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> A) Gates doesn't take the time to learn the research and the history of the fields/problems he's trying to solve. I'm not surprised, but really this is inherent in the philanthropy-based model of societal improvement. Rich people, who are (barring huge inheritance) by definition successful in at least one domain, have a large pressure to prove their general greatness by succeeding in another one, once they turn to charity. But this does not really lend itself to familiarization or deep interest. Rather, the point is to try to get some metrics up and running as fast as possible and demonstrate results— a recipe for failure, of course. If rich people were immensely smarter than the general public, in a way that also generalized across domains, then it'd maybe work well, and not even need metrics. But they are usually not. Most rich people are of somewhere around average intelligence. Gates had some lucky breaks around being in the right place at the right time, with a lucky choice in parents, so got (much) more money than the average person. But this did not somehow give him vast insight into all problems in all other fields of human endeavor. He does not have any better insight into education than anyone else. But the problem is, he has to pretend that he does. He has to throw his money into trying to prove this falsehood true. Albert Einstein, who was undeniably gifted in some fields of human endeavor, recognized this, which is why he was in favor of a strongly democratic approach to governance and education (he was pretty openly a socialist, in the old-school sense of the term). Now, you could argue that while Einstein was a good physicist, he was wrong on how to run a society... but that'd be just confirming his thesis. ;-) |