Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems

Mr. Gates writes, <i>"I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition. You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal — in a feedback loop ... This may seem basic, but it is amazing how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right."</i><p>He's talking from experience. Between the late 1990's and early 2000's, the Bill &#38; Melinda Gates Foundation wasted around $1.7 billion on a broad-ranging, intensive, national effort to study small schools... based on a flawed measurement of Bayesian probabilities!<p>The foundation looked only at the probability that a school would be small given high school performance, and seemingly forgot to look at the probability that a school would be high-performing given a small school size. The two are not the same. $1.7 billion, poof!<p>The following analysis, by a professor of statistics, explains in more detail how the foundation got it wrong: <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8863.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8863.pdf</a>

I must say the comments here are extremely cynical and somewhat disturbing. Speaking as a citizen from India, (still third world despite our progress), I can say that the Gates foundation has done a turn of good in our corner of the world. You might dislike Microsoft the corporation, but Gates as a philanthropist deserves praise.

He is not wrong, but there is also a certain danger in this approach that goes unremarked upon. It is often difficult to measure the outcome you actually desire, and a lot easier to measure some proxy for it. But attaching incentives to optimising some metric - making an intermediate goal the goal in itself - tends to make it an extremely unreliable proxy for the original worthy cause.<p>We know that Gates is aware of this, because he is credited with having once said: "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." We can only hope that he is keeping this in mind; he certainly makes no reference to the problem in this piece.<p>The Gates Foundation has in the past spent billions driving ruthlessly and with careful measurement toward what turned out to be entirely counterproductive goals. Simply measuring more stuff will not be sufficient to prevent it from doing so again.<p>Some recommended reading material on the subject:<p>Ritter &#38; Webber, "Dilemma's in a General Theory of Planning" (1973) introduced the concept of "wicked problems" - <a href="http://www.uctc.net/mwebber/Rittel+Webber+Dilemmas+General_Theory_of_Planning.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.uctc.net/mwebber/Rittel+Webber+Dilemmas+General_T...</a><p>Dietrich Dörner, <i>The Logic of Failure</i> (1996) covers this ground very well, including with case studies of people trying to save a fictional third-world country in a computer simulation of an aid program... with uniformly disastrous results.

This reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell talk on why future generation will remember Bill Gates and not Steve Jobs and also why he will be remembered as a humanitarian and not as a computer genius.

Feedback and data related to your actual goals is key to achieving anything, and of course education and health should be targeted, but a bigger underlying problem is the structural inequality causing a constant lack of resources for many countries and communities.<p>The fact that Mr. Gates ignores this leads me to believe that he thinks that the grossly unequal distribution of resources is the result of some process that has a sound basis. Our current 'economic' models, since they do not take into account equality, health, education, or any other important scientific data, are fundamentally unsound, and that is why we have the problems of gross inequality and inadequate distribution of resources.<p>We should frame this as less exploitation and more fairness rather than more charity.

A couple of years ago my wife's 2 years old nephew was diagnosed with retinoblastoma (eye's cancer). I contacted the world's best hospitals and was told that the treatment will cost hundreds of thousands dollars.<p>So I tried to get some financial help from related funds and organizations and contacted all of them I could find on the internet.<p>Guess what happened: 90% of them just ignored me, and the rest told me that they are not helping sick kids, but only doing research work. One came up to cover up to $3.500(!) if I provide a bunch of documents I was sure I wouldn't be able to gather in a short term.<p>On web pages of such funds you normally can easily find a button to make a donation. But try to contact them if you need help - you will be surprised how difficult it is.<p>So we (relatives and friends) collected as much money as we could, the kid was receiving treatment in one of the local hospitals, in the end both of his eyes got removed. Maybe the same would have happened in those best hospitals too, but if there was even the slightest chance to keep his sight it certainly would worth any money.<p>Bottom line is - I don't believe in cancer funds any longer, and will never donate any dime. In fact I'm not even sure that they spend all money for "Research", they might be just another way to avoid taxes.<p>May be Bill Gates fund is different, I hope so...

Hmm, would love to see Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet in a competition to see who can solve more of the worlds problems.

How to rid the world of all known diseases (the Python method)<p>"Well, first of all become a doctor and discover a marvelous cure for something, and then, when the medical profession really starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right so there'll never be any diseases ever again."<p><a href="http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/toridof.htm" rel="nofollow">http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/toridof.htm</a>

Bill Gates treating the world like a computer optimization problem. First profile the world (program) and construct suitable benchmarks. Figure out some reasonable goals and test if your various health care and education programs affect the benchmark results.

Dear Bill Gates. Here's yardstick to measure residual value of your efforts: <i>If you'd stop doing whatever you're doing, will the world continue benefit from your past efforts for ages to come?</i><p>Compare "buying food for the hungry" and "teaching the man to fish" - which effort carry more residual value?<p>You developed DOS, and then Windows. Even when you stopped - the world continued rolling with your software and building more and more great stuff on top of it. Even Ballmer with all his powers couldn't derail your past efforts.<p>Dear Bill Gates, please stop taking consequences for causes, stop fighting with shadows. See where you can turn on the light so it will shine when you'll be long gone. Money + creativity goes the long way. It's time to add creativity. You can do that! You can do that!

So far as I'm aware, the Gates Foundation does nothing in regard to the world's biggest problem, which is aging. Aging kills the most people, causes the greatest amount of suffering, causes the greatest loss of wealth and capital, falls most heavily on the poor without access to palliative medical technologies, etc, etc.<p><a href="http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2002/12/death-is-an-outrage-1.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2002/12/death-is-an-outra...</a><p>You'll see a number of mainstream foundations in the Methuselah Foundation lists, and those also support the SENS Research Foundation, working on the basis for ways to reverse the cellular and molecular damage that causes aging. The Gates foundation isn't there:<p><a href="http://mfoundation.org/?pn=donors" rel="nofollow">http://mfoundation.org/?pn=donors</a><p>But that's not entirely surprising: from the beginning, the Gates Foundation has been a very traditional Big Philanthropy operation. Wealth does not grant vision. Where there is innovation or stepping away from the norms it is of the incremental type, with none of what Peter Thiel calls "radical philanthropy". Is this is a criticism of Gates? Sure. But it's equally a criticism of everyone else. The Gates Foundation is doing what most people think Big Philanthropy should do. The blind spot for aging is near universal.

Not everyone is as confident in Bill Gates's magical abilities as he is.<p><a href="http://dianeravitch.net/2013/01/10/how-bill-gates-wasted-50-million/" rel="nofollow">http://dianeravitch.net/2013/01/10/how-bill-gates-wasted-50-...</a> <a href="http://seattletimes.com/html/dannywestneat/2014437975_danny09.html" rel="nofollow">http://seattletimes.com/html/dannywestneat/2014437975_danny0...</a>

I'm very glad he's doing what he's doing.<p>It is also fair that when someone proposes a certain set of objectives, and then declares a plan to accomplish those, that you can criticize the plan to accomplish those objectives as being less than optimal. IMO, since this is his own money, he has every right to pick the objectives he thinks most important.<p>I think a marginal $1b spent to end the drug war would do more for his stated goal of fixing underperforming urban schools than a marginal $1b spent on teacher measurement. The irony is he wouldn't even need to spend $1b to make a huge impact on ending the drug war -- just showing through data that the drug war is responsible for many of the problems in schools and urban culture ($10mm to study this?) and then having the courage to promote that result (free or priceless) would accomplish it.

Who has more power to do good in the world? A rich business person or a "powerful" politician in a democracy? I'm going to go with the business person. They're free to do anything they can afford, unlike politicians who are at the mercy of government processes and political opponents.

We will fix nothing if we don't change the OS on that we are running...<p>OS = what we see(input) and what we do with that knowledge(output)<p>We can Install this software and this firewall and this make things easy tool but at the end we still are on the same OS.

Sometimes it seems that some think that the world biggest problem is that there are too few people on earth. No, it is not. We are killing our ecosystem already now. These other human problems like child mortality, poverty etc are of course emotionally and personally big ones, but resolving them would make world more crowded and not better place at all. My suggestion: if you put X amount of money to increase human population, then you must put also at least same amount to resolve all the next problems what we people generate: over-harvesting, co2 and other greenhouse gases, pollution etc.

Interesting read.<p>What is not measured, can not be controlled.

The best I can say is that BG sure made the right decision stepping down from Microsoft to do something useful.

I don't get the negativity in this thread. Bill Gates is trying to solve hard problems and people here are complaining. Sure, they may not be the problems that <i>you</i> think are most important, and I'm sure the foundation is making missteps along the way and wasting some money. But his message in this article is a good one I think:<p>&#62; <i>The process I have described—setting clear goals, choosing an approach, measuring results, and then using those measurements to continually refine our approach</i><p>This sounds like a pretty pragmatic plan to me. I know that I don't necessarily agree with the direction he's going (I would personally pick other problems to tackle), so I just hope someday I'm in a position to do something along the same vein and learn from the lessons he's willing to share.

Bill Gates eradicating disease is pretty awesome. His weird school ranking system in the US is pretty bizarre and utilitarian.<p>"Students would be better served by measures of which colleges were best preparing their graduates for the job market." is total corporatist bullshit. How about more free courses online like what MIT and Stanford are doing.

Didn't read the article; is getting rid of Balmer somewhere in there?

Hey Bill Gates! Fix what Aron Swartz was fighting for.

Money elf found a new way to spend money (that just applies "The Lean Startup.")<p>Good on Money elf!<p>"Huzzah!"

The biggest problem is resource depletion and overpopulation. Overpopulation will be "fixed" through starvation and death. Resource depletion will leave the current young and future generations with far less extravagant lives. Adding to the overpopulation through vaccination programmes und su weiter is a misstep.

Windows is one BIG problem of the world. How is he going to "solve" it?