efficiency in a country will make many, many people very miserable.
Can't you make the same argument at organization level? I'm sure many Amazon warehouse workers would agree.
>> because too much efficiency in a country will make many, many people very miserable.
> Can't you make the same argument at organization level? I'm sure many Amazon warehouse workers would agree.
Honestly, I think you could. Actually, this is something I was thinking about a lot in context of employee rights. Making workers happy - good office conditions, paid leaves, healthcare benefits, regular schedule, etc. - is a cost for a company, and creates inefficiencies that, if eliminated, would let the company do more while spending less[0]. So many companies are indeed happy to make employees as miserable as they can get away with[1]. Enforcing worker rights is purposefully introducing inefficiency, in order to avoid the market optimizing away all human values.
So let me rephrase my original point: you can get away with much more efficiency in companies than in countries without making a lot of people miserable.
--
[0] - subject to dynamics of market competition, in which all the gains you earn by introducing a change are quickly cancelled out when competitors follow suit.
[1] - not a problem for companies that don't need specialized workers for which there's more demand that supply - i.e. not a problem for most companies and a huge problem for most people.
Interestingly, Thiel (of all people), has argued that companies in a monopoly position tend to treat their employees well, focus on fundamental research, and focus on delivering the best products for their customers. He argues that businesses with a thin profit margin can't afford to do any of that and so are more brutal and authoritarian and they can't afford the long term investments necessary for real innovation to take place.
Consider that in a private company, surpluses are paid out to executives and shareholders. How is that not "inefficient"? Meanwhile, workers are paid a subsistence wage of however low the company can get away with paying. In a worker-owned, worker-managed business, those surpluses could be spent on higher wages, lower prices, or increasing productivity. Without having to generate profits for investors and shareholders (who contribute no labor to the enterprise), wouldn't that make a firm much more "efficient"?
I would never work at a company structured like this and if you're implying we impose rules on companies to operate like democracies then that's even more dangerous than Trump.
I'd also add that this isn't nearly as insane as it sounds. Something quite comparable works well in Germany (see Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?), and to an extent this is just the principle behind co-ops on a larger scale. Distributed ownership of capital tends to lead to greater efficiency, better productivity, and better worker engagement, and it's a bipartisan issue: see syndicalism on the left, distributivism on the right.
> Modern corporations are run like totalitarian, authoritarian regimes with top-down orders being barked down. If you disobey, you're out.
People in Western democracies are no longer putting up with non-democratic control of their political institutions, but are completely oblivious to non-democratic control of their economic institutions and are perfectly willing to take orders where and when it matters most -- every day, 9 to 5.
This sounds strikingly socialist.
As a small business owner, the one who took the risk to start it, invested my own savings, and put things together so I could coordinate selling products with paying employees, you're damn right it's my regime. If I didn't think it would be mine, I never would have started it. The future rewards would be non-existent, relevant to being a cog somewhere else. And my customers would never get the added value of what I make from the business I never would have started.
Instead of having increased ownership, autonomy, and earnings potential, I have to negotiate and play politics with other people who I know aren't as intrinsically motivated as myself? Forget it, that's entirely unrealistic. Think about what you're saying - this is not how value, wealth, and prosperity is created. Nobody is going to vote me out of being CEO, because if that were possible I wouldn't have put in the tough work (and created the value) that goes along with being a CEO.
And the capitalist system works fine, because if these employees think I'm doing a shit job, they do have a vote: leave and start their own company. The parts that don't work are actually the more socialist parts of the system, such as bailouts for big behemoth, and regulatory barriers to starting competitors.
Sorry pal, but surface-level idealism doesn't square with real-life incentives and rewards. What I'm in favor for is reducing regulations and other burdens so that you or any employees in general have the option of starting their own companies and competing with me. That's a much better way for them to "take" the value of my shares, rather than just voting it to themselves with no work done.
It sounds socialist because it is textbook socialism.
Your assertion that value, wealth, and prosperity are created through the hard work and sacrifice by business owners is of course disputed by socialists. You're begging the question here. If you stipulate that value in society is created by the very process that socialists want to dismantle, then of course being a socialist is irrational. No real conversation can be had when you define socialism to be irrational from the outset.
Further evidence that no real conversation can be had follows from your dismissive "sorry pal, surface-level idealism" remark. Why are you so snide and dismissive? Do you think it helps your credibility? (It doesn't.)
Socialists argue that value is created by all working people, most of whom are not in it for the profit incentive. Value in society is created by teachers, whom get paid poorly. By PhD students, who get paid poorly. By parents who raise their children well for no compensation at all. By all the millions of people who get to work every day and don't get compensated handsomely for the effort. If there are so many people willing to work hard and sacrifice for the good of society without any chance of striking it rich, why should business owners be the exception? That's the fundamental question socialists ask. And there are no snide answers to this question that are remotely satisfying.
If I'm dismissive it's because we've had a lot of field tests of socialism throughout history, as well as in economic studies, and the results are always poor. It's a dangerous mindset to not examine critically because it is a slippery slope towards communism, the most inhumane type of society responsible for the most deaths in human history (much more than religion).
> Value in society is created by teachers, whom get paid poorly.
Many teachers (pre-college) are essentially babysitters who recite state-certified textbooks. This not value in itself, but it does free the parents to work to create value. Value is also created by the students who go on to create exceptional things. Some are inspired by good teachers, yes, but this seems to be the exception than the norm.
> By PhD students, who get paid poorly.
Apprentices in older times got paid poorly too, but many went on to create value who wouldn't have otherwise without the extensive training. It's an investment. You don't get paid well while in training because you're still an unknown quantity for the most part.
> By parents who raise their children well for no compensation at all.
The purpose of capturing value is to be able to start a family and pass on your genetics (for most people). And those who raise their children well often do get compensated later in life, if not with direct support, than with higher probabilities that their children will be successful and continue passing on their shared genes.
> By all the millions of people who get to work every day and don't get compensated handsomely for the effort.
You don't get compensted for effort, you get compensated for value. You can dig a ditch with a spoon for a lot of effort, guess what, it's not valuable.
> If there are so many people willing to work hard and sacrifice for the good of society without any chance of striking it rich, why should business owners be the exception? That's the fundamental question socialists ask.
As I showed above, hard work a.k.a effort is not, and should not, be a determining factor of one's wealth. Many people work hard but are using "spoons" so to speak. This doesn't create value. Planning the logistics of a digging operation (tool equipment rental, worker recruiting and scheduling, end customer sales, planning real estate builds, etc) creates value, even if it means I only plan these things for a few months then sit back while other people do the digging.
Now not everyone can do that simultaneously. For one, not everyone is smart enough to do higher-level planning. Intelligence is rewarded economically, and we see this with IQ-income correlations. Secondly, even if everyone were the same intelligence level, we can't have everyone be a planner/developer and nobody be a digger (or excavator operator). But then guess what happens, the worker class becomes rare and so the free market will start paying it much better as demand increases. If physical labour becomes scarce, that's what gets paid more.
Because we can fight neither the reality of scarcity driving value, nor the reality of greedy human nature, we ought to design systems whereby these forces can be put towards good. That's what capitalism does, and there's many examples of everyone being better off as a result (e.g. 600M+ Chinese people eating a lot better in the last few decades).
Finally, to emphasize human nature again, none of the examples you listed are exclusively for the "good of society". Being a teacher is a job with decent pay and good vacation, being a PhD student is an investment towards your future (earnings), being a parent and raising children well is how you pass on and secure your genetic lineage, and work is for economic survival, and eventually gives one the power to pass on their genes.
> If I'm dismissive it's because we've had a lot of field tests of socialism throughout history, as well as in economic studies, and the results are always poor. It's a dangerous mindset to not examine critically because it is a slippery slope towards communism, the most inhumane type of society responsible for the most deaths in human history (much more than religion).
This one sentence already demonstrates that you don't know what the words socialism or communism means.
Socialism = state with social ownership of the means of production
Communism = hypothetical end goal of society where the state "whithers away" and class divisions no longer exist
Note that people describe themselves as communist since that is their end goal and states describe themselves as socialist since they have not ceased to exist yet.
> If I'm dismissive it's because we've had a lot of field tests of socialism throughout history, as well as in economic studies, and the results are always poor.
While this may sound like a no-true-Scotsman argument, the most prominent example of a failure, USSR, has quickly (within a few years) moved off course from socialism to totalitarianism and state capitalism [1]. There were never democratically governed workplaces in the Soviet Union. This happened for a variety of reasons, including constant military threats from capitalist countries that naturally pushed the population to rally around autocratic leaders. Same is true for many others. There were successful-looking democratic attempts as well, but those were crushed by capitalists pretty quickly.
North Korea's full official name, for example, is Democratic People's Republic of Korea. However, nobody is seriously arguing that democracy doesn't work because North Korea is democratic. However, the same logic somehow fails to apply to communism.
> It's a dangerous mindset to not examine critically because it is a slippery slope towards communism, the most inhumane type of society responsible for the most deaths in human history (much more than religion).
Citations needed here. Putting aside the fact that no countries in history have actually been communist yet, most claims of "millions deaths under communism" are pretty dubious, counting many deaths without establishing causal effect. For example, Chinese famine deaths are counted as directly caused by communism. If the same methodology were applied to capitalism, you can count many more deaths throughout the world until today -- famines, starvation, easily preventable diseases in capitalist Third World, etc.
Yes, as a small business owner, it's a tougher concept to come to terms with. You can try looking at it from different perspectives though.
For one, I'm sure a 12th century monarch or a lord would have a host of reasons why you're damn right it's my regime. Or a modern-day King Saud for that matter I guess. After all, it's his father who built his kingdom, and he has all the risks and responsibilities of a monarch. But for most Western observers, that is no longer defensible and most would elect to live somewhere with a democratic government.
Same goes to modern day dictatorships like North Korea. If not for international borders and internal controls, most North Koreans would probably prefer to leave their country. So, to continue the analogy, one could imagine a day in the future where as a small business owner, you are no longer able to attract any employees on the terms you're used to now -- not unless they are not employees, but co-workers with all equal rights and votes. And just as it's unimaginable and laughable in modern America for someone to start claiming that he's now a lord of XYZ county, and all those living within it are his peasants, it's not too hard to imagine a similar reaction to your proposal of employment for wages.
You can also look at it from another angle.
Why exactly is it that you want to have your own totalitarian regime within the organization you started? Is it just because you enjoy the power over people? Most people wouldn't say so. Besides, if you are the founder and know the business better than anyone, and have good leadership qualities, why wouldn't you be constantly re-elected as CEO?
And if your coworkers indeed approve of you as CEO, you would still get your greater earnings potential, although without being able to exploit your workers as much.
> Same goes to modern day dictatorships like North Korea. If not for international borders and internal controls, most North Koreans would probably prefer to leave their country. So, to continue the analogy, one could imagine a day in the future where as a small business owner, you are no longer able to attract any employees on the terms you're used to now -- not unless they are not employees, but co-workers with all equal rights and votes.
Again, I welcome whatever reality the free market thrusts upon me, and will react and adapt accordingly.
However this is incredibly far from reality because people actually like being employees. You don't have nearly as much risk. You don't have to make tough executive decisions with far-reaching consequences. Your levels of stress are lower. Etc. Those things are worth $$$, and we price them by CEO/founder compensation. It's not going to be perfect pricing, but it's the best we've got.
> Why exactly is it that you want to have your own totalitarian regime within the organization you started?
Because I believe that my decision making and skills with regards to a particular type of business in a particular type of market will yield me big returns, and so I want to put my money where my mouth is. Hence I saved up and founded my business.
> Besides, if you are the founder and know the business better than anyone, and have good leadership qualities, why wouldn't you be constantly re-elected as CEO?
Injecting this type of politics into a company is a fantastic way of slowing it to a crawl. Even if it's possible that one of my employees could be "better" than me at my job, we're not practically going to find out ("let's all try each other's job for a month!"). Or rather, it's not my responsibility to ask them -- if they think so they're free to go start their own company/competitor (subject to whatever non-compete clauses they may have signed, which you could argue is burdensome regulation, and I might be inclined to agree).
Besides, who says elections give us the best candidate? ;)
Unlike the North Korea example, the employees really do have options here. At least ideally they have as much choice as possible for who to work for, remember it's not like I put a gun to anyone's head when I asked them to join (or stay). A counterexample might be the H1-B's that are tied to their employer, but I don't have that particular relationship with any of my employees.
> And if your coworkers indeed approve of you as CEO, you would still get your greater earnings potential, although without being able to exploit your workers as much.
Just to wrap up, as I said above it's not worth the time for me to "poll" everyone. There are serious business consequences to injecting such a high level of politics into a company. What keeps me from exploiting my workers primarily are competitors, with competing potential offers, and the flow of information on the internet, e.g. 'this type of engineer makes X a year'.
> However this is incredibly far from reality because people actually like being employees.
Really? Why don't you offer your employees equal partnership with no strings attached and see if they'd just rather stay employees. I call bullshit on this.
> Injecting this type of politics into a company is a fantastic way of slowing it to a crawl.
Not true. Taking one day a year to nominate candidates and vote is hardly a burden. It's less of a burden than any normal employee turnover process in non-democratic companies. And I'm not even talking about large bureaucratic corporations with layers of management and their constant "re-orgs".
> Besides, who says elections give us the best candidate? ;)
Elections where most people are apathetic and don't even bother to vote because they think the entire system is corrupt are a bit different from elections in a 50-people organization, where everyone knows everybody else.
> Unlike the North Korea example, the employees really do have options here.
You missed my point. If all other organizations out there were democratically governed, then you'd probably have had to put a gun to someone's head to stay.
> There are serious business consequences to injecting such a high level of politics into a company.
Again, this is untrue. You might be projecting American election process onto this and may not be aware that everywhere else election cycles don't actually last 2 years. Most normal countries don't spend more than a month on an election cycle. A small business wouldn't spend more than a day.
> What keeps me from exploiting my workers primarily are competitors, with competing potential offers, and the flow of information on the internet, e.g. 'this type of engineer makes X a year'.
I think again you're projecting your own bubble here. Fast food industry is fiercely competitive, correct? Do you think a Burger King employee would get a vastly superior competing offer from McDonald's?
> And the capitalist system works fine, because if these employees think I'm doing a shit job, they do have a vote: leave and start their own company.
I didn't know it was this possible to be so non self aware.
> The parts that don't work are actually the more socialist parts of the system, such as bailouts for big behemoth, and regulatory barriers to starting competitors.
Socialism is when the government does things, and the more things it does, the socialister it is!
I didn't know it was this possible to be so non self aware.
No matter how ignorant you may think another poster is, it's never okay on HN to be uncivil. Particularly with contentious topics, it's even more important to raise to level of civility to ensure constructive discussion.
If you believe the poster is missing important facts, and you're willing to take the time to do so, let them know what it is you think they're missing in a constructive, non-combative manner. Claiming someone is heretofore unimaginably non self-aware is a direct personal insult, which is never appropriate on HN. Please contribute substantively and civilly, or refrain from doing so.
Yes please add some substance to your criticism. There is nothing wrong with criticism of ideas and I welcome it for my own.
Perhaps I should have mentioned that I live and work in North America where GDP per capita is something like $54K USD or more. This context makes a difference for your "99%" comment.
> I didn't know it was this possible to be so non self aware.
Or leave and work for a competitor. I don't put a gun to anybody's head, unlike various socialist governments.
Feel free to expand on this thought though. Note that I work in North America and so my expectation of an employee being able to 1) leave and work for someone else, or 2) leave and start their own company, stem from this.
> Socialism is when the government does things, and the more things it does, the socialister it is!
So what do you call it when the government props up certain businesses (that they prefer) by redistributing my tax dollars thereby shielding them from market forces? I can't think of a libertarian government doing this.
And yes, socialism must imply a bigger and more intrusive central management body (aka government) because that's how you "democratize the means of production". You have to enforce such actions with the gun.
> Or leave and work for a competitor. I don't put a gun to anybody's head, unlike various socialist governments.
Only socialist governments put guns to people's heads?
> Note that I work in North America and so my expectation of an employee being able to 1) leave and work for someone else, or 2) leave and start their own company, stem from this.
Yeah, it's not so easy for most of the world's population. Since you seem to be aware this, note that a less obvious element of this fact is that the reason things seem largely not so bad in the US/Europe is due to the large scale extraction of economic value from less developed countries. That power law is now coming around to bite the US/Europe middle class, and Trump/Brexit is the result.
> So what do you call it when the government props up certain businesses (that they prefer) by redistributing my tax dollars thereby shielding them from market forces? I can't think of a libertarian government doing this.
Cronyism? Corruption? This really has little to do with economics but is a political problem. The same thing happens in capitalist and socialist countries.
> And yes, socialism must imply a bigger and more intrusive central management body (aka government) because that's how you "democratize the means of production". You have to enforce such actions with the gun.
Yes because of people like you fighting it... grumble grumble
There are actually a lot of "libertarian socialist" theories out there. It's like a blend of anarchism and Marxism.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. Your workplace is the government that you're made to obey most of the time, and unless you have a lot of leverage your position is very similar to a Medieval serf.
One benefit that I feel may happen, is to generate better buy-in for management decisions if the workers feel they have a hand in making said decisions. They might also care more about the health of their company, rather than maximizing the value they reap.
As I've said in another reply, make sure to checkout Ricardo Semler's TedTalk. An awesome example. I won't post a link because everythings is blocked here, next week I'm back at a much more democratic company I've worked before, pretty satisfied.
I am a little ambivalent about this. On the one hand the intent is probably good but on the other hand companies like YC and Silicon Valley are drivers of a lot of developments that led to the current situation.
- Silicon Valley is a great example of growing inequality. Most of the rewards go disproportionally to a select few at the top
- A lot of VC companies are killing a lot of previously relatively stable jobs. Uber is giving its drivers a job for a while but it's pretty clear this will not be sustainable and they will soon be out of a job again
- The biggest companies like Facebook and Google are pretty much aiding "fake news" because in the end the only thing they care about is impressions and fake news sells better
Don't want to be too negative but technology is not only a force for good but also causes problems for a lot of people. Maybe these people are looking at the wrong guy for solutions but their concerns are valid.
I don't think we can halt progress just because it negatively impacts some people. At the same time you are right that it is "not only a force for good" and there are things that can be done to mitigate that negativity. I think this is an appeal to entrepreneurs do to just that
When "progress" continually lowers wages of the lower class and concentrates power to fewer and fewer people, I think the way of doing things needs to be reevaluated.
Technology provides massive amounts of consumer surplus and deflation.
What if we need less money and lower wages are actually fine?
Edit: Do the people down-voting this actually think technology doesn't provide consumer surplus and deflation? Or do you have a problem with my question?
That's not what I'm getting at. I'm referring to technology specifically. Cost of living is dictated predominantly by the cost of housing, healthcare, education, and food. Food cost as a % of income has decreased significantly since 1960 according to the USDA [1].
Technology and globalization have impacted food a lot. Education, and housing? Not nearly as much. Healthcare is more complicated, and I'm not an expert, so I'll refrain from speculating there.
One might argue globalization has hurt people, but so far, technology seems to be making just about everything it touches cheaper for everyone.
The problem is that the benefits of globalization are offset by the centralization of the remaining jobs, and is adding to the inequality seen in America. There are some parts of the country doing fantastic, but a lot of the Midwest is seeing lower wages, fewer jobs, and a lower quality of life.
You're right that certain parts of the country have been hit hard by automation and globalization but the idea that the hard hit people are the Trump voters is not particularly true.
Yes, but why is it making things cheaper where it touches? Usually it's because it allows production with fewer people or by people with lower wages than before. Thus things get cheaper because some subset of people lose jobs or wages. That's fine as long as those people are able to find new jobs or supplemental income sources (many do), but I think the point here is that it's not a universal benefit. I have to agree with the parent post here - for some portion of people, technology has led to lower wages while cost of living decreases (food, products, etc.) are offset by increases in things you need to lift yourself up (healthcare, education, housing).
> Cost of living is dictated predominantly by the cost of housing, healthcare, education, and food.
> so far, technology seems to be making just about everything it touches cheaper for everyone.
You say this, but only provide a source for 1 out of 4 key indicators of cost of living. Can you provide the same evidence towards housing, healthcare and education becoming significantly cheaper as a % of a budget of an average household?
I fully agree that there are multiple forces at work here and globalization and technology are not a universal benefit to the western poor and middle-income.
I just wanted to expose something commonly left out of these discussions, which is that technology is generally deflationary. More technology in the areas of healthcare, education, and housing might be the solution, not the problem.
> That's easy to say for someone with a good income. For a lot of people wages go down while cost of living goes up.
Bullshit. Technology brings down the cost of living by making the supply side more efficient. What goes up is the cost of the way you'd like to live as you have more options to choose from.
Obviously there's disruptions along the way (ex: automobiles lessen demand for horse breeders) but when capitalism closes a door it opens a window (ex: mechanics).
You have no idea if you think technology magically brings down prices. Tell that to the 100 million people living in/near poverty in the USA alone.
The "efficiency" increases in recent years have more often than not been various ways of cutting labor costs. It doesn't matter if things are cheaper in a nominal sense if your ability to earn a living is eroded.
> You have no idea if you think technology magically brings down prices. Tell that to the 100 million people living in/near poverty in the USA alone.
I suggest you go do some basic math on the cost of producing consumer staples like rice, beans, milk, and meat. Technology has brought down the cost of all of them.
Similarly, efficiency gains in MPG and durability improvements have lowered the price of owning and maintaining a vehicle. Uber, Lyft, and other ride sharing apps have lowered the price of it even further to remove the capital outlay.
> The "efficiency" increases in recent years have more often than not been various ways of cutting labor costs.
Which is bad because why exactly? Is the purpose of the corporate sector to produce goods and services or to provide a place for people to go?
> It doesn't matter if things are cheaper in a nominal sense if your ability to earn a living is eroded.
Sure it is. That's the definition of makes things more efficient: being able to be produced more cheaply
You make fair points, however the cost of living is dictated primarily by: transportation, education, housing and health costs. Has technology made these significantly cheaper for someone in poverty?
> You make fair points, however the cost of living is dictated primarily by: transportation, education, housing and health costs. Has technology made these significantly cheaper for someone in poverty?
I specifically cite transportation costs in my prior comment. Housing is also cheap if you don't live in (expensive) cities. There's an abundance of housing in the suburbs and if you're willing to share a place with others (like everybody seems to take for granted in the city) it's insanely cheap.
Education and health are interesting beasts. On the one hand technology has brought the cost of education to near zero through remote learning and internet courses. There's more knowledge available at a person's fingertips than at any point in history and the cost is cheaper than ever. The cost of a formal higher education has gone up but I don't think that's driven by technology. It's from the availability of "easy money" for student loans. Healthcare (in the USA) is uniformly fucked and needs to be scrapped and rebuilt though government programs like Medicaid do cover the people your describe (poverty line).
Housing is cheap if you live in a part of the country with a bad economy.
The increasing polarization of the economy is also spatial: the remaining good jobs are congregating in fewer and fewer metropolises where the cost of living is skyrocketing.
Tell that to people whose salaries haven't kept up with inflation while other costs like housing, health care and education have been going up. Yes, in the long run it will maybe/probably work out but it can take years or decades for things to adjust and in the meantime a lot of people will suffer.
I downvoted you. My problem with what you said is that you acknowledged that technology creates surplus, but didn't acknowledge that many of the efficiency gains aren't going to the consumer, but to the owners of the company.
Technology creates massive consumer surplus. I'm not sure if you don't know what that means, but it means exactly the opposite of what you said.
For example: Apple sells an iPhone for about $750. This phone contains the equivalent of (roughly) $3,000 of disparate technology from the 1990s, including a cell phone, camera, tape recorder, etc. Not only does it contain all of that for less money, all of that is better quality than what was available for that $3,000 back in the 1990s.
That is deflation and consumer surplus in action. The consumer can spend a fraction of what they would've in 1990 for a better product.
Another example: Apps on the App Store. Everyone expects everything for free because there is so much competition enabled by technology. The marginal cost is roughly zero, so most apps are free. If most of the gains were being kept by the producer, apps would cost a lot of money.
My previous post was poorly worded. Technology has automated so many jobs that the oversaturated labor pool means wages are dipping. Cheaper goods don't mean much when you can't afford a house or car. Meanwhile, the investors are reaping the benefits of this efficiency with insane returns, and the CEOs are running off with millions. When we're living in the richest country in the world with a GDP per capita of over $50k, the idea that there are those unemployed or making $8k/yr while others are making millions or billions per year is ridiculous.
That's not a good thing to down-vote for, but props for explanation.
Down vote for trolls and other destructive posts, not just because you have a problem or disagreement with what's expressed. OP is legitimately trying to contribute to the conversation.
Just to play devil's advocate: what if you define progress as "that stuff" that will increase the general well-being of the greatest number of people over the next 20 years? With that definition, does technology-powered automation still count as progress?
It would count as progress if the automated means of production were owned by the labor that is put out of work. Oh wait, that sounds like communism, and we could never ever have a reasonable discussion about that amongst a group of people who thrive off of a system that is the opposite.
Okay, I'll bite. How do the workers so recently unemployed by the automated machines gain ownership of those machines in a way that does not entirely remove the incentive for building them?
Something of a loaded question, but more, a super hard question.
Your question is loaded because it assumes that ownership of such machines is the best solution for those made unemployed by them - I think this is probably flawed, because management is a different skill set than direct contribution.
The problem is that the worker's skills have lost value. They need new skills - management skills for owning the machines, or different skills that haven't been automated yet.
Or maybe a refinement on their existing skills. My understanding of Japanese factories is that it's commonplace to have one of the fabrication lines done by people - the thinking goes: "If you do not know how to do it better, how can you make machines do it better?". I also remember a story of, I think it was GE, getting their designers, engineers, and assemblers (the people literally putting the pieces together) all together to improve the design. The assemblers noted a particularly difficult step, and in making that step easier, the engineers removed a number of parts. Everything got better.
Let's look at the other part of your question - incentives for building the automation. It seems like the R&D incentive comes from the end-user value, so let's skip to that - I want an automated machine for a number of reasons: Quality consistency, up time, wage cost reduction, safety. Eventually, all of these do boil down to "profit", but the routes taken are important. QC means you can sell more and/or charge more; but you could make more and charge less in ways that make more or less profit.
I don't think I can answer your question, because I don't know why you think that the incentives for building them would be removed; and in my head, the first blocker for the recently unemployed to own such machines is wanting to run a business. I don't think most people want that.
I blame the grandparent post by eevilspock for loading the question.
I don't think it can even be answered with that assumption included. Let's say you have a cobbler, who makes shoes. He recently lost his job to the burgomeister's new Elfbot 4000, that can make the same quality of shoe, but turns out 2 dozen pairs in a single night.
The Elfbot 4k runs all week on a single saucer of milk, without sleeping. The cobbler has to eat 2000 kcal every day, and sleep 8h every night. It is completely obvious that the cobbler can no longer compete in the shoe market with the Elfbot. The value of the cobbler's one marketable skill has been devastated by automation. So the cobbler cannot raise enough money from selling shoes to buy the Elfbot. No matter how hard the cobbler works, his productive output cannot reach a level high enough to equal the value of the Elfbot.
So the cobbler would have to get the money from somewhere else. But the burgomeister is the richest man in town, and the only one with enough money to lend out. Why would he give a loan to the cobbler, to buy the robot, whose production would be used to pay off the loan, when he could just sell the production and get the money without that source of default risk?
So the cobbler could also just steal the Elfbot. But if Elfbots could just be stolen willy-nilly, no one would bother keeping one. The burgomeister would obviously have to defend his property against one-man robberies.
That leaves a torch-and-pitchfork rebellion. After that happens, no one bothers bringing new machines to the village, because they don't want to lose their property.
Or the cobbler could study the machine, and build his own, if it can be done cheaply enough. Unfortunately for him, the burgomeister has a patent, which equates copying with theft.
The only way for the cobbler to own an Elfbot is if he is the first to build one. And that just puts all the other cobblers in his shoes for the above scenarios.
The displaced workers just can't get the capital in a capitalist society through the use of their obsoleted skill, and the capital is not created as quickly or as easily in a non-capitalist society. They would have to acquire a different marketable skill to be able to afford one, but once they have that skill, they no longer have any specific connection to or need for that particular machine. If the cobbler becomes an expert in specialty candle marketing, and makes a pile of cash, he no longer has any need to own the Elfbot. He could buy the Dribbler Deluxe instead.
Ah! I hadn't noticed that you weren't the question's author.
I really like your summation that "can't get the capital in a capitalist society through the use of their obsoleted skill".
Arguably, the benefit of the cobbler could be a) highly custom small batch work, b) expertise to maintain the Elfbot, and c) a thinking mind behind the task. Elfbot will not improve by itself, the cobbler would.
But you have to remember that the one machine has put a large number of cobblers out of work, and you need very few for the tasks you listed, so the total displacement is still problematic.
The Elfbot was likely built by a cobbler, and sold to the burgomeister for immediate cash plus an Elfbot servicing contract. The machine owner only needs to rent a tiny bit of one ex-cobbler's labor to program new shoe construction techniques into the machine, and the person creating new shoe fashion patterns for it might not even be an ex-cobbler at all.
The human labor requirement has been slashed and burned for shoe-making, and the 99% of ex-cobblers that can't find work reprogramming and servicing Elfbots are busted back down to the pool of unskilled laborers.
The modern economy is increasingly asking unskilled laborers to retrain themselves to a different category of skilled labor at their own expense. Those categories of skilled labor may not even stay viable long enough to pay off the (re-)education loans, so those people may even be in exactly the same situation ten years later, except instead of just being broke, they will be broke, still in debt, and unable to borrow more for additional retraining.
As production costs approach zero, many industries will resemble intellectual property with it's 0 marginal costs more closely.
In the IP space, we have an example working perfectly with the communist maxim "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need": Open Source Software.
RangerScience, many people, myself included, have. And guess what? We are down-voted. And then our future posts are automatically pro-actively ranked lower (A penalty has been attached to my account. See my history. Do I deserve that?). Politics is discouraged and even banned[1]. HN prides itself as being "a place for civil discussion", but it achieves that through effective suppression of dissent and criticism of SV culture. It's worked. I rarely comment here anymore.
How are you distinguishing from suppression of dissent and criticism, and suppression of uncivil discussion?
From what I've seen, contrary opinions that are well expressed are rewarded (even if controversial - I've got a few that ultimately got more up votes than down, but it was a ride). Contrary opinions that, well, presume a fight? Not so much.
Communism seems like an idea from the 19th century shoehorned onto economic discussions in the modern age.
Is it really necessary that the means of production be owned by the labor put out of work? Or is the real problem not inequality (which has some very nice incentivizing benefits) but desperation at the lower end of the economic scale which lead to extortion like transactions? And if that is the case, is a full scale distribution of wealth necessary or can we have the best of both worlds by redistributing just enough wealth to guarantee that everyone has their survival needs taken care of?
"Decreasing economic inequality means taking money from the rich. Since risk and reward are equivalent, decreasing potential rewards automatically decreases people's appetite for risk. Startups are intrinsically risky. Without the prospect of rewards proportionate to the risk, founders will not invest their time in a startup. Founders are irreplaceable. So eliminating economic inequality means eliminating startups."
No; that essay might argue that inequality is a necessary side-effect or condition of startups, but that is not the same as arguing it is a "good thing".
For comparison: pollution might be a necessary result of the industrial revolution, and perhaps a cost we pay gladly; but that doesn't mean pollution is good. If we could get industry without pollution, we would.
That's probably of Graham's worst essays. Nobody is talking about removing all rewards. The question is how much reward is needed. Did CEOs do a worse job when they made 20 times the average worker income or would Zuckerberg do anything differently if he had made $500 million instead of 20 billion? What was his risk? Wasting a few years of his life? Plenty of small business owners go under after years of work and have nothing left. Silicon Valley founders don't take an extraordinary risk.
That's a somewhat naive view. It presupposes that the current system is just, because (1) all members of society had an equal hand in shaping the current system, (2) that it was designed to serve the interests of society as a whole (rather than those who benefit most from it), and (3) that it would be easy to change the system if a consensus emerged among a majority (or even a vast majority) of society that such change was desirable. I disagree with all three presuppositions.
I made none of your 3 presuppositions. Society is society whether or not it is democratic, fair or wise. But usually it changes its mind as it becomes more democratic, fair and wise.
This is... very wrong, at least if you're talking about CEO pay. Who decides CEO pay? The Board. Who is the Board? Well, it's usually guys who are CEOs at other companies. Boards have every incentive to make this pay as high as they can get away with, so they will get the same quid pro quo, and "society" has nothing to do with it.
You're interpreting my comment too narrowly. I agree that the concentration of power is a big problem, in fact, the biggest. But most everyone is complicit, both through their actions and inactions. Nearly everyone is putting self-interest first and foremost, including most liberals/progressives. We are complicit when we vote for people like the Clintons into power to represent progressive values. We are complicit when we take higher paying jobs at companies that put profit over people and society (and thus act behave just like those CEOs). We are complicit when we try to handsomely reward ourselves via SV get-rich-quick schemes building products that no one is willing to pay for except the advertisers who bombard us with self-serving messages in turn turning the web into click-bait, fake-news viral hell.
Congress? Someone should. Society has decided that a greater good is promoted when someone decides on a minimum wage. Why can't someone decide on a maximum wage?
Monetary rewards are far from the only rewards. Ability to effect change is a broader version of that reward: Elon Musk doesn't have as much money as Zuckerburg, but there's an argument to made that he's wealthier, since he's able to enact more/different change in the world.
(Of course, Facebook has had such a ridiculously large effect on the world that argument is probably hard to win, but it illustrates what I'm trying to say)
The way Elon was able to get into a position to affect the world was by acquiring a pile of money. It was a necessary first step. If you imagine a scenario where society enforces a cap on how rich someone is allowed to get, it's possible that Musk might not have passed the threshold of money needed to get into his current position.
More broadly, when a society won't let people become as rich as the market will let them, founders will tend to move elsewhere.
You mean like Galt's Gulch? That would be great. We'll be better off without people who only doing things for personal gain, to amass the greatest share of the world's wealth and power that they can.
Inequality as a driver of innovation is maybe arguable based on the idea of risk/reward. But what about, for example the CEO of any large bank or established corporation. Those people aren't taking any significant risk, but their compensation packages would indicate otherwise. The organization that concentrates wealth towards the top is already in place. They profit from the success of that organization, but in most cases the worst case for them if things go wrong is losing their job. Not losing their life savings, not ending up living on the street, etc. So since the risk is so low, there shouldn't be a need to incentivize people to such an extreme to do that work.
This actual analysis from The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which uses long running public (easily accessible) data from the Census Bureau, the BDS report[1], suggests that income inequality hurts startup creation rather than helping it.
Note: The specific relationship that they find is that startup creation is associated with home prices. This makes sense in the US, as home prices are a good proxy for middle class wealth. Here's a quick not fully vetted interpretation of this finding: When the middle class is relatively rich, they start businesses. When it is relatively poor, they don't. The aspirational income inequality that Graham posits doesn't immediately jump out when looking at year by year new startup numbers on a graph. I'm currently analyzing these numbers, but it's pretty clear that they don't support Graham's assumptions.
Note 2: The FRBoSF analysis isn't perfect for answering this question, but at least it's a good start, unlike the pure logic approach (despite the easy availability of good longitudinal Census data on the subject) that Graham published.
Note 3: The Graham essay is an essay on income inequality that came out before the atomic bomb that Picketty dropped on the subject. It really shouldn't be dragged out now because the research landscape on the field has been completely changed since it was written.
Final Note: I know that every time the word startup is used on HN, it spurs a 'No True Scotsman' debate about what qualities invalidate a new business from the label startup. Not remotely important. The FRBoSF article notes that new businesses have faster job growth than older businesses and that's the larger subject in question. Trying to throw companies out only serves to move the conversation from fact based to conjecture based by throwing out a perfectly good source of facts relevant to the matter.
The specific relationship that they find is that startup creation is associated with home prices. This makes sense in the US, as home prices are a good proxy for middle class wealth. Here's a quick not fully vetted interpretation of this finding: When the middle class is relatively rich, they start businesses. When it is relatively poor, they don't. The aspirational income inequality that Graham posits doesn't immediately jump out when looking at year by year new startup numbers on a graph. I'm currently analyzing these numbers, but it's pretty clear that they don't support Graham's assumptions.
"A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. There is, in any normal family, a fixed amount of money at any moment. But that's not the same thing.
When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. "You can't make the pie larger," say politicians. When you're talking about the amount of money in one family's bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year's tax revenue, this is true. If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.
I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you're planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy."
A couple things you should do, if you want to have better discussions:
First, you should stop quoting pg's essays as though they were infallible sources of truth. It's not helping your argument. I like some of his essays; others are misleading or dead wrong (for example: http://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm). Empirical evidence always beats philosophical pondering; shawn-furyan provided data that pg was wrong, and you did nothing but post another data-free essay.
Second, you should stop assuming your ideological opponents are idiots who don't understand simple concepts like growth of wealth. We do; of course it is possible to "grow the pie". But since the 1970's, the majority of GDP growth has translated to income gains only for the top decile. And in such a regime, why should everyone else bother to grow the pie? What income inequality has done is create people who make a rational, and perfectly valid, calculation that "growth" is pointless and not worth fighting for, since they won't see any of it.
You're reading much too far into my comments. I posted the quotes to see what other people think of them, nothing more. If the response is that data beats logic, then that's a fine point.
you should stop assuming your ideological opponents are idiots who don't understand simple concepts
This is a personal attack, though. Please don't do that.
He doesn't, and it's not a line of logic, it's an interpretation of the evidence. Graham didn't even look at the evidence, and came to a conclusion that becomes very hard to support once you've had a glance at a chart of the available evidence (i.e. deep analysis isn't required to recognize that his proposed mechanism is flawed).
Also, you should really heed my 3rd note. You cannot speak effectively on income inequality without having read Picketty. It is by far the most significant treatment on the subject. It goes far beyond my simple counterpuntal analysis here to bat down a poorly thought out and completely unresearched pure logical argument. At least read a couple informed reviews of Picketty. I seem to recall FT, the Economists, Mankiew and Krugman having worthwhile, messy and conflicting thoughts after it was published. Graham just is not a useful resource on income inequality.
To address your point: Yes, Macro 101 makes it clear that trade multiplies wealth, thus wealth is non-static. The Graham argument you cite is incredibly elementary, and he is not the source to be citing on the topic. That particular question is miles more elementary than any discussion of the impacts of income inequality on macroeconomic factors. Bringing it up when talking about Income Inequality is kind of like citing a clunky explanation of Newton's 2nd law of motion in a discussion about time dilation effects of supersonic flight (which relies on non-Newtonian physics). To wit, analysis of Income inequality requires going beyond the overly simplistic macroeconomic models that have led Economists to mispredict the effects of income inequality for so long. Macro 101 is not useful here. The current evidence in the field is conter-intuitive and difficult to reconcile for expert economists.
Also, again, Graham's essay is very outdated and has, to be charitable, been surpassed by more careful and thorough resources on the topic.
Technology is also inevitable. Nothing you mention can be stopped. So standing up even more technology to help balance things is at the very least a noble effort.
Is Uber technology or is it a Ponzi scheme? I admire their technology at the same time as I have absolutely no faith in their ability to ever turn a profit, and more particularly, ever be a net benefit.
No, the technology label is not sufficient. It isn't an immunity necklace. It doesn't mean inevitability. I say this as an engineer.
A company isn't a technology, it's a business model built on technology. Uber's technology (mobile-enabled P2P networks connecting service providers to customers) is definitely unavoidable. Uber's business model isn't.
Global nuclear war will quickly and reliably stop everything.
There are powers which are very unhappy about the way technology is making them irrelevant and they see it as a fight for survival.
Civilisation is at a crossroad: continue building a high-tech society which makes humans irrelevant according to the current social/philosophical/moral norms (1) OR go back to the Dark Ages and let the powerful run the show (2).
If we want to continue with (1), we also have to quickly redefine the whole meaning of society, citizen, work, job, leadership, democracy, etc. This has to be done fast and it has to be done globally.
> Don't want to be too negative but technology is not only a force for good but also causes problems for a lot of people.
Technology is a tool. Effects depend on who handles it / with which incentives. It can naturally facilitate wrongdoing (intended or not) but it also can – and it would be irresponsible not to use it – to counter said wrongdoings.
One of my favorite "public good" websites is in the UK and called "theyworkforyou.com"
The workflow is that you punch in your postcode and get a list of all the people who represent you. From house, senate, european parlaiment.
You can then fill in a form and send a "constituent letter" to all the correct people for whom your opinion should have an impact.
After a reasonable wiating period, a survey comes to your email asking if they replied and some other questions.
Those "roll up" into a report on the member's responsiveness to their constituents.
Of the times I used it when I lived there, I always got responsiveness and only once was the response rude / unsatisfactory. (a member of european parlaiment was a total dismissive jerk)
Anyways - as far as ideas go, I think that would be a useful "start" - I also think there was more they could do to improve that further.
That's really great - though I do think a web page is more inclusive. Additionally the phone-call aspect is something really cool which I hadn't thought of, but I believe the form would allow a letter to be posted directly to multiple representatives.
The return address would clearly indicate "I live in your constituency" while a phone call might not have that same impact.
I think there's also room to improve on the formula of TWFY like allowing an option for users to post their letters "openly" and allowing them to upload photos of the responses.
Though open-source on the congress APP makes it a really exceptionally cool foundation.
The thing that is needed most is a laboratory of ideas for what will replace the neoliberal order. A corporate democracy that increases inequality and only panders to justice by gestures towards identity politics is seemingly over. What we're faced with now is either devolving into an Ethnic Nationalist state on par with Russia, or something entirely new that has yet to be described.
What needs to be recaptured is a vision of the future based on science, health, the arts, and shared prosperity. And it has to be described in actionable political terms.
We can do this. We have the majority of scientists, engineers, philosophers, and artists behind us. But we have to move quickly because returning to the kind of managed democracy we had before is no longer possible.
> What needs to be recaptured is a vision of the future based on science, health, the arts, and shared prosperity. And it has to be described in actionable political terms.
We need a Star Trek: TNG for the (pun not intended) next generation...
If someone is willing to start a movement that wants to create United Fedration of Planets, count me in.
Right I agree. The command and control framework of the Star Trek universe will be unpalatable to American biases, so it would have to be something more networked along the lines of the federalism we already have. But given our technology, building a more directly democratic system of feedback should be possible. Trump's success is using Twitter to transform himself into a disruptive avatar of his supporters. The next generation of politicians has to do the same, but with democratic impulses as opposed to authoritarian ones.
We also, as much as possible, must try evenly distribute the future. For example, if we want to defeat climate change, we have to rally manufacturing and technological solutions in places like the rural Midwest. In even the reddest of states, their are bastions of support for future-oriented ideas, and we should begin networking these places togehther as forward bases of operation.
I wasn't really even thinking about "command and control framework". More about the culture of Star Trek universe - "the future based on science, health, the arts, and shared prosperity", where people respect science, competence, teamwork and humanitarian values.
One thing I always loved about Star Trek worldview is that characters in the show always believe people they meet are competent at what they do, instead of assuming that they're working with morons. Ditto for the bureaucracy of the UFP - it's assumed competent until proven otherwise; not like in our world, where the government is always assumed idiotic by default.
Right, but framing is desperately important in this context. If you say we want to build a Star Trek future, in no short order you'll have people jumping all over you about how it's an authoritarian communist fantasy. I've seen this exact thing happen on this forum.
If instead, its framed as expanding the idea of American Federalism, diverse entities working towards vision of the future rooted in these ideals, I think it will be more successful.
We just need 2 things to make it happen. The replicator (far closer than most people think) and a way to deal with the people who will inevitably decide that replicators can only be used with their permission (so, so far away).
There are quite a few energetic people out there devoted to worker cooperatives and generally developing strategies for the democratization of wealth/capital. The nice part is it doesn't require electoral politicking or lawmaking, just a voluntary change in how people interact and associate economically.
Alternative economic arrangements will not be able to survive under an authoritarian kleptocracy. They'll just be moved out of the way through some form of corruption. Even under the neoliberal order, they were only barely tolerated. Think about what happened with Tessa and direct sales in many states as the mildest precursor to this kind of future.
Whether we like it or not, the country is shifting back towards the 19th century notions of "political economy." These existed in a diminished form under neoliberalism, but were largely swept beside by the triumphalist end of history that reigned. Appeals to fascism and authoritarian communism have already entered the Overton window, so the only option now is to outcompete those explicit political-economic fusions with something new.
Kind of sounds like the hypothetical "technocracy" [1]. I'd be wary of too much science at the same time - needs some balance. What stirs the beating hearts of people on HN likely does not do so for everyone.
I know this is a risk, but I think science and tech have to be at the center because of their association with forward looking narratives. Part of the reframing has to be positioning science and tech as being at the service of constituencies that have been left behind in the past order. Trump has been able to conflate them with elitism because they have thrown their political weight behind a neoliberal political order. Since that's on the its way out, the door is open to align them with a new, more democratic political narrative.
About news: Back in the day, Groklaw did a phenomenal job covering the SCO v. world court cases (and, more broadly, the intersection of law and technology). It was run by a semi-anonymous paralegal who really cared about the cases, about the law, and about technology. ("Semi-anonymous", because her name was known, but it was a fairly common name, and her city and state were not known.)
Groklaw became the source of authoritative reporting about the SCO cases. It had analysis from lawyers, paralegals, and technologists. It had (voluntary, amateur) reporters attending hearings and giving in-depth reports, and then thorough analysis from a wide variety of people. People cared enough to voluntarily take vacation days to go to the courthouse and attend hearings, and then spend the next 2+ hours writing it all up and posting it. People voluntarily gave money to keep it all going. It was amazing.
It also was subject to significant attack, both from SCO and from trolls. It consumed the life of the paralegal running it for a decade. It was probably not sustainable.
I think that moderation is essential for any online community that isn't going to fall to the lowest common denominator, but sustainability is an issue. (HN at least has multiple moderators, so hopefully they won't burn out.) For news, multiple reporters are needed (Groklaw didn't report on a hearing until multiple reports came in, because sometimes trolls sent in false reports.)
I think the answer may be multiple small sites that each care about a focused area, and attract enough of a following that there are multiple reporters available when needed. (This probably won't work for something like foreign policy. I can attend a court hearing in my town and write up a report, but I can't get an interview with the Secretary of State and start asking uncomfortable questions.)
This isn't really a firm idea, just some thoughts and observations...
What about a new media organization focused on covering politics in a way that contributes to strengthening democracy? Is that something YC would be interested in?
I'm exploring this idea and trying to figure out how to make it work.
> News: We’re facing two major issues with news. The first is fake news. The business model for online media rewards the people who get the greatest number of page views, clicks and likes. That results in a system that prizes virality over truth.
This is insanely difficult as interpersonal trust is expensive and getting first-hand information/data is extremely non-trivial. I agree that "mainstream media" (quotes because that phrase makes my mouth taste like ash) has happily devolved into BuzzFeed-style clickbait, but another parrot of AP isn't progress.
Paul Graham suggests that the best way to come into a good startup idea is to become the sort of person that has them, which I think applies to informing the public at large -- I don't think it's realistic to expect to build a revenue model off of people that will only give you their eyeballs for 20 minutes a day in the hopes of finding something to have an opinion on. I think this is a much larger, nearly intractable, problem of making societies into the types that are interested in nuance and dry detail.
Paul Graham is right that it has to be something you want to do, but it is possible to build large new media sites on short attention spans -- if your site is designed for them. My site, an actual working solution to the problem of both fake news and bias, is doing great (Over three million page views last month). However, we most likely won't apply to YC this time, or ever again, due to Sam Altman's anti-Trump bias.
No offense, but looking at your website, you've solved the problem of fake news by not showing any news. Unless you're talking about no bias in UFC news specifically.
It's early days, so we haven't filled out a lot of our content. While our main newsline is on Conor McGregor, the UFC fighter, there is not much fake news or bias surrounding him. A far better example is to look at the newsline for Emma Sulkowicz, the so-called "Mattress Girl" [1].
Ms Sulkowicz, at that time a student at Columbia University, claims she was raped and in protest at what she saw was the University's lack of action, decided to carry a mattress around the campus for a year. The problem for readers wanting to find out more about her story is that the media is highly polarized. They are either written by feminists, or their opponents. There is no middle ground. If you try to get an overview of the case on Wikipedia [2] you will encounter that site's systemic bias, where the most powerful group on the page "owns" the content. In this case the page is controlled by people sympathetic to Ms Sulkowicz claims and reflects their bias. There is also the issue that Wikipedia does not allow embedded content such as documentation or videos.
Newslines fixes the problem of bias by allowing people to build up the page by adding news events. Each news event comprises only the factual information in the source article. Even if the source is highly partisan we can still extract non-biased information. In effect, we are converting articles to data. As each factual summary is added to our system it builds up an unbiased account of the topic, and the reader can then decide the result. Compare this with a traditional news article or biography where the writer starts out with the conclusion in mind. Also, because each post goes through editorial review, the potential for fake new is minimised.
Thanks for responding. To be sure, I'm asking the following questions in good faith as I want your site to work.
> Newslines fixes the problem of bias by allowing people to build up the page by adding news events.
If people are just citing existing biased sources, isn't this just trading half-truths? Is the idea that somewhere in the middle is typically the truth? This sounds like it's prime to create middle ground fallacies.
> Each news event comprises only the factual information in the source article. Even if the source is highly partisan we can still extract non-biased information.
Who is "we"? If it's your staff (or you), then I'd need to trust you. If it's the collective "we", then we're back to bias, but worse because it's masquerading as impartial.
> Also, because each post goes through editorial review, the potential for fake new is minimised.
Which makes it sound like the prior in the previous issue -- this sounds like closed source Wikipedia.
>If people are just citing existing biased sources, isn't this just trading half-truths? Is the idea that somewhere in the middle is typically the truth? This sounds like it's prime to create middle ground fallacies.
We don't simply cite the source. We extract the factual information in the source into the post. When New York Times reports "Evil Trump is coming to the UK" and Breitbart reports, "Our friend Trum is coming to the UK", the news event that Trump is coming to the UK is the same in both cases.
Now, the facts may be misreported, but that's a different issue. We do some tagging for obvious rumors, and we hope to improve our tools for labeling the veracity of how each new event is reported. But we belive we have a solid base to work from.
>Who is "we"? If it's your staff (or you), then I'd need to trust you. If it's the collective "we", then we're back to bias, but worse because it's masquerading as impartial
We use a combination of paid and crowdsourced staff. It doesn't really matter who "we" are, because the process is the same in either case to extract the factual information. You only need to trust that we are transcribing from the source correctly, and readers can always go back to the original source to check. So you may wonder, what's the value in that? The value is the creation of the unbiased timeline when all the summaries from diverse sources are compiled.
>Which makes it sound like the prior in the previous issue -- this sounds like closed source Wikipedia.
While Wikipedia acts like a news archive, its software and policies are not up to the task. There are similarities to what we do compared with Wikipedia and at first we considered ourselves to be a "Wikipedia for news". However, we take a more formal approach to adding sources that Wikipedia, which leads to more consistency in the final result. You may want to read my analysis of Wikipedia's failings: http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/
I've been thinking about Robert's Rules of Order [1] for some time now, and the idea that it would be nice if it were updated for today's world of discussion forums, in which the interactions are more drawn out, rather than conducted with all participants active at the same time. I think it would be nice if there were a discussion forum that implemented some sort of policies that had been as well thought-out as Robert's rules.
What I was thinking is that some policies regarding responsibilities incurred by posting a comment in an asynchronous discussion forum are needed. For example, one should not be able to simply post a comment then leave the discussion. The persistence of their comment should be tied to whether they continue to participate, and respond to refutations and the like. Similarly, I see a lot of specious reasoning and appealing lies get posted, rapidly upvoted, but only eventually debunked: the people who upvoted should be notified of the refutation.
It would be nice if karma could actually be useful, and this always reminds me of PageRank [2]. Surely there must be some way to normalize the weights of highly-voted comments in less populated but serious subforums (like subreddits) so they are not overwhelmed by the karma granted to silly jokes in unserious but hugely populated frivolous subforums (again, I'm thinking of reddit here).
I think all of these things would do something to counter the fake news and echo chambers.
I've played in this space! A few years ago, I half-assed the world's worst startup for asynchronous political debating that focused more on identifying and understanding opinions as opposed to expression and dialog, because dialog necessarily breaks down to dichotomies and outgroup homogeneity which are exactly the problem. I never really figured out how to elevator-pitch the damn thing, but here are some blog posts I wrote back in the day: http://blog.agreethepeople.com/
If you do follow that link, start at the bottom and work your way up. And let me know what you think!
It doesn't matter anyway. Even though I am building a social news search engine that aims to minimise bias and eliminates fake news, given @sama's statements I don't think there will a culture fit. So I'm not going to apply this time, or ever again.
There are several issues, which overlap 1) Credibility: Altman's call to fix the fake new problem is ironic, because Altman's most recent statement [1] propagates the very fake news he decries. For example he refers to Trump's travel executive order as a "Muslim ban" and bases his thoughts on that false premise. 2) Woolly thinking: His statement that "most of them [Trump voters] voted for him for reasons other than the promise of a Muslim ban," is not only false because it's not a Muslim ban, but false because increasing security at the border was one of the main reasons they actually did vote for him, and the actions Trump has taken have high approval from his followers. 3) Being a smug liberal: See point 2. The idea that Trump voters are misled fools is a common theme of liberals. Altman is determined to try to show Trump supporters the error of their ways instead of making any attempt to understand their concerns. It's useful to note at this point that Trump flipped states that had been previously held by Obama. 4) Hypocrisy: Where was Altman when Obama was actually bombing Muslims? I know where he was -- organising a YC fundraiser for Obama [2] 5) Hyperbolic: I'm all for reasoned arguments, but his previous post [3] bordered on hysteria, saying Trump is "irresponsible in the way dictators are" and making outlandish comparisons to Hitler. 5) Poor business decision: It's surprising that Altman would damage his business by creating a culture of intolerance for founders who have political views from him. How must Trump supporting founders, employees and investors inside YC and beyond feel when Altman claims the moral high ground? 6) Emotional: When emotion takes over business, business fails. 7) Evasion: Despite numerous requests Altman has not clarified his position regarding the status of pro-Trump founders.
Put all of these together and I just lost respect. I thought he was smarter. And I certainly I don't feel the need to justify my support for Trump to any investor. So, no, I don't think there's a culture fit.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadI would love to see a tool or company that holds the mainstream news sources accountable. Over the last two days the major news sources have been pushing a blatantly false "truth" ("Muslim Ban"). Intention of this post is not to get into a political discussion of this!
Every time I, as a heavy news consumer, see the BBC, NYT etc push a story which I know to be false or extremely misleading, I lose more and more trust.
I value the benefits that the mainstream press provides (checking sources, editorial discretion etc), but as I see more and more fake or misleading stories, I lose trust. I think this is a common feeling across many in the West.
edit: Could someone also clarify if these are intended for US only? I have a couple of ideas in mind for the UK which has a great amount of open source data regarding Gov.
edit edit: Apologies for mods if my example has derailed this thread a bit. Just used an example fresh in our minds.
For the passing news consumer, it would be very easy to be led to believe that Muslims are banned from entering the US.
In addition: "I’ll tell you the whole history of it: When he first announced it, he said ‘Muslim ban,'" Giuliani said on Fox News.
"He called me up, he said, ‘Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally.’"
source: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/316726-giuliani-t...
Accurate reporting of the news is so tremendously important. Every single time that the mainstream media is called out for presenting opinion as fact, the public lose a tiny bit more faith in the veracity of the media.
The Trump administration media strategy is so crystal clear I do not know why there is any confusing about what is going on.
Every time a mainstream publication presents an analysis/opinion as fact, when it turns out Not to be true, Trump admin. calls them out on it and erodes trust further. This is their strategy. Keep the mainstream media falling into this trap and erode public confidence.
I think the ONLY way to counteract this very effective strategy is to clearly separate the two.
Report on the facts as they are. Also provide analysis and opinion that is clearly marked as such. This is so damn important, regardless of where you stand on the issue discussed.
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/01/29/protecting-nation-foreig...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/us/politics/refugee-musli...
The "ban" is religion-blind. In the future, as refugee claims processing resumes, minorities can be prioritized; it does not "ban" with religion-specific exclusions altogether... now, or then.
"(e) Notwithstanding the temporary suspension imposed pursuant to subsection (a) of this section, the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security may jointly determine to admit individuals to the United States as refugees on a case-by-case basis, in their discretion, but only so long as they determine that the admission of such individuals as refugees is in the national interest — including when the person is a religious minority in his country of nationality facing religious persecution"
Maybe a better approach would be to focus on ways of securely authenticating, signing, and delivering primary sensory data like photos, video, audio, and transcripts and doing so without interpretation.
Another two things to focus on:
- a better way to get an overview of a story and its evolution - something to collate news reports in order to easy see what's the current aggregate knowledge (trivial example: see how causalty rates tend to fluctuate for the first few hours/days of a disaster, and how the blame gets shifted around before appropriate investigations conclude)
- a better way to follow redactions and corrections - it's too easy to read an outraging story that later turns out to be completely false, but to never get the memo that the story was invalidated
A high-profile author of the policy is on camera --- video you can easily find for yourself --- saying that they were tasked with devising a Muslim ban, and that he is proud of the legal chicanery they employed to make it "legal".
This subthread, of course, an entirely off-topic divergence from the subject at hand.
Would you prefer if the headline was "Trump Wants Muslim Ban, Gets as Close as He Can"?
There are no valid security reasons for it.
Well, if you're going to try to build a mechanism to hold the mainstream media accountable, you'll really need to create a standard on when a summarization is inaccurate.
If the media was reporting on, "a ban on travelers from majority Muslim countries by a president who has promised his supporters a ban on Muslims" would that still be misleading? And if opponents of the ban called it a "Muslim ban", would media outlets be allowed to report on that fact?
For the record, I've seen NYT and BBC call this a "travel ban", "Trump's ban" and in quotes designed to indicate attribution "'Muslim ban'". All of these seem reasonable and factual.
Your thoughts?
== EDIT ==
A headline that reads simply "muslim ban" shouldn't be considered fake news (in my opinion), so long as it provides a full explanation of the ban and who is affected.
It is an editorializing title, but there's a massive difference between editorializing and fabrication. I believe calling something "fake news" should be reserved for publications that create falsehoods out of whole cloth. (e.g. "warehouse full of votes cast by illegal immigrants found")
That would be a very accurate summary. Not misleading in the slightest.
>" And if opponents of the ban called it a "Muslim ban", would media outlets be allowed to report on that fact?"
Absolutely, but it should not be presented as fact that "Donald Trump has enacted a Muslim Ban". "People have described this as a Muslim Ban" is a fair representation.
>For the record, I've seen NYT and BBC call this a "travel ban", "Trump's ban" and in quotes designed to indicate attribution "'Muslim ban'". All of these seem reasonable and factual
That is far more responsible. However if you google news search Muslim Ban on the day it was announced, this is Not what the majority of news sources were doing.
Of course, the more clarifications you add, the less it reads like a headline...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_world#Countries_with_th...
Are you sure? Here's the google search you're talking about: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22muslim+ban%22&safe=off&bi...
The only "muslim ban" usages are opinion articles or quotes.
https://www.popehat.com/2016/12/15/deserving-trust/
1) http://ndresponse.gov/dakota-access-pipeline/myth-vs-fact
2) #15 is so beyond dumb, "wild buffalo", really? Plus, it underscores the poor reporting in that ranchers have lost livestock in the area.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/29/tr...
Is it true that Rudy Giulani has said this. It also true Trump has said in the past he wants a Muslim ban. It is also true that many people believe this action is a step in the direction of a Muslim Ban.
But this is not a Muslim Ban at this stage and presenting it as such is a lie and misleading.
I agree that alarms should be going of all over the place in the mainstream news about this action and would encourage all of the opinion pieces to stress this could be a step towards a full Muslim Ban. That is for the Opinion pieces however.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and in a feat of amazing linguistic ability for a waterfowl looks you dead in the eye and says "I'M A DUCK!" what are we supposed to call it, a giraffe?
To engage with pedantry for a moment, the ban may be more precisely an ethnicity or nationality one, but that's just as wholly unjust. Don't lose sight of the forest for the trees. The essential malfeasance here is bigotry written into law, the particular shade of that bigotry is immaterial.
I still believe the mainstream news should Clearly separate the cold hard facts from analysis and opinion.
Trump will do a lot of damage to the US, but hysterical reporting with such a negative bias does not cast a good light on the US media, and is not the way to go.
Alternately find some way to get uneducated heartlanders to move to Fresno or something.
Also it would help if you show just the smallest amount of empathy people in the U.S. who don't live in one of two half states. (i.e. people whose tax dollars benefit Stanford and the origin of Silicon Valley in defense contracting, people who buy your products, whose stock market investments make it possible for you to get rich, etc.)
There are lot of people in rural areas in the US who not only do not have a lot of education but who have an active antipathy to it.
One shouldn't let this observation degenerate into a stereotype, but I don't think one should dismiss it either.
"a lot of education but who have an active antipathy to it."
An yet, I live with people who cherish it right here in rural America. Parents sacrificed to get kids in college. Doctors are listened to (yep, get your shots).
Its ok, really. It is socially acceptable to degrade and demonize all us NFL & MMA watching morons. You can feel superior based on one story, and frankly, most in these parts don't go in for the trouble to correct you. Its not like TV treats people much better.
The funny part is the little digs. The NYT article[1] on TV shows by region claimed folks in rural American liked "Walking Dead" because it is "for people worried about immigration". I'm more thinking that its a fun show and frankly most people here can imagine there survival a lot more than those goofballs in the show.
Oh well. As the graphic floating around Twitter said "you spent 8 years weaponizing the federal government" then you get this.
I guess, I ask if someone had the same story about say, a racial group, would you be passing it along on a board like this as an example of why "uneducated X" would be true?
1) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/26/upshot/duck-d...
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-on...
I find his analysis good on top of being entertaining. Echos a lot of what I've heard living in Red states. Forgot to add that most people around here are just down-to-earth, working-class people who go to work, raise kids, have fun with friends, etc. Normal people.
When a farmer's interaction with "educated folk" are people such as yourself who look down their nose at him because _he's a farmer_ and you have a degree in _gender studies_ ("I mean gawd, that poor hick doesn't know anything!"), can you blame them?
We need to stop writing off states that aren't progressive enough as places unworthy of investment or business. Part of the problem is that "founder culture" isn't big in smaller cities away from the west coast. Some time and investment towards teaching students at state colleges and community colleges across the nation, along with some actual investments could go a very long way.
Of course, most VCs already have a deluge of bad ideas that will come to them, so they don't think there is much to be gained from seeking out new sources of ideas. But that's elitism and laziness. There are talented and driven Americans who may not talk with the same lingo or approach the same problems the same way, but leaving them out (or requiring them to move and be surrounded by others who do think how VCs want) will only entrench the existing divide.
Better something that encourages primary sources on the ground to contribute (video, text audio), and puts them in context chronologically, geographically and perhaps socially, but is not based on an advertising business model.
Difficult to know what it could look like to but we need something fundamentally new which uses the internet not just as another medium.
Issue is, I think that's kind of what social media is meant for. Anyone can contribute news as a primary source and share it with others online via sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
So my worry is that any system like this would basically be just another social media service (albeit with a 'news slant' in the marketing material) and therefore be very difficult to promote.
User created news is an idea that seems obvious and logical in theory, just very hard to promote in a world where it's competing with thousands of other services offering (in your user's eyes) very similar functionality.
I'm thinking of something less social and more verifiable source of info though. You'd need incentives to keep it real, probably some form of verifying in a local web of trust, and incentives to read/watch so grouping by geography and interest.
I'm thinking more make your own local newspaper than share videos to your friends. Probably you'd have to start in a niche like school news and expand out.
Twitter is really interesting here because they are making and breaking news and being used as a broadcast medium in spite of huge failings for that use (spam, trolls), I think they're the closest thing but still a long way from something letting people publish verified info to the world in chunks bigger than a procrustean tweet.
Grouping by geography and interest is definitely needed (Medium/WordPress style tags can help with both here, especially if users can follow/subscribe to them).
Making your own newspaper sounds interesting as well. You mean like a sort of blog or Medium publication? Or a social network type feed?
What are your thoughts on the way news should evolve, I'm genuinely really interested in this area.
I mean, it's going to be a way more complicated dependency situation than with code - imagine a fact determined by a study which had to make decisions about categories - but the gist remains:
An interpretation of facts depends on those facts, some of which themselves are collections/transforms on facts, but ultimately, there's a physical reality from which they stem.
Also do you think we are in the right spot to go for this YC call?
People need a (fun) way to increase the number of real social interactions they have with other people. What's really dangerous right now is that many (including Liberals) are socially shunning those who don't share their political beliefs (or are not pure enough in their beliefs). Pushing people to the fringes of society will just force them to find a home in the most extreme among us.
For a long time, Americans relied on social clubs that allowed people to engage in diverse political discussions but also build friendly relationships with others. I would like to see startups try to revive long lived, persistent social organizations that are aimed first at building a friendly community among its members and second at making people listen to different points of view.
http://www.fairvote.org/
https://represent.us/
http://www.wolf-pac.com/
Creating a more fair representation in government that doesn't only involve the duopoly parties as well as getting money out politics should be the two main priorities before anything else. Unless these two things are fixed first, everything else will continue to be broken.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g
* Leveraging social networking to generate social permission for people to stand for office, which I think is the most important obstacle facing people who might consider running --- far more so than money.
* Using technology to bypass the expensive outreach vectors traditional candidates are stuck with.
* Informing constituencies and potential candidates about the local offices available to run for.
* Crowdfunding campaigns with Kickstarter-like dynamics to make it safer to commit funds to speculative candidates.
* Capturing the stories of people who have or are standing for election, so that we can all compare notes and see what the challenges (or lack thereof) are.
* Building informal parties and coalitions of officeholders in states and major metro areas, to build tickets and slates of candidates around common ideals.
* Building common platforms for constituent services, so that fresh new officeholders can outcompete incumbents both in responsiveness and in making their newfound influence available to their constituencies to pressure other parts of government.
I've been calling my Senators about the Sessions nomination nonstop for the past 2 weeks and I've gotten calls through just 3 times. I haven't the slightest clue how to reach officeholders in my Chicago suburb. Clearly there's room for major innovation here.
Incidentally, if you're building things like this, I'd love to help in any way I can. I'm easy to contact. I've set a goal for myself to get a specific number of friends and acquaintances to run, and I'm happy with the progress I've been able to make and pretty excited about the concept.
This is a huge frustration of mine. It is nearly impossible to get the attention of politicians unless I'm willing to spend a vast amount of my time on the phone, because they don't pay attention to email, social media, etc.
It would be awesome to have a social media platform that is dedicated to political communication. And with ample features related to communicating about policy. Like for example:
1) The ability to search for a pending bill based on the text of the bill, highlight text, and comment directly on it.
2) The ability to +1 someone else's comments in a meaningful way.
3) The ability to publicly challenge a politician's claims through research, data citations, or other types of analysis.
4) The ability to find the appropriate politicians/appointees for a specific concern.
5) The ability to facilitate directional communication from politicians on specific issues. It would be great if a politician had a common platform to explain in detail why they voted yay/nay or abstained from voting for something, with quick crossreferences, data visualization, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory
So I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think it's "just" removing the "costly signal".
For a long time, in fact, this mindset meant that a really effective way to "hack" the Congressional contact system was to send your message in a telegram -- because if you were willing to pay to have a messenger run your message across town and deliver it by hand, you were assumed to be very motivated indeed!
(I doubt that's true anymore, of course; not least because I'm not sure you can send telegrams anymore. But now I'm wondering if you could get the same effect these days by sending your message via FedEx's most expensive service...)
That being said, once the sums you contribute get large enough you will almost certainly get to be known around the office -- either explicitly (e.g. the Chief of Staff tells all the people who handle correspondence "Bob Smith is a good friend of the Congressman's, if you find any messages from him bring those straight to me") or implicitly (e.g. the staff of the Congressional office notices that when Bob Smith comes in to meet with the boss he's ushered right in and stays for a long time). So large contributors' messages can easily get special attention, even without that kind of direct connection to their contributions ever being made.
Mail them a letter. Yes, a letter, on paper. They take those very seriously -- especially when so many of them come in that their office is filled to the rafters with them.
I almost hate to reveal this "secret" since I thought it was pretty well-known, but if you contribute to your Representative's campaign, there's a pretty good chance you can get a one-on-one or at least attendance to a dinner event. This is much easier with state politicians.
Legislating is an information processing task. They're just doing triage. It's your job to get their attention. The only way I've ever gotten my way is when I show up with a crowd. Then whoever's sitting in the chair will do whatever it takes to make you go away.
Politics of Attention https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Attention-Government-Priorit...
Do you plan to run yourself?
If you can take away the need for millions of dollars to run a campaign then policy makers aren't beholden to the few wealthy supporters that helped get them elected.
Many of your points are already being worked on and the projects would love more support and input.
[0]http://progcode.co
e.g. https://www.theyworkforyou.com/ (Hansard prettified), https://www.writetothem.com/ (case study at https://www.mysociety.org/democracy/writetothem/ )
TLDR: Replace current campaign managers, consultants, fund raisers, etc.
Which I totally support. But how?
Please ask candidates (past, present and future) about running for office. Better yet, run for office. See what it's like. I highly recommend the training from http://wellstone.org and http://democraticfuture.org. I'm sure there's others.
Also, join some local campaigns and do the grunt work. See how the game is played. Especially fund raising and endorsements.
---
This is not a technical problem.
Like the nerdtopian legislative information systems (https://www.govtrack.us) before, geeks making fascinating tools without deep knowledge won't make a dent.
Source: ran for office, activist/lobbyist.
My direct observation is that (most) successful politicians are careerists. They started as pages, legislative assistants, etc. Makes perfect sense.
At the same time, most of the lowest rung (entry level) offices have a ridiculous number of candidates. Most first time candidates are walk-ons, having no idea how to play the game (me, for example). Most aspirants wash out after their first loss.
Excellent link, thank you.
Redistricting is my #1 issue. I've been long
I'm slowly warming up to the idea of voter efficiency. It'd likely moot the geometric based techniques, like compactness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasted_vote
http://election.princeton.edu/2016/11/24/a-lower-court-win-o...
http://gerrymander.princeton.edu
Politically, I work on local issues. We recently formed a local working group. So far we're researching and networking.
My personal policy goal is to have an open, transparent redistricting process. Regardless of the heuristics used. Modeled loosely on Iowa's system. Though I'm super partisan, all gerrymandering (disenfranchisement) makes me sick. I want to prevent scenarios like Ohio and Maryland.
I do not yet know how voter efficiency standards will change my plans, goals.
1) 8 week Training Program - an eight-week training program targeted at lawyers, entrepreneurs, and others who are interested in serving as state and federal legislatures. Candidates have their training and expenses paid for, and they learn all of the key things they need to know to win. It's an open process, where people all over the country can apply, and the program becomes prestigious over time, like Echoing Green or YC.
- Public Speaking Training - Social Media Growth Hacking - Fundraising and Donor Management - Policy Issue Training
2) Shared News: A hacker news type site for democratically minded people to share political articles. Builds inbound attention to the accelerator.
3) Blog: Articles about what it is like to become a politician. It features lots of examples and profiles. Shows everyday people they can do it as well. - What does the career path look like for someone who joins the House of Representatives? - How do state senators support themselves?
4) Funder Network: Candidates get introductions to top funders from the state who can help. Each candidate gets a certain amount of intros, and the accelerator manages the process.
5) Fundraising Tools: the candidate is trained in how to use tools, such as a CRM, to manage the process. I've seen a lot of startups struggle with setting up the right infrastructure, and I'm sure candidates have the same challenges.
6) Public Speaking Training: Politicians need to be electrifying. Have politicians train with TV media experts to become compelling in front of the crowd.
7) Digital Profile: Help candidates set up a website, volunteer management tools, and social media tools. Create a standard set of tools for candidates.
9) Growth Hacking Team: a small squad of growth hackers who devise strategies for growth hacking political candidates. This team builds software and strategies, and these tools are disseminated to candidates through the training program. Think of it like a consulting firm within the program.
9) Intern Pool: Many early-stage state legislatures rely on interns to provide the manpower needed for the procedural aspects of campaigning and running office. The accelerator can help recruit thousands of interns from different sources, and it can provide each candidate with a constant stream of interns to provide the manpower needed to win. Interns are given credit for being part of the fellowship program (like YC fellows) and are part of a cohort with shared events, message board, hr people they can talk to.
10) MOOC: make a public MOOC to let people view the training program. This makes people excited about the program and interested in applying. It also helps scale the program, similar to How to Start a Startup.
If you'd like to follow up, my email is in my username.
You could also possibly allow constituents to place donations that would go through if the petition succeeds and a response is given.
Hear, hear, I think this is the key. Happy people tend toward stability for the societies they're in. I'm all for education, for anyone who wants it, as much as they want it (price and payer to be negotiated). That said, I suspect that education by itself will not fill the job supply-demand gap, nor that those educated jobs will be well-matched to the places where people live. And, if there's more to life than jobs, then maybe the jobs need to move to where people are, rather than making people move to where the jobs are. I think answers that will work will have to work for, say, everybody in the 'Rust Belt' as they are today, not as they might be if they jump through all the right hoops. For an example some people will dislike, a government run single payer health care system would take the financial burden off of employers as well as being cheaper for employees, supporting small business growth and entrepreneurship. Don't like that example? Fine. Bring on your favorites.
The root of all these problems stem from a lack of effective education.
1) The current methods are highly ineffective for teaching
By getting more effective at teaching children, and helping them to self educate, we get better informed citizens who can interpret news more accurately and effectively participate in democracy.
2) The current goals for education do not align with current & future needs
Our current system is designed to produce factory workers for the industrial economy, which was adapted to produce knowledge workers for the information economy. But we are moving towards full automation of most of those jobs.
We will need to prepare people to be adaptable in a fast changing automated world: more entrepreneurial type skills are needed.
I guess you could start by opening a co-working space with a supervising adult (not teacher, this adult will be there to ensure that the kids aren't killing each other).
There would be teachers accessible via video calls but most of the time would be spent reading or doing work, not passively listening/watching. If you pool these teachers together, you will be able to teach even the most obscure subjects.
In this system, everyone is literally going at their pace.
I think that fundamentally the main objection to this system is that some people learn better in a classroom setting, to which I reply: 21st century education needs to make a transition to turn graduates into self-learners. This can only be achieved with a system that fosters self-learning from very early on.
It's not like you can create self-learners by making students go through a process that's fundamentally as anti-self-learning as possible.
This will also make switching schools extremely painless. You will transition to a new desk. It's like a gym membership, you can totally have two if that's convenient for you for whatever reason.
If a "global assessment API" was decoupled from learning institutions it could capture educational experience as generated by any environment, from standard public schools to non-traditional schools, and we'd see a much more diverse set of educational experiences arise and be able to coexist fairly, meaning that individuals could better shape their individual academic paths without compromise and still be able to operate in the greater academic network.
A universal assessment system can exist in a very scalable way if its built upon social consensus. It would be absolutely impossible given our current models of assessment, especially the ones used on a national or international level. They are just simply far too expensive to begin to capture the breadth or depth of potential experience in academics in a meaningful way.
Today though we have the technology (i.e Ethereum and other decentralized technologies) to (relatively) easily design and deploy incentivized _secure_ systems for social consensus. It would enable systems like the one you're talking about to actually enable not just the teaching of the most obscure subject, but the _recognition_ of them too.
This is something I have been working on building for a while now. I truly believe its the answer to the flaws in our (global, not just American) education system and will be necessary for a truly effective, and universal, one.
Very good point. There are no feedback looks between the two subsystems which makes them both suck.
One point I'd like to raise though is that I'm not sure if it's really optimal have 'assessments'. I have some fundamental issues with assigning numerical values to things that are sometimes hard to judge numerically.
I think that a much better system would be that each student's work is stored in the cloud where it's accessible and everyone can judge for himself.
And I think that we should move away from test to projects that are largely designed by the student under the guidance of teachers.
Experience could even just be a boolean value, has or doesn't have, instead of anything numerical. Or there could emerge separate numerical systems for each area of knowledge. The important part is that the system is based on social consensus of people who actually possess the experience, so that its the most relevant and applicable system possible.
Osmo - https://www.playosmo.com/en/ - seems pretty cool. Uses the iPad camera and packets of materials for interactive learning experiences. It could evolve into something like the Primer.
"One Laptop per Child" has/had similar goals while not being nearly as advanced/cohesive as the Primer.
I think that fundamentally the main objection to this system is that some people learn better in a classroom setting, to which I reply: 21st century education needs to make a transition to turn graduates into self-learners. This can only be achieved with a system that fosters self-learning from very early on.
I grew up in a very traditional system that would remind most Americans of the 1950s, and it hasn't impacted my self-learning ability at all. I'm fortunate in that my parents liked books and I was able to read by age 3 and as long as I can remember I had firm opinions about what I wanted to read. I'm not altogether convinced by your vision of students as intellectual tabulae rasa that can be variously configured as drones, autodidacts, or innovators.
A student's home and socioeconomic life can have as much or more impact on their intellectual development as the kind of school they attend, and the idea that perfecting education will automatically nullify other factors is a rock on which many would-be reformers have come to grief.
Poor people's children self-teach. They definitely learn. They don't necessarily learn the culture and values that would allow them to function gracefully in the modern economy.
A student's home and socioeconomic life can have as much or more impact on their intellectual development as the kind of school they attend, and the idea that perfecting education will automatically nullify other factors is a rock on which many would-be reformers have come to grief.
People's subculture/tribe and actual community are a tremendous part of who people are and how well they can access resources and knowledge in the world. Religious and various civic organizations understand this. Often governments only understand this as a source of strength for their "opposition." Opposition movements and rebellions understand this.
Most significantly, school reform programs like Harlem Children's Zone understand this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Children's_Zone To fight poverty, you have to involve the whole community on your side. If your initiative is fighting the community, it cannot fight poverty.
But I think its worth bringing up again as it is seemingly at the root of all the issues surfaced by the Trump presidency, which is the main driver of this new RFS
As technological automation continues, there is demand for a system that is capable of retraining displaced workers, and doesn't create modern indentured servants in the process.
As you stated, I also believe that education it's the root of most problems. Today, almost everyone learns the same way as they did 100 years ago: A teacher going through a non-customized textbook that was written by a small number people. It's a linear learning path and highly ineffective. It's also inefficient, as teacher to student ratios are mostly around 1-to-20 (I am talking about K-12, not college or MOOCs).
I believe that we can overcome a lot of problems of education by applying technology. More concretely, we should be able to provide more customized, higher quality content for people at young and old age. This, while creating more genuine excitement for science and scientific thinking. This means, we have to rethink the current teacher/student paradigm. And I don't mean by merely providing tools to teachers or copy/pasting textbooks to online videos.
I mean by curating content that excites, using some ML to create an optimal and dynamic learning path per student and making it fit to the busy daily lives of people who don't have time to watch 1 hour lectures every week when they get home from work. This might seem like advertising, by I am working on exactly such a project and thought it would be ok to mention it here, because it is relevant for the discussion and other startups were mentioned in the comments, too. It's called Humbot (humbot.io) and I am happy to hear your comments and start a discussion on what the radical improvements in education must be over the next decade.
https://theconversation.com/ and http://www.worldcrunch.com/ make good starts, as do aggregators like http://www.aldaily.com/ and https://redef.com/
As far as pure education companies, we need more software platforms for building curriculums collaboratively, some combination of wikia, github, wirecutter, and khanacademy.org. You may be thrown by my inclusion of wirecutter, but concensus based consumer reports type information, leading to populations making better decisions, helps cut through the paradox of choice. It also teaches people HOW to make decisions, and how to evaluate choices. It should be easy for anyone to fork, remix, contribute, or request corrections. Even collaborative documentary editing software, or the ability to sift through ALL the worlds lectures on a topic, and assessable the best bits. As long as teams of strangers can collaborate and fork, the world will have more shoulder standing giants, and less reinventing of the wheel.
Contrary to popular belief - even here on HN - teachers are chronically making known sub-optimal instructional tradeoffs because they lack the time to complete tasks as they should ideally be completed. Very little seems to be done to create tools to improve the instructional process (that doesn't involve removing the teacher from that very process - e.g. MOOCs, Khan Academy, Knewton, etc.). Those digital alternative absolutely have a place, but there's a lot of opportunity to fundamentally improve the instructional work being done by teachers in classrooms every day.
Your suggestions are a great place to start:
- network instructional materials and lessons so they can be accessed in their entirety by other teachers
- network assessment materials that are tied (on the question/answer level) to standards and common goals (e.g. comprehension quip above).
Email is in profile if anyone would like to continue this discussion in a more detailed manner outside the thread.
I really believe forking is important. People might disagree with concensus and have a better way to do things that is looked down upon by the mass. One curriculum for all sounds like every egg in one basket.
(i decided i like optimul better than optimal)
It's been an open question for me how to improve education in earlier years where there's probably less scope for self-learning, and more focus should be on how to improve the teachers' efficiency and effectiveness. Since my own kids are starting school now, these earlier years have taken on new significance, but since I don't have a background in education, I haven't known where to start. I'm more at the point of "How can I help?!", since I have very little visibility into the frustrations that teachers experience on a day-to-day basis, but I can build software, if software can be part of the solution.
Sent you an email, but I'm sure there are others who would love to be involved in the discussion...
[1] http://www.commoncurriculum.com/
this product looks like only people within the same team can work together. that means thousands of teachers all repeating the same steps.
http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158
I have a platform that can be used to build it all but could use a good business partner and extra JS/Mobile developers can't hurt.
The business partner would help make pilots in schools and colleges. Just maybe a class here or there at first, then prove it out.
Please see http://qbix.com/blog for how we could partner together. If you are interested to talk, see my HN profile.
I agree with Bernie that college should be free but disagree that it should be free in its current state. It can b made much cheaper if you flip the classroom in the way I indicated above. That is what should be made free (ie paid for by the government).
In Primary School (everything up to High School) we need to reform the terrible top-down dynamics. I know about them secondhand because my mom is a teacher. School is a daycare center for parents who work. Kids are overdiagnosed with ADHD. Paul Graham wrote about school being a veritable prison back in 2003 (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html) Things only got worse in the last 20 years.
Someone else said that the goal of education is to produce factory workers. I disagree. I think the goal of education is to allow one teacher to effectively babysit up to 30 children at once. With both parents working, it simply isn't possible for them to give kids the attention they need to keep them healty and sane, let alone educate them on how to be part of society. Schools are supposed to do this instead, but the primary goal is training the children to be manageable at a ratio of 30 to 1.
Before we can do anything else, we have to acknowledge that the first goal is getting the kids out of their parents hair. This is the fundamental truth that everyone knows but refuses to acknowledge when they're debating policy. After that, we can make other decisions that make more sense. The lecture-hall format really only makes sense when the number of students is unmanageable for a single adult. If was only 10 kids per teacher, they would actually have time for more useful activities, applying knowledge, giving guidance to students who are ready to strike out on their own.
Tripling the number of teachers is going to cost some money, and application-type lessons costs more than lecture-type lessons. Some ways to deal with this - as a society, acknowledge that creating educated, well informed citizens is not a fuzzy, feel-good liberal goal, but a necessary factor for everyone's safety, including the permanently child-free. I think most people agree with that already, but since many people voting are full grown adults who still aren't properly educated, not everyone will come to the same conclusion, and therefore a massive infusion of public money for this idea isn't likely to happen. So I think a successful, disruptive idea will be one that gets around the cost problem of a much lower student-to-teacher ratio. I don't think remote teaching is going to be the answer here.
My wife and I are fortunate enough that she can be a stay at home mom. I grew up the same way. Were middle class, though increasingly probably slightly mid to upper these days. We don't need the babysitter, and want our kids to be educated, so that is the focus. We help them with homework, etc. We're lucky.
So from my perspective, having both parents working is the root issue. It's an economic necessity for probably 80+% of the country, which I suppose is really the root issue.
Ultimately it all boils down to resources, time and money, and there is never enough to go around. I don't have an answer for that :(
I think it goes back to what you said first. We need to agree on some core values.
I don't want any more of my money going to people who mocked the MSNBC host[0] when she said "children belong to the collective". It seems pretty obvious to me. If we are all paying for your children, I better have a say in how we raise OUR children.
Clearly, a lot of people do not see it that way. Why should we have tax deductions for people to have children? Why should we have tax breaks for people to put money away for their children to go to college? I for one support an end to these tax breaks. Lets send a clear message: If your children are your own and do not belong to the society, then you can raise them by yourself. If you can't afford to do so, we'll simply put you in a debtor's prison.
[0] https://youtu.be/sjczwQOnMqg
I grew up in post-communist Europe. In the past, we had state propaganda that told children to turn in their parents[1], among other wonderful products of that line of thinking. So I'd be very careful with ideas like this one. (I still support mandatory vaccinations and/or sane defaults.)
>Lets send a clear message: If your children are your own and do not belong to the society, then you can raise them by yourself. If you can't afford to do so, we'll simply put you in a debtor's prison.
This would undo a lot of progress that has been made on the human rights front in the past century.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov
One possible model may be to enlarge the "nuclear family" to groups of friends. Get five couples who enjoy each other's company together, and everyone can work 80% (4 days) while two people are home each weekday for childcare/housework etc.
Many other models are possible and it would be best to make it as easy as possible to experiment. Relevant factors may be:
- a universal right to flexible work schedules, at least for larger companies (10+) where changes balance out
- Mixed-zoning housing allowing the creative use of space. Which also helps with:
- Neighbourhoods designed for street life, where you can actually meet neighbours and build these (real) social networks, and where children can explore. When I was 6 or so, I became friends with two families in my neighbourhood. One owned a bookshop which became my personal library. The other was a graphics designer and a racing car driver where I learnt computers and mechanics (and got to drive in a Formula 1 car). I was often invited for dinner at these families, or just hung out when they had guests, and I learned more from listening to adults debating the topics of the day than anywhere else.
Its not an economic necessity that both parents work, the incentive to do it is extremely large and probably pure conservatism had been keeping it at bay, if at all.
Especially for parents with multiple children, it is economically rational to have a parent at home to provide that customized 1-on-1 care with the child. The benefit is improved learning and opportunity for experiences (daily trips to museums, sports activities, classes) at the expense of less structured socialization with a peer group and a loss in net household profit.
Though the tax break afforded for day care should not be disregarded, there are plenty of situations where it makes sense to have a parent stay at home with children.
Most parents choose to have children so they can spend time with them. Maximizing this at the expense of some net household profit can be rational, given certain living situations. One could argue it is a luxury, and they would likely be right. Having children at all in advanced industrial societies is, in the individual case, usually a luxury.
If it were a productive investment it would be common because those that do it would easily outclass the rest.
Of craouse we would all like to have the option to take as much time as we want to take care of our own, its akin to wanting to amass enough wealth to never have to work again.
If the parent can earn a lot more income by delegating responsibilities he will do it, or rather, most will do it.
> a massive shift toward automation... in the next five years, 5 million jobs in 15 economies will be lost. (from YC post)
We don't have enough workers. We have too many workers. When will we realize that our current economic system is doing a lousy job of allocating human resources?
We can't get enough teachers, but we have tens of millions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars allocated toward things that add, to be generous, questionable value to the world.
There is TONS of work that needs to be done though. Teachers like you said, health care workers, psychologists to help us deal with the inevitable mental problems, mountain bike trail maintainers, pickers of plastic trash out of the ocean, people to design apis for distributing government transparency data, designers of infographics to help the rest of us make sense of that data, and on and on and on. There's so much to do, when you stop thinking of a "job" as something provided for you by the government or a company, and rather as value that you can contribute to the world. Another disruptive business is going to figure out how to make it possible to pay people for contributing that kind of value.
Being a stay at higher parent is an incredibly difficult, stressful and under appreciated job so to many well educated couples, it's not appealing at all.
True, not all jobs can be offered as part-time, and working part-time limits your career growth if you work for a big corporation, but still, it is a viable option.
--
[1] I think schools teach much more than just what's on the national education plan. Making friends, making enemies, dealing with puberty etc are all valuable lessons that have less friction when the group of people you're around have similar amount of experience with those things. Thus being grouped with people with wildly different experience levels in these areas can be detrimental. While the primary grouping factor should be skill, there's probably a good case for secondary range limits by age, which is a decent estimative measurement of children's experience in these social areas.
[2] I understand that full isolation isn't possible, because physics requires math knowledge, which in turn requires writing & reading skills. Still, even with these dependencies we could do a lot more decoupling than what is being currently done.
Children of school age DO NOT need babysitting. When I was a kid, everyone's mom worked and we kids just stayed at home or played together and were perfectly fine. There were zero kids who had a babysitter when they were 7 years old. Zero. Never heard of it. This was the late 80s / early 90s during the breakup of socialism. There was even a war going on for a few of those years.
I can't even imagine the level of ridicule a child would have endured if their friends had found out they had a babysitter.
Children don't just randomly burst into flames if they're left alone.
And I seriously doubt 30:1 is a significant part of the problem. Look at countries with successful school systems. Ours also used to be, but slowly got worse with time as we adopted western attitudes towards children and parenting. The schools themselves didn't change significantly, yet the outcomes became worse.
To be fair, it did go a bit lord of the flies on occasion, in the sense that we engaged in "wars" with kids from different streets and so on, sometimes someone would get a thrown rock to their head or get a beating, but nothing too serious. Also we were constantly getting injured while playing from falling, stepping on sharp shit, etc but kids are incredibly resilient, they recover from anything and quickly. The important thing is to teach the kid not to fuck around in traffic, that's where the real danger is. And if there is a war not to pick shit up that might be explosive.
The reason for public education is to have an informed citizenry able to participate fully in society. Using it as job training is just corporate welfare, that is using tax money to pay for something businesses should do themselves.
There is often overlap in the skills needed in an informed citizenry and employees (e.g. reading, computer skills, etc.), but not always.
Trying to chase what business or the marketplace wants is a fools journey that create citizens poorly prepared to be fully empowered citizens with a solid understanding of the world.
I suspect entrepreneurial skills would be well covered by this approach as it should emphasis skills of leadership, self-reliance, consensus, and creative thinking.
1) The Obama administration's college rankings (I don't know if they are still around) at one point were using the earnings of graduates as a basis.
2) Often you hear people evaluating college based on their first job. Not only are employment skills not the goal, as you point out, but consider the absurdity of valuing education based on what is probably the least important, worst paying job you'll ever get, with a payoff of probably 1-2 years.
3) Looking at the shocking political and environmental problems in 'advanced' countries right now, perhaps more education in the non-vocational fields of liberal arts, including history, political science, and literary criticism, and in the sciences, providing an understanding of nature and scientific method, is more important than ever.
4) A useful way of looking at it: [0]
"The Yale Report of 1828" -- an influential document written by Jeremiah Day (who was at the time president of Yale), one of his trustees, and a committee of faculty -- distinguished between "the discipline" and "the furniture" of the mind. Mastering a specific body of knowledge -- acquiring "the furniture" -- is of little permanent value in a rapidly changing world. Students who aspire to be leaders in business. medicine, law, government, or academia need "the discipline" of mind -- the ability to adapt to constantly changing circumstances, confront new facts, and find creative ways to solve problems.
I'd add that it's not just leaders, but everyone who needs these skills.
----
[0] Richard C. Levin, President of Yale, in "Top of the Class: The Rise of Asia's Universities"
https://www.foreignaffairs.org/articles/china/2010-05-01/top...
I'm a bit jealous of the younger generations, as these methods were primitive/not available when I was younger. I could have learned so much when I had more time to learn it. The old school system I grew up with was quite ineffective, but thankfully we've improved the options well beyond those days.
Uneducated people (and I am distinguishing education from intelligence; uneducated most emphatically does not mean unintelligent) are bad for society. Witness climate change denial, Trump and his ilk, etc.
Lack of "soft skills" is the problem. We are taught or force fed knowledge, but not taught how to be well adjusted people.
You were lucky, for some reason you came to understand the value of personal development and self education. This is something that needs to be taught to everyone. In the world.
The last thing we need is a bunch of people who have learned the same things, references the same books and inspirations. (yes there are obvious exceptions but even within those the landscape is normally so vast.
The first thing we need is people to start taking education on by themselves in todays world there is no excuse.
The only lasting solution will be to allow true market competition for education to replace the centralized top-down system we have. Yes, it's a libertarian pipe dream. No, I don't want to hear about how "poor people will not be educated" by such a system. You cannot know what a free market in education would look like, because we've never tried.
> I don't see how this would work since schools are always expensive to run by nature and the working class is getting poorer (for those still having a revenue), I don't see this working very well.
That's why in my comment I said I don't want to hear this comeback. It's as predictable as sunset that every time someone mentions a free market in education, someone else can't imagine it working for educating the poor.
How well does the current system educate the poor?
It's already difficult for the working class with a free school so I can't imagine it would be better with a non-free one, the alternative to no public schools is simply no schooling at all for some people
> How well does the current system educate the poor?
You need to ask the US government for that, most public school systems are working well in western Europe so the US must be doing something wrong somewhere.
Every implementation of a freer market for education that I've read about has had a significant amount of scamming and kids left behind.
We have a free market for food, we subsidize food for poor people, and the market for food is much 'thicker' and 'fluid' than the market for education -- but we still have food deserts. If the free market + subsidies can't make healthy food available to everyone, what chance do we have with education.
Also, many of the poor don't get a good education with the current system.
Imagine if the current school system was completely free-market, and we were seeing the same performance as the public schools. There would be complete outrage and calls for nationalization. But somehow government gets the benefit of the doubt, and the only comeback is "but, but the poor."
Government schools do not respond to consumers, since the process is political. Thus, we have our current mess. There must be a better way. We've given the government over 100 years to get things right. Why don't we try something different?
Yes, yes it is.
> No, I don't want to hear about how "poor people will not be educated" by such a system.
Libertarianism summarized: have you ever tried hating poor people... on weeeeeed?
Why doesn't the time before public schools existed constitute a try? Seems to me humanity had centuries to millenia of a free market in education: anyone was free to offer or purchase as much education as they could afford.
It wasn't very nice.
> They're the ones who care the most about kids' learning
Sad that some parents care less than their teachers, but that's probably the root of 75% of education problems.
I hear teachers, on the other hand, complain that after decades of trying everything they can, they've realized that they cannot help students unless those students have safe, stable, supportive home lives.
It's easy to say we should introduce children to programming early, even easy to do. It is easy to complain about critical thinking skills and kids these days. It is easy to see that overtesting schools and overreacting to those test scores wastes resources and the time of children and teachers.
It's hard to find a way to ensure one in six children in the US subject to food insecurity always get three good meals a day. It is hard to figure out how to provide stability in a single family, let alone all families. It is hard to say a child shouldn't drop out of school and work whatever job they can when their parents have been unable or unwilling to provide for them.
We have been talking about and trying to fix "education" my entire life; maybe we should try fixing some of the underlying problems first, even if they are hard.
So focus on the parts that happen once you're an adult. MOOCs aren't a panacea but you don't have to miss a class because your shift moved. If the objection is they aren't taken seriously by employers, my objection is that's still playing the old prestige and rank game, and there is always going to be someone at the bottom of that anyway. So make them useful to themselves if employers don't want them.
(I believe fixing childhood poverty involves the US Government doing things it's not going to do soon, and that private business isn't going to do it. We must cultivate our garden.)
As someone from a teaching family, this is absolutely true.
That said, the underlying problems can only be fixed by a combination of economic improvement and education. Education empowers in the future, but economic status empowers educational opportunities in the present.
And when it comes down to it, the government can't afford to replace the future wealth created by an educated citizenry.
But the education issues also apply to the other five in six children who do have food security. The education problem is one that affects anyone who does not have access to the best private schools.
When I say fix education, I don't mean teach people programming or whatever skills or knowledge that might give them a marginal leg up. Those things are becoming increasingly less valuable.
I mean teach people how to be well adjusted people, teach them soft skills of empathy and understanding others, teach them why and how to continuously improve themselves, teach them how to identify areas where they can contribute to society without waiting for a teacher or boss to tell them exactly what to do.
Without these abilities, more and more will fall into the poverty trap as the need for worker bees diminishes.
Much like healthcare, education's goals dont fit capitalisms mold.
None of those subjects are particularly relevant for factory work. Even at the height of manufacturing, high schools were geared towards universities – because 10 is not the age where you want to make the decision that someone has or doesn't have the potential to be a judge/chemist/artist.
Calls to more closely align education with the perceived needs of the future economy seems misguided:
- You don't actually know what will be needed 15 to 20 years in advance (including the time it takes to develop a curriculum and teach teachers)
- It reduces citizens to their role in the economy
- It doesn't work. History is at least somewhat exciting. Teaching the filing of tax returns (a staple of such discussions) is completely removed from a 16-years reality. When it becomes relevant after college, it will be completely forgotten and possibly obsolete.
The current system is very much geared towards teaching modes of thinking, learning and similar meta-skills. History and philosophy, for example, are possibly the most important to understand current affair (but have often been decimated by a drive towards the sciences). Throw in a bit of statistics and you'll also have a good foundation for entrepreneurs.
Education is a red herring, and the first thing people reach for.
But education is always misunderstood, and all research shows that there is vast amount of variability in things ranging from understanding to retention.
For example
1) Level of nutrition impacts grade outcomes
2) Level of food consumed on that particular day impacts retention/learning
3) Level of reading of parents impacts student scores
4) Level of grand parent nutrition impacts student health and nutrtion
5) Race and discrimination impacts educational outcomes
Leave aside things like bullying, student interest, intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, learning style and so on.
And this may or MAY not impact job and future outcomes either.
Education is NOT an easy fix, and a tool which magically does fix this is a tool too powerful to create because if it were misused it would be an indoctrination tool beyond any other ever developed.
Education must be solved with other efforts
Does it? Many people with a college degree hold political beliefs one would consider unwieldy; Bannon went to Harvard.
It seems startups themselves are part of the problem, so one can doubt they will bring the solution. "Disruption" is another word for tearing society apart, ignoring legal norms designed to protect citizens from corporations.
The shift to online shopping -- actually, to online everything -- let people do most things from the comfort of their homes without ever meeting anyone.
"Fake news" were never a problem before Facebook and the bubble economy, where money is made by keeping people in a safe environment.
A better request would be: how to make people quit Facebook and stop using smartphones.
Bannon is the leader, not the follower. He takes advantage of those who are less informed and less likely to accurately judge fact from fiction.
If they were effectively educated, they would 1) be less susceptible to propaganda, 2) have better economic prospects and not be so pissed off.
The current model doesn't need to be destroyed and rebuilt, just remodeled as you said for a different future
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circa_News
Modern corporations are run like totalitarian, authoritarian regimes with top-down orders being barked down. If you disobey, you're out.
People in Western democracies are no longer putting up with non-democratic control of their political institutions, but are completely oblivious to non-democratic control of their economic institutions and are perfectly willing to take orders where and when it matters most -- every day, 9 to 5.
When employees can directly vote and democratically elect the CEO/CFO and other executive and managerial positions, across the wide range of industries and in majority of organizations, it will be a huge win for democracy, and that will spill into a much more engaged population politically as well. Also, at that point, employees are no longer employees.
We can tolerate authoritarian regimes in companies, because they're small (relative to countries) and compete in a heavily regulated space. If you want to leave or they fire you, you can generally find a new workplace. Companies play thier game by selling stuff (and doing accounting magic).
On the other hand, when two countries enter fierce competition, it's called "war". People on both sides end up dying. Even a less fierce competition ends up being miserable for everyone. The game has no bounds. And you can't easily quit it and move elsewhere.
That's why we prefer countries to be run with inefficient democratic process - because too much efficiency in a country will make many, many people very miserable.
That already happens anyway. You don't need to have a democratically governed workplace for constant political shifting and backstabbing to occur.
> If you want to leave or they fire you, you can generally find a new workplace.
Which will also be non-democratically governed, so that doesn't work.
> because too much efficiency in a country will make many, many people very miserable.
Can't you make the same argument at organization level? I'm sure many Amazon warehouse workers would agree.
> Can't you make the same argument at organization level? I'm sure many Amazon warehouse workers would agree.
Honestly, I think you could. Actually, this is something I was thinking about a lot in context of employee rights. Making workers happy - good office conditions, paid leaves, healthcare benefits, regular schedule, etc. - is a cost for a company, and creates inefficiencies that, if eliminated, would let the company do more while spending less[0]. So many companies are indeed happy to make employees as miserable as they can get away with[1]. Enforcing worker rights is purposefully introducing inefficiency, in order to avoid the market optimizing away all human values.
So let me rephrase my original point: you can get away with much more efficiency in companies than in countries without making a lot of people miserable.
--
[0] - subject to dynamics of market competition, in which all the gains you earn by introducing a change are quickly cancelled out when competitors follow suit.
[1] - not a problem for companies that don't need specialized workers for which there's more demand that supply - i.e. not a problem for most companies and a huge problem for most people.
Watch Ricardo Semler's TedTalk.
This sounds strikingly socialist.
As a small business owner, the one who took the risk to start it, invested my own savings, and put things together so I could coordinate selling products with paying employees, you're damn right it's my regime. If I didn't think it would be mine, I never would have started it. The future rewards would be non-existent, relevant to being a cog somewhere else. And my customers would never get the added value of what I make from the business I never would have started.
Instead of having increased ownership, autonomy, and earnings potential, I have to negotiate and play politics with other people who I know aren't as intrinsically motivated as myself? Forget it, that's entirely unrealistic. Think about what you're saying - this is not how value, wealth, and prosperity is created. Nobody is going to vote me out of being CEO, because if that were possible I wouldn't have put in the tough work (and created the value) that goes along with being a CEO.
And the capitalist system works fine, because if these employees think I'm doing a shit job, they do have a vote: leave and start their own company. The parts that don't work are actually the more socialist parts of the system, such as bailouts for big behemoth, and regulatory barriers to starting competitors.
Sorry pal, but surface-level idealism doesn't square with real-life incentives and rewards. What I'm in favor for is reducing regulations and other burdens so that you or any employees in general have the option of starting their own companies and competing with me. That's a much better way for them to "take" the value of my shares, rather than just voting it to themselves with no work done.
Your assertion that value, wealth, and prosperity are created through the hard work and sacrifice by business owners is of course disputed by socialists. You're begging the question here. If you stipulate that value in society is created by the very process that socialists want to dismantle, then of course being a socialist is irrational. No real conversation can be had when you define socialism to be irrational from the outset.
Further evidence that no real conversation can be had follows from your dismissive "sorry pal, surface-level idealism" remark. Why are you so snide and dismissive? Do you think it helps your credibility? (It doesn't.)
Socialists argue that value is created by all working people, most of whom are not in it for the profit incentive. Value in society is created by teachers, whom get paid poorly. By PhD students, who get paid poorly. By parents who raise their children well for no compensation at all. By all the millions of people who get to work every day and don't get compensated handsomely for the effort. If there are so many people willing to work hard and sacrifice for the good of society without any chance of striking it rich, why should business owners be the exception? That's the fundamental question socialists ask. And there are no snide answers to this question that are remotely satisfying.
> Value in society is created by teachers, whom get paid poorly.
Many teachers (pre-college) are essentially babysitters who recite state-certified textbooks. This not value in itself, but it does free the parents to work to create value. Value is also created by the students who go on to create exceptional things. Some are inspired by good teachers, yes, but this seems to be the exception than the norm.
> By PhD students, who get paid poorly.
Apprentices in older times got paid poorly too, but many went on to create value who wouldn't have otherwise without the extensive training. It's an investment. You don't get paid well while in training because you're still an unknown quantity for the most part.
> By parents who raise their children well for no compensation at all.
The purpose of capturing value is to be able to start a family and pass on your genetics (for most people). And those who raise their children well often do get compensated later in life, if not with direct support, than with higher probabilities that their children will be successful and continue passing on their shared genes.
> By all the millions of people who get to work every day and don't get compensated handsomely for the effort.
You don't get compensted for effort, you get compensated for value. You can dig a ditch with a spoon for a lot of effort, guess what, it's not valuable.
> If there are so many people willing to work hard and sacrifice for the good of society without any chance of striking it rich, why should business owners be the exception? That's the fundamental question socialists ask.
As I showed above, hard work a.k.a effort is not, and should not, be a determining factor of one's wealth. Many people work hard but are using "spoons" so to speak. This doesn't create value. Planning the logistics of a digging operation (tool equipment rental, worker recruiting and scheduling, end customer sales, planning real estate builds, etc) creates value, even if it means I only plan these things for a few months then sit back while other people do the digging.
Now not everyone can do that simultaneously. For one, not everyone is smart enough to do higher-level planning. Intelligence is rewarded economically, and we see this with IQ-income correlations. Secondly, even if everyone were the same intelligence level, we can't have everyone be a planner/developer and nobody be a digger (or excavator operator). But then guess what happens, the worker class becomes rare and so the free market will start paying it much better as demand increases. If physical labour becomes scarce, that's what gets paid more.
Because we can fight neither the reality of scarcity driving value, nor the reality of greedy human nature, we ought to design systems whereby these forces can be put towards good. That's what capitalism does, and there's many examples of everyone being better off as a result (e.g. 600M+ Chinese people eating a lot better in the last few decades).
Finally, to emphasize human nature again, none of the examples you listed are exclusively for the "good of society". Being a teacher is a job with decent pay and good vacation, being a PhD student is an investment towards your future (earnings), being a parent and raising children well is how you pass on and secure your genetic lineage, and work is for economic survival, and eventually gives one the power to pass on their genes.
This one sentence already demonstrates that you don't know what the words socialism or communism means.
Note that people describe themselves as communist since that is their end goal and states describe themselves as socialist since they have not ceased to exist yet.
> If I'm dismissive it's because we've had a lot of field tests of socialism throughout history, as well as in economic studies, and the results are always poor.
While this may sound like a no-true-Scotsman argument, the most prominent example of a failure, USSR, has quickly (within a few years) moved off course from socialism to totalitarianism and state capitalism [1]. There were never democratically governed workplaces in the Soviet Union. This happened for a variety of reasons, including constant military threats from capitalist countries that naturally pushed the population to rally around autocratic leaders. Same is true for many others. There were successful-looking democratic attempts as well, but those were crushed by capitalists pretty quickly.
North Korea's full official name, for example, is Democratic People's Republic of Korea. However, nobody is seriously arguing that democracy doesn't work because North Korea is democratic. However, the same logic somehow fails to apply to communism.
> It's a dangerous mindset to not examine critically because it is a slippery slope towards communism, the most inhumane type of society responsible for the most deaths in human history (much more than religion).
Citations needed here. Putting aside the fact that no countries in history have actually been communist yet, most claims of "millions deaths under communism" are pretty dubious, counting many deaths without establishing causal effect. For example, Chinese famine deaths are counted as directly caused by communism. If the same methodology were applied to capitalism, you can count many more deaths throughout the world until today -- famines, starvation, easily preventable diseases in capitalist Third World, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
For one, I'm sure a 12th century monarch or a lord would have a host of reasons why you're damn right it's my regime. Or a modern-day King Saud for that matter I guess. After all, it's his father who built his kingdom, and he has all the risks and responsibilities of a monarch. But for most Western observers, that is no longer defensible and most would elect to live somewhere with a democratic government.
Same goes to modern day dictatorships like North Korea. If not for international borders and internal controls, most North Koreans would probably prefer to leave their country. So, to continue the analogy, one could imagine a day in the future where as a small business owner, you are no longer able to attract any employees on the terms you're used to now -- not unless they are not employees, but co-workers with all equal rights and votes. And just as it's unimaginable and laughable in modern America for someone to start claiming that he's now a lord of XYZ county, and all those living within it are his peasants, it's not too hard to imagine a similar reaction to your proposal of employment for wages.
You can also look at it from another angle.
Why exactly is it that you want to have your own totalitarian regime within the organization you started? Is it just because you enjoy the power over people? Most people wouldn't say so. Besides, if you are the founder and know the business better than anyone, and have good leadership qualities, why wouldn't you be constantly re-elected as CEO?
And if your coworkers indeed approve of you as CEO, you would still get your greater earnings potential, although without being able to exploit your workers as much.
Again, I welcome whatever reality the free market thrusts upon me, and will react and adapt accordingly.
However this is incredibly far from reality because people actually like being employees. You don't have nearly as much risk. You don't have to make tough executive decisions with far-reaching consequences. Your levels of stress are lower. Etc. Those things are worth $$$, and we price them by CEO/founder compensation. It's not going to be perfect pricing, but it's the best we've got.
> Why exactly is it that you want to have your own totalitarian regime within the organization you started?
Because I believe that my decision making and skills with regards to a particular type of business in a particular type of market will yield me big returns, and so I want to put my money where my mouth is. Hence I saved up and founded my business.
> Besides, if you are the founder and know the business better than anyone, and have good leadership qualities, why wouldn't you be constantly re-elected as CEO?
Injecting this type of politics into a company is a fantastic way of slowing it to a crawl. Even if it's possible that one of my employees could be "better" than me at my job, we're not practically going to find out ("let's all try each other's job for a month!"). Or rather, it's not my responsibility to ask them -- if they think so they're free to go start their own company/competitor (subject to whatever non-compete clauses they may have signed, which you could argue is burdensome regulation, and I might be inclined to agree).
Besides, who says elections give us the best candidate? ;)
Unlike the North Korea example, the employees really do have options here. At least ideally they have as much choice as possible for who to work for, remember it's not like I put a gun to anyone's head when I asked them to join (or stay). A counterexample might be the H1-B's that are tied to their employer, but I don't have that particular relationship with any of my employees.
> And if your coworkers indeed approve of you as CEO, you would still get your greater earnings potential, although without being able to exploit your workers as much.
Just to wrap up, as I said above it's not worth the time for me to "poll" everyone. There are serious business consequences to injecting such a high level of politics into a company. What keeps me from exploiting my workers primarily are competitors, with competing potential offers, and the flow of information on the internet, e.g. 'this type of engineer makes X a year'.
Really? Why don't you offer your employees equal partnership with no strings attached and see if they'd just rather stay employees. I call bullshit on this.
> Injecting this type of politics into a company is a fantastic way of slowing it to a crawl.
Not true. Taking one day a year to nominate candidates and vote is hardly a burden. It's less of a burden than any normal employee turnover process in non-democratic companies. And I'm not even talking about large bureaucratic corporations with layers of management and their constant "re-orgs".
> Besides, who says elections give us the best candidate? ;)
Elections where most people are apathetic and don't even bother to vote because they think the entire system is corrupt are a bit different from elections in a 50-people organization, where everyone knows everybody else.
> Unlike the North Korea example, the employees really do have options here.
You missed my point. If all other organizations out there were democratically governed, then you'd probably have had to put a gun to someone's head to stay.
> There are serious business consequences to injecting such a high level of politics into a company.
Again, this is untrue. You might be projecting American election process onto this and may not be aware that everywhere else election cycles don't actually last 2 years. Most normal countries don't spend more than a month on an election cycle. A small business wouldn't spend more than a day.
> What keeps me from exploiting my workers primarily are competitors, with competing potential offers, and the flow of information on the internet, e.g. 'this type of engineer makes X a year'.
I think again you're projecting your own bubble here. Fast food industry is fiercely competitive, correct? Do you think a Burger King employee would get a vastly superior competing offer from McDonald's?
I didn't know it was this possible to be so non self aware.
> The parts that don't work are actually the more socialist parts of the system, such as bailouts for big behemoth, and regulatory barriers to starting competitors.
Socialism is when the government does things, and the more things it does, the socialister it is!
No matter how ignorant you may think another poster is, it's never okay on HN to be uncivil. Particularly with contentious topics, it's even more important to raise to level of civility to ensure constructive discussion.
Perhaps I should have mentioned that I live and work in North America where GDP per capita is something like $54K USD or more. This context makes a difference for your "99%" comment.
Or leave and work for a competitor. I don't put a gun to anybody's head, unlike various socialist governments.
Feel free to expand on this thought though. Note that I work in North America and so my expectation of an employee being able to 1) leave and work for someone else, or 2) leave and start their own company, stem from this.
> Socialism is when the government does things, and the more things it does, the socialister it is!
So what do you call it when the government props up certain businesses (that they prefer) by redistributing my tax dollars thereby shielding them from market forces? I can't think of a libertarian government doing this.
And yes, socialism must imply a bigger and more intrusive central management body (aka government) because that's how you "democratize the means of production". You have to enforce such actions with the gun.
Only socialist governments put guns to people's heads?
> Note that I work in North America and so my expectation of an employee being able to 1) leave and work for someone else, or 2) leave and start their own company, stem from this.
Yeah, it's not so easy for most of the world's population. Since you seem to be aware this, note that a less obvious element of this fact is that the reason things seem largely not so bad in the US/Europe is due to the large scale extraction of economic value from less developed countries. That power law is now coming around to bite the US/Europe middle class, and Trump/Brexit is the result.
> So what do you call it when the government props up certain businesses (that they prefer) by redistributing my tax dollars thereby shielding them from market forces? I can't think of a libertarian government doing this.
Cronyism? Corruption? This really has little to do with economics but is a political problem. The same thing happens in capitalist and socialist countries.
> And yes, socialism must imply a bigger and more intrusive central management body (aka government) because that's how you "democratize the means of production". You have to enforce such actions with the gun.
Yes because of people like you fighting it... grumble grumble
There are actually a lot of "libertarian socialist" theories out there. It's like a blend of anarchism and Marxism.
One benefit that I feel may happen, is to generate better buy-in for management decisions if the workers feel they have a hand in making said decisions. They might also care more about the health of their company, rather than maximizing the value they reap.
- Silicon Valley is a great example of growing inequality. Most of the rewards go disproportionally to a select few at the top
- A lot of VC companies are killing a lot of previously relatively stable jobs. Uber is giving its drivers a job for a while but it's pretty clear this will not be sustainable and they will soon be out of a job again
- The biggest companies like Facebook and Google are pretty much aiding "fake news" because in the end the only thing they care about is impressions and fake news sells better
Don't want to be too negative but technology is not only a force for good but also causes problems for a lot of people. Maybe these people are looking at the wrong guy for solutions but their concerns are valid.
What if we need less money and lower wages are actually fine?
Edit: Do the people down-voting this actually think technology doesn't provide consumer surplus and deflation? Or do you have a problem with my question?
Technology and globalization have impacted food a lot. Education, and housing? Not nearly as much. Healthcare is more complicated, and I'm not an expert, so I'll refrain from speculating there.
One might argue globalization has hurt people, but so far, technology seems to be making just about everything it touches cheaper for everyone.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
In the future, if you could provide a source for your argument, it could give more substantive discussion.
> so far, technology seems to be making just about everything it touches cheaper for everyone.
You say this, but only provide a source for 1 out of 4 key indicators of cost of living. Can you provide the same evidence towards housing, healthcare and education becoming significantly cheaper as a % of a budget of an average household?
Otherwise that statement is just incorrect.
I just wanted to expose something commonly left out of these discussions, which is that technology is generally deflationary. More technology in the areas of healthcare, education, and housing might be the solution, not the problem.
Bullshit. Technology brings down the cost of living by making the supply side more efficient. What goes up is the cost of the way you'd like to live as you have more options to choose from.
Obviously there's disruptions along the way (ex: automobiles lessen demand for horse breeders) but when capitalism closes a door it opens a window (ex: mechanics).
The "efficiency" increases in recent years have more often than not been various ways of cutting labor costs. It doesn't matter if things are cheaper in a nominal sense if your ability to earn a living is eroded.
I suggest you go do some basic math on the cost of producing consumer staples like rice, beans, milk, and meat. Technology has brought down the cost of all of them.
Similarly, efficiency gains in MPG and durability improvements have lowered the price of owning and maintaining a vehicle. Uber, Lyft, and other ride sharing apps have lowered the price of it even further to remove the capital outlay.
> The "efficiency" increases in recent years have more often than not been various ways of cutting labor costs.
Which is bad because why exactly? Is the purpose of the corporate sector to produce goods and services or to provide a place for people to go?
> It doesn't matter if things are cheaper in a nominal sense if your ability to earn a living is eroded.
Sure it is. That's the definition of makes things more efficient: being able to be produced more cheaply
I specifically cite transportation costs in my prior comment. Housing is also cheap if you don't live in (expensive) cities. There's an abundance of housing in the suburbs and if you're willing to share a place with others (like everybody seems to take for granted in the city) it's insanely cheap.
Education and health are interesting beasts. On the one hand technology has brought the cost of education to near zero through remote learning and internet courses. There's more knowledge available at a person's fingertips than at any point in history and the cost is cheaper than ever. The cost of a formal higher education has gone up but I don't think that's driven by technology. It's from the availability of "easy money" for student loans. Healthcare (in the USA) is uniformly fucked and needs to be scrapped and rebuilt though government programs like Medicaid do cover the people your describe (poverty line).
The increasing polarization of the economy is also spatial: the remaining good jobs are congregating in fewer and fewer metropolises where the cost of living is skyrocketing.
For example: Apple sells an iPhone for about $750. This phone contains the equivalent of (roughly) $3,000 of disparate technology from the 1990s, including a cell phone, camera, tape recorder, etc. Not only does it contain all of that for less money, all of that is better quality than what was available for that $3,000 back in the 1990s.
That is deflation and consumer surplus in action. The consumer can spend a fraction of what they would've in 1990 for a better product.
Another example: Apps on the App Store. Everyone expects everything for free because there is so much competition enabled by technology. The marginal cost is roughly zero, so most apps are free. If most of the gains were being kept by the producer, apps would cost a lot of money.
Down vote for trolls and other destructive posts, not just because you have a problem or disagreement with what's expressed. OP is legitimately trying to contribute to the conversation.
Just to play devil's advocate: what if you define progress as "that stuff" that will increase the general well-being of the greatest number of people over the next 20 years? With that definition, does technology-powered automation still count as progress?
Instead of claiming that we can't have that discussion, why not try to have that discussion?
Your question is loaded because it assumes that ownership of such machines is the best solution for those made unemployed by them - I think this is probably flawed, because management is a different skill set than direct contribution.
The problem is that the worker's skills have lost value. They need new skills - management skills for owning the machines, or different skills that haven't been automated yet.
Or maybe a refinement on their existing skills. My understanding of Japanese factories is that it's commonplace to have one of the fabrication lines done by people - the thinking goes: "If you do not know how to do it better, how can you make machines do it better?". I also remember a story of, I think it was GE, getting their designers, engineers, and assemblers (the people literally putting the pieces together) all together to improve the design. The assemblers noted a particularly difficult step, and in making that step easier, the engineers removed a number of parts. Everything got better.
Let's look at the other part of your question - incentives for building the automation. It seems like the R&D incentive comes from the end-user value, so let's skip to that - I want an automated machine for a number of reasons: Quality consistency, up time, wage cost reduction, safety. Eventually, all of these do boil down to "profit", but the routes taken are important. QC means you can sell more and/or charge more; but you could make more and charge less in ways that make more or less profit.
I don't think I can answer your question, because I don't know why you think that the incentives for building them would be removed; and in my head, the first blocker for the recently unemployed to own such machines is wanting to run a business. I don't think most people want that.
I don't think it can even be answered with that assumption included. Let's say you have a cobbler, who makes shoes. He recently lost his job to the burgomeister's new Elfbot 4000, that can make the same quality of shoe, but turns out 2 dozen pairs in a single night.
The Elfbot 4k runs all week on a single saucer of milk, without sleeping. The cobbler has to eat 2000 kcal every day, and sleep 8h every night. It is completely obvious that the cobbler can no longer compete in the shoe market with the Elfbot. The value of the cobbler's one marketable skill has been devastated by automation. So the cobbler cannot raise enough money from selling shoes to buy the Elfbot. No matter how hard the cobbler works, his productive output cannot reach a level high enough to equal the value of the Elfbot.
So the cobbler would have to get the money from somewhere else. But the burgomeister is the richest man in town, and the only one with enough money to lend out. Why would he give a loan to the cobbler, to buy the robot, whose production would be used to pay off the loan, when he could just sell the production and get the money without that source of default risk?
So the cobbler could also just steal the Elfbot. But if Elfbots could just be stolen willy-nilly, no one would bother keeping one. The burgomeister would obviously have to defend his property against one-man robberies.
That leaves a torch-and-pitchfork rebellion. After that happens, no one bothers bringing new machines to the village, because they don't want to lose their property.
Or the cobbler could study the machine, and build his own, if it can be done cheaply enough. Unfortunately for him, the burgomeister has a patent, which equates copying with theft.
The only way for the cobbler to own an Elfbot is if he is the first to build one. And that just puts all the other cobblers in his shoes for the above scenarios.
The displaced workers just can't get the capital in a capitalist society through the use of their obsoleted skill, and the capital is not created as quickly or as easily in a non-capitalist society. They would have to acquire a different marketable skill to be able to afford one, but once they have that skill, they no longer have any specific connection to or need for that particular machine. If the cobbler becomes an expert in specialty candle marketing, and makes a pile of cash, he no longer has any need to own the Elfbot. He could buy the Dribbler Deluxe instead.
I really like your summation that "can't get the capital in a capitalist society through the use of their obsoleted skill".
Arguably, the benefit of the cobbler could be a) highly custom small batch work, b) expertise to maintain the Elfbot, and c) a thinking mind behind the task. Elfbot will not improve by itself, the cobbler would.
The human labor requirement has been slashed and burned for shoe-making, and the 99% of ex-cobblers that can't find work reprogramming and servicing Elfbots are busted back down to the pool of unskilled laborers.
The modern economy is increasingly asking unskilled laborers to retrain themselves to a different category of skilled labor at their own expense. Those categories of skilled labor may not even stay viable long enough to pay off the (re-)education loans, so those people may even be in exactly the same situation ten years later, except instead of just being broke, they will be broke, still in debt, and unable to borrow more for additional retraining.
In the IP space, we have an example working perfectly with the communist maxim "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need": Open Source Software.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/05/hackernews-calls-for-polit...
From what I've seen, contrary opinions that are well expressed are rewarded (even if controversial - I've got a few that ultimately got more up votes than down, but it was a ride). Contrary opinions that, well, presume a fight? Not so much.
Is it really necessary that the means of production be owned by the labor put out of work? Or is the real problem not inequality (which has some very nice incentivizing benefits) but desperation at the lower end of the economic scale which lead to extortion like transactions? And if that is the case, is a full scale distribution of wealth necessary or can we have the best of both worlds by redistributing just enough wealth to guarantee that everyone has their survival needs taken care of?
That's a good thing: http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html
"Decreasing economic inequality means taking money from the rich. Since risk and reward are equivalent, decreasing potential rewards automatically decreases people's appetite for risk. Startups are intrinsically risky. Without the prospect of rewards proportionate to the risk, founders will not invest their time in a startup. Founders are irreplaceable. So eliminating economic inequality means eliminating startups."
No; that essay might argue that inequality is a necessary side-effect or condition of startups, but that is not the same as arguing it is a "good thing".
For comparison: pollution might be a necessary result of the industrial revolution, and perhaps a cost we pay gladly; but that doesn't mean pollution is good. If we could get industry without pollution, we would.
Who decides that?
Also see my other reply.
(Of course, Facebook has had such a ridiculously large effect on the world that argument is probably hard to win, but it illustrates what I'm trying to say)
More broadly, when a society won't let people become as rich as the market will let them, founders will tend to move elsewhere.
Note: The specific relationship that they find is that startup creation is associated with home prices. This makes sense in the US, as home prices are a good proxy for middle class wealth. Here's a quick not fully vetted interpretation of this finding: When the middle class is relatively rich, they start businesses. When it is relatively poor, they don't. The aspirational income inequality that Graham posits doesn't immediately jump out when looking at year by year new startup numbers on a graph. I'm currently analyzing these numbers, but it's pretty clear that they don't support Graham's assumptions.
Note 2: The FRBoSF analysis isn't perfect for answering this question, but at least it's a good start, unlike the pure logic approach (despite the easy availability of good longitudinal Census data on the subject) that Graham published.
Note 3: The Graham essay is an essay on income inequality that came out before the atomic bomb that Picketty dropped on the subject. It really shouldn't be dragged out now because the research landscape on the field has been completely changed since it was written.
Final Note: I know that every time the word startup is used on HN, it spurs a 'No True Scotsman' debate about what qualities invalidate a new business from the label startup. Not remotely important. The FRBoSF article notes that new businesses have faster job growth than older businesses and that's the larger subject in question. Trying to throw companies out only serves to move the conversation from fact based to conjecture based by throwing out a perfectly good source of facts relevant to the matter.
[1] http://www.census.gov/ces/dataproducts/bds/
He addresses this line of logic in a separate essay: http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
"A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. There is, in any normal family, a fixed amount of money at any moment. But that's not the same thing.
When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. "You can't make the pie larger," say politicians. When you're talking about the amount of money in one family's bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year's tax revenue, this is true. If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.
I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you're planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy."
First, you should stop quoting pg's essays as though they were infallible sources of truth. It's not helping your argument. I like some of his essays; others are misleading or dead wrong (for example: http://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm). Empirical evidence always beats philosophical pondering; shawn-furyan provided data that pg was wrong, and you did nothing but post another data-free essay.
Second, you should stop assuming your ideological opponents are idiots who don't understand simple concepts like growth of wealth. We do; of course it is possible to "grow the pie". But since the 1970's, the majority of GDP growth has translated to income gains only for the top decile. And in such a regime, why should everyone else bother to grow the pie? What income inequality has done is create people who make a rational, and perfectly valid, calculation that "growth" is pointless and not worth fighting for, since they won't see any of it.
you should stop assuming your ideological opponents are idiots who don't understand simple concepts
This is a personal attack, though. Please don't do that.
He doesn't, and it's not a line of logic, it's an interpretation of the evidence. Graham didn't even look at the evidence, and came to a conclusion that becomes very hard to support once you've had a glance at a chart of the available evidence (i.e. deep analysis isn't required to recognize that his proposed mechanism is flawed).
Also, you should really heed my 3rd note. You cannot speak effectively on income inequality without having read Picketty. It is by far the most significant treatment on the subject. It goes far beyond my simple counterpuntal analysis here to bat down a poorly thought out and completely unresearched pure logical argument. At least read a couple informed reviews of Picketty. I seem to recall FT, the Economists, Mankiew and Krugman having worthwhile, messy and conflicting thoughts after it was published. Graham just is not a useful resource on income inequality.
To address your point: Yes, Macro 101 makes it clear that trade multiplies wealth, thus wealth is non-static. The Graham argument you cite is incredibly elementary, and he is not the source to be citing on the topic. That particular question is miles more elementary than any discussion of the impacts of income inequality on macroeconomic factors. Bringing it up when talking about Income Inequality is kind of like citing a clunky explanation of Newton's 2nd law of motion in a discussion about time dilation effects of supersonic flight (which relies on non-Newtonian physics). To wit, analysis of Income inequality requires going beyond the overly simplistic macroeconomic models that have led Economists to mispredict the effects of income inequality for so long. Macro 101 is not useful here. The current evidence in the field is conter-intuitive and difficult to reconcile for expert economists.
Also, again, Graham's essay is very outdated and has, to be charitable, been surpassed by more careful and thorough resources on the topic.
No, the technology label is not sufficient. It isn't an immunity necklace. It doesn't mean inevitability. I say this as an engineer.
Civilisation is at a crossroad: continue building a high-tech society which makes humans irrelevant according to the current social/philosophical/moral norms (1) OR go back to the Dark Ages and let the powerful run the show (2).
If we want to continue with (1), we also have to quickly redefine the whole meaning of society, citizen, work, job, leadership, democracy, etc. This has to be done fast and it has to be done globally.
This will be very hard to do.
Technology is a tool. Effects depend on who handles it / with which incentives. It can naturally facilitate wrongdoing (intended or not) but it also can – and it would be irresponsible not to use it – to counter said wrongdoings.
The workflow is that you punch in your postcode and get a list of all the people who represent you. From house, senate, european parlaiment.
You can then fill in a form and send a "constituent letter" to all the correct people for whom your opinion should have an impact.
After a reasonable wiating period, a survey comes to your email asking if they replied and some other questions.
Those "roll up" into a report on the member's responsiveness to their constituents.
Of the times I used it when I lived there, I always got responsiveness and only once was the response rude / unsatisfactory. (a member of european parlaiment was a total dismissive jerk)
Anyways - as far as ideas go, I think that would be a useful "start" - I also think there was more they could do to improve that further.
The return address would clearly indicate "I live in your constituency" while a phone call might not have that same impact.
I think there's also room to improve on the formula of TWFY like allowing an option for users to post their letters "openly" and allowing them to upload photos of the responses.
Though open-source on the congress APP makes it a really exceptionally cool foundation.
What needs to be recaptured is a vision of the future based on science, health, the arts, and shared prosperity. And it has to be described in actionable political terms.
We can do this. We have the majority of scientists, engineers, philosophers, and artists behind us. But we have to move quickly because returning to the kind of managed democracy we had before is no longer possible.
We need a Star Trek: TNG for the (pun not intended) next generation...
If someone is willing to start a movement that wants to create United Fedration of Planets, count me in.
We also, as much as possible, must try evenly distribute the future. For example, if we want to defeat climate change, we have to rally manufacturing and technological solutions in places like the rural Midwest. In even the reddest of states, their are bastions of support for future-oriented ideas, and we should begin networking these places togehther as forward bases of operation.
One thing I always loved about Star Trek worldview is that characters in the show always believe people they meet are competent at what they do, instead of assuming that they're working with morons. Ditto for the bureaucracy of the UFP - it's assumed competent until proven otherwise; not like in our world, where the government is always assumed idiotic by default.
If instead, its framed as expanding the idea of American Federalism, diverse entities working towards vision of the future rooted in these ideals, I think it will be more successful.
"democracy" makes the sentence an oxymoron.
http://democracycollaborative.org/
http://geo.coop
http://fair.coop
Whether we like it or not, the country is shifting back towards the 19th century notions of "political economy." These existed in a diminished form under neoliberalism, but were largely swept beside by the triumphalist end of history that reigned. Appeals to fascism and authoritarian communism have already entered the Overton window, so the only option now is to outcompete those explicit political-economic fusions with something new.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy
Groklaw became the source of authoritative reporting about the SCO cases. It had analysis from lawyers, paralegals, and technologists. It had (voluntary, amateur) reporters attending hearings and giving in-depth reports, and then thorough analysis from a wide variety of people. People cared enough to voluntarily take vacation days to go to the courthouse and attend hearings, and then spend the next 2+ hours writing it all up and posting it. People voluntarily gave money to keep it all going. It was amazing.
It also was subject to significant attack, both from SCO and from trolls. It consumed the life of the paralegal running it for a decade. It was probably not sustainable.
I think that moderation is essential for any online community that isn't going to fall to the lowest common denominator, but sustainability is an issue. (HN at least has multiple moderators, so hopefully they won't burn out.) For news, multiple reporters are needed (Groklaw didn't report on a hearing until multiple reports came in, because sometimes trolls sent in false reports.)
I think the answer may be multiple small sites that each care about a focused area, and attract enough of a following that there are multiple reporters available when needed. (This probably won't work for something like foreign policy. I can attend a court hearing in my town and write up a report, but I can't get an interview with the Secretary of State and start asking uncomfortable questions.)
This isn't really a firm idea, just some thoughts and observations...
I'm exploring this idea and trying to figure out how to make it work.
This is insanely difficult as interpersonal trust is expensive and getting first-hand information/data is extremely non-trivial. I agree that "mainstream media" (quotes because that phrase makes my mouth taste like ash) has happily devolved into BuzzFeed-style clickbait, but another parrot of AP isn't progress.
Paul Graham suggests that the best way to come into a good startup idea is to become the sort of person that has them, which I think applies to informing the public at large -- I don't think it's realistic to expect to build a revenue model off of people that will only give you their eyeballs for 20 minutes a day in the hopes of finding something to have an opinion on. I think this is a much larger, nearly intractable, problem of making societies into the types that are interested in nuance and dry detail.
How is crowd-funded media a solution to the problem of bias and factually unsound reporting?
I found a link to your site from your profile and it appears to be a gossip and tabloid site with a focus on UFC.
Ms Sulkowicz, at that time a student at Columbia University, claims she was raped and in protest at what she saw was the University's lack of action, decided to carry a mattress around the campus for a year. The problem for readers wanting to find out more about her story is that the media is highly polarized. They are either written by feminists, or their opponents. There is no middle ground. If you try to get an overview of the case on Wikipedia [2] you will encounter that site's systemic bias, where the most powerful group on the page "owns" the content. In this case the page is controlled by people sympathetic to Ms Sulkowicz claims and reflects their bias. There is also the issue that Wikipedia does not allow embedded content such as documentation or videos.
Newslines fixes the problem of bias by allowing people to build up the page by adding news events. Each news event comprises only the factual information in the source article. Even if the source is highly partisan we can still extract non-biased information. In effect, we are converting articles to data. As each factual summary is added to our system it builds up an unbiased account of the topic, and the reader can then decide the result. Compare this with a traditional news article or biography where the writer starts out with the conclusion in mind. Also, because each post goes through editorial review, the potential for fake new is minimised.
[1]http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/?order=ASC [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattress_Performance_(Carry_Th...
> Newslines fixes the problem of bias by allowing people to build up the page by adding news events.
If people are just citing existing biased sources, isn't this just trading half-truths? Is the idea that somewhere in the middle is typically the truth? This sounds like it's prime to create middle ground fallacies.
> Each news event comprises only the factual information in the source article. Even if the source is highly partisan we can still extract non-biased information.
Who is "we"? If it's your staff (or you), then I'd need to trust you. If it's the collective "we", then we're back to bias, but worse because it's masquerading as impartial.
> Also, because each post goes through editorial review, the potential for fake new is minimised.
Which makes it sound like the prior in the previous issue -- this sounds like closed source Wikipedia.
We don't simply cite the source. We extract the factual information in the source into the post. When New York Times reports "Evil Trump is coming to the UK" and Breitbart reports, "Our friend Trum is coming to the UK", the news event that Trump is coming to the UK is the same in both cases.
Now, the facts may be misreported, but that's a different issue. We do some tagging for obvious rumors, and we hope to improve our tools for labeling the veracity of how each new event is reported. But we belive we have a solid base to work from.
>Who is "we"? If it's your staff (or you), then I'd need to trust you. If it's the collective "we", then we're back to bias, but worse because it's masquerading as impartial
We use a combination of paid and crowdsourced staff. It doesn't really matter who "we" are, because the process is the same in either case to extract the factual information. You only need to trust that we are transcribing from the source correctly, and readers can always go back to the original source to check. So you may wonder, what's the value in that? The value is the creation of the unbiased timeline when all the summaries from diverse sources are compiled.
>Which makes it sound like the prior in the previous issue -- this sounds like closed source Wikipedia.
While Wikipedia acts like a news archive, its software and policies are not up to the task. There are similarities to what we do compared with Wikipedia and at first we considered ourselves to be a "Wikipedia for news". However, we take a more formal approach to adding sources that Wikipedia, which leads to more consistency in the final result. You may want to read my analysis of Wikipedia's failings: http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/
What I was thinking is that some policies regarding responsibilities incurred by posting a comment in an asynchronous discussion forum are needed. For example, one should not be able to simply post a comment then leave the discussion. The persistence of their comment should be tied to whether they continue to participate, and respond to refutations and the like. Similarly, I see a lot of specious reasoning and appealing lies get posted, rapidly upvoted, but only eventually debunked: the people who upvoted should be notified of the refutation.
It would be nice if karma could actually be useful, and this always reminds me of PageRank [2]. Surely there must be some way to normalize the weights of highly-voted comments in less populated but serious subforums (like subreddits) so they are not overwhelmed by the karma granted to silly jokes in unserious but hugely populated frivolous subforums (again, I'm thinking of reddit here).
I think all of these things would do something to counter the fake news and echo chambers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert's_Rules_of_Order
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
Could you summarise those differences?
Put all of these together and I just lost respect. I thought he was smarter. And I certainly I don't feel the need to justify my support for Trump to any investor. So, no, I don't think there's a culture fit.
[1] http://blog.samaltman.com/time-to-take-a-stand [2] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/politics/2014/05/obama-fundra... [3] http://blog.samaltman.com/trump
I literally do not have the time to build this, as I'm busy trying to make PHP secure.
I just spitballed an idea and passed it along hackers who gave me feedback.
I don't want to be contractually tied to VCs either.
Just, if you like the idea, take it. Run with it. Make it successful. Use modern crypto. It's yours.
Maybe see if the folks that run Snopes are interested?