Two things which should be basic human rights and absolutely free, are: communication and education. But people wish to earn $$ off of them. And then they wonder why the world is in such a messed up state.
Kudos to Khan Academy and Bill Gates for patronizing and liberating the education.
You can't have an absolute right to something that requires someone else to provide a service for you (remember that rights are inalienable, so you have them no matter how much money you have.) Such an obligation would essentially make the provider a slave to some extent (this effect can be very small for a given person, but the principle is the same: if you have to do something you don't need or want to do otherwise, and you're not even getting paid to do it, what does that make you?)
Rights only make sense when they're defined as legal prohibitions on action. Rights come from our nature as human beings; without the protection that they provide, we wouldn't be able to do all the things that we need to do to flourish (a concept that includes more than just biological survival).
>You can't have an absolute right to something that requires someone else to provide a service for you
Like a lawyer? Pretty sure I have a right to one of them when charged with a crime.
I understand to go with the clean logic of Ayn Rand's definitely of rights and everything, but that doesn't mean it fits all situations of the word right.
Positive rights have some traction and serve a useful purpose too, even though they do in fact require some taxation/other forms of forced payments to provide them.
The 'right' to an attorney should mean that the government cannot prevent you from attempting to obtain an attorney to represent you. (edit: added the italicized words)
Edit: Don't many public defenders think of their jobs as a form of partial charity?
Edit 2: Is it a violation of rights that these public defenders aren't the best lawyers available? I don't think so, and the onus is on people that accept positive rights to show that it is.
Edit 3: You know, I'm not exactly sure that this is Rand's answer at all (I couldn't find it in the cursory glances I took at a couple of books). But it does at least reflect what I think about the right to an attorney, and I think it holds up pretty well!
Not that I'm a libertarian, but if I was I would be inclined to argue the right to an attorney is specifically in place when the government initiates legal action against you. Outside of specific government action you have no right to an attorney -- you can't for instance sue the government and demand the government provide you with an attorney to do so.
The government may have wrongfully initiated the legal action, but this is not certain before the trial is over. Remember, in the case of guilt (context: when someone is guilty of violating an objective law, so this doesn't apply to all of today's laws), it is merely retaliating.
I support most of what the Innocence Project does, but I think that charity is the answer here (being a selfish person doesn't mean that I don't support charities; it just means that I don't think that such support earns me moral credit). If the government didn't pay for public defendants at all, I think that the Innocence Project might have an easier time raising money for more and better attorneys.
No, I'm saying that they'd get better representation if people didn't think "the government has already taken care of the problem, so why should I donate?"
Imagine the effect of a government program intended to assist stranded motorists (suppose that the program maintained a fleet of trucks which carried common spare tires, gas, compressed air and the like). Fewer people would stop to help, and that program would function about as well as any other government program does, which is another way of saying that it would work a lot worse than any private roadside assistance program known today.
Legal representation can't be totally inaccessible unless the justice system removes the right to trials altogether. Representing yourself in court is possible, at least to some extent,^ and it doesn't require hardware like flying does. (Incidentally, this is also why it's a good thing to have libraries in prisons - the innocent can use them to learn more and help exonerate themselves.)
^I know that it's a very poor idea to represent yourself if you have any other option, but it's still better than being on trial in a 100% rigged system, such as the USSR had.
I concede the point that it can't be totally inaccessible, but the it seems like farmers with hunting rifles going after professional soldiers. Sure, sometimes it works out or you get lucky, but that's not the norm.
Although come to think of it, the public defender situation isn't much better, is it.
There are rights and then there are rights. It's pretty easy to see the characterization of "free speech" as rooted in reason / "natural law", or given by God. It's harder to see the "right" to drink alcohol on such universal bases.
Something like legal representation isn't so much deeply fundamental as it is a pragmatic and institutional response to the problem of checking arbitrary prosecution. We would drop it if we could find some better way of checking those prosecutors.
But notice, the lawyer in question is hoping to make money off of representing you. As far as I can tell its always far better if the government collects taxes fairly from the entire population and pays some people to solve a problem, than either waiting passively for people of pure heart to fix the problem or arbitrarily forcing some particular group to solve it.
Right... because Bill Gates didn't make billions from the education market.
You go build a company around giving things to the education market for free and I'll build a company around selling things to the education market, and we'll see whose company is better off in five years and whose customers are better off in five years.
Bill Gates did make quite a bit in the education market. Find one school that does not use MS Office.
Also, Apple was, and still is, notorious for donating or offering heavily discounted products to teachers and schools. Why? They would get familiar with and used to using their products and purchase them in the future. It also gives them great publicity.
Many other companies do this as well. My campus computer store sells software at 90% discounts for the same reason. Sometimes giving things away is where the smart money is at.
Quality education must accessible to everybody. It might, but it doesn't have to be free. What we currently have in many parts of the world is free education of poor quality. That needs to be fixed.
Well, I'd love and welcome a good high-quality open source textbook movement that happens to also be high quality. It's the quality issue that's the major problem at the moment, I'd say. I've LOVE to see, for instance, Math textbooks written like they wrote "Real World Haskell" in wiki format with a single (or a small,finite set of) editor(s) ensuring that content and quality is up-to-snuff. I think that there really should be minimal educational infrastructure provided for free or very low cost.
Quality isn't the issue for most subjects. There are plenty of free and cheap textbooks with perfectly fine quality.
For example, when I took thermodynamics in college (in 2001), I used a thermo book from the early 70's which cost me $8 on eBay (as opposed to the modern version which cost $100). I also skipped purchasing many books entirely, and just used free materials online, including this newfangled site called wikipedia.
Agency costs and are the issue. The people assigning books don't have to pay the cost of using them, so they have no incentive to select based on price. Further, it's very difficult for students to use substitutes - if the professor assigns problems 1-10 from the book, it doesn't matter how good the material in your cheaper substitute is.
If you want to crack this nut, focus on problem sets, not textbooks.
Well, I do disagree on the quality aspect. I'd like to see a high quality Calc I and II textbook that's free, coherent, and not aimed at MIT students. My wife is a faculty member and if you can find me one, I'll pass it along (they're constantly looking for one). It's just hard to not choose Stewart..it's a solid textbook for a broad range of students, but it's expensive as shit. A lot of professors are getting that this (if they don't, I make damned sure I mention it when we socialize with them) is a barrier for a lot of students.
Anyway, you're absolutely 100% correct about problem sets. Good problem sets go a VERY long way to making a good textbook.
Is there _anything_ in Stewart that isn't covered as well by Khan? You also get advantage of the video tutorial on the topic.
I'm waiting for that point in time when we reach a tipping point and Higher Education Institutions don't just delegate everything to Khan for a lot of their topics.
My Calculus Course (151) at SFU took place in Images Theater at 8:30 in the morning and had 450 Students listening to a lecture on Calculus. The ratio was approximately: 1/8 of the students were bored. 1/8 of the students were lost, 1/8 of the students were attentive, 1/8 of the students were asleep, and 1/2 of the students didn't show up. (8:30 AM!)
I see little need for Stewart in the Face of Khan's Video Collection on Calculus + a bit of wikipedia (Seriously - check out their section on Derivatives and compare it to Stewart)
I will agree with you on the Problem Sets - and perhaps that's the missing ingredient in Khan - He needs to more fully flesh out his test bank - but http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard is moving ahead nicely. (And, in my mind, is far superior to any static test bank)
Problem set quality is not the issue. If it were, I would donate a week or two of my time and build a problem set generator.
The issue is that you need the same problem sets as the instructor. If the instructor uses Stewart and homework is graded, you get a 0 on HW. This is why you can't even go back 1 edition of the book, and why the legacy publishers print a new edition every 2 years with minimal changes beyond tweaking the problems.
A startup idea I never pursued, but one I think has a lot of merit: build an online problem cross referencer. It provides a) free problems to any instructors who want to use them and b) crossreferences these problems with existing textbooks (that way students who don't want to buy the book don't have to).
I'm pretty sure that Int[ 1/Sqrt[3+5x^2], {x}] can't be copyrighted.
Int[ 1/Sqrt[3+5x^2], {x}] can't be copyrighted but a problem set that consists only of exercises as routine as this would be almost worthless. A cross referencer is a neat idea though.
I have not, thanks for the tip. I looked at a book or so, but didn't see an easy away to comment on individual paragraphs like in "Real World Haskell", but maybe more of the interface opens up if you log in. ANyway, thanks for the tip!
Honestly, that is not a ridiculous idea. If we remove the standardized testing, the community developed textbook would explode.
In many of my college classes I spend more time using wikipedia than my textbook.
Furthermore, I know many teachers who have written widely used (assigned reading in over 1k classes) who want their books to be available for a greatly reduced price if not all together for free. Unfortunately the publishers ban this and the writers must relent since the only way to get their book known is if it comes from a major publisher. They justify this mostly based on promotion costs, but this is not even close to their profit margins.
Books are expensive because there is little competition, particularly with k-12 schools, largely based on political lobbying.
Of course, we aren't likely to dissolve lobbyists anytime soon; but the idea of socially conscious startups is to dream big.
I should also add. Technology is driven by people so it matters how they use it to the advantage of all and not just some. When technology helps people, we generally mean to say that people are helping people. I am not being altruistic here but there are things which should be free and available to all equally and education is one of that.
I expect basic education to stay within the realm of government and free. Public giving up education to private/corporate sector is a recipe for disaster.
How technology can help government improve the quality, and how technology can keep the education free for the masses, is another thing.
I don't think that the goal here is to degrade public education; one of the main attractions with this incubator is that it has connections to get your product into public schools.
To provide a good education, public school systems need all kinds of supplies, products, books, services, etc. that don't make sense to produce in-house. This is where the private sector comes in -- though it's hard for small companies (who can often give the schools the best value for their money) to build relationships with schools, get through the red tape (getting onto vendor lists, going through bid systems, etc.), so often the schools are getting lower-quality supplies/services for more money.
...so wouldn't it be nice if there were some group that would help new education-focused companies to get their innovations into the (free) public schools?
Kudos to Khan Academy and Bill Gates for patronizing and liberating the education.