The author doesn't answer because that "question" is blatant and manipulative nonsense. Don't fall for it.

What worries me more than billionaires funding learning initiatives is how many people fall for this kind of "reasoning" when it's about something they're primed to not like - where they'd reject it in any other context.

I mean, seriously. Small children will touch a hot stove only once, yet try to walk despite repeatedly tripping up. Obviously they don't learn from experience.

aside from which the idea that learning initiatives are all as simply equivalent as touching hot stoves is idiotic.

There is little reward in touching a hot stove more than once however there is a great reward from learning to walk.

When small children fall over, the furthest they usually fall is a couple of feet. It might make them cry, but it won't lea ve them with injuries, like a hot stove will.

And you can make a small child cry without hurting them at all, e.g. by saying "Boo!".

> When small children fall over, the furthest they usually fall is a couple of feet

Tell me you've never had small children without telling me you've never had small children

Raised two. They're now in their thirties, and they have all their teeth and no broken bones.

what would have happened if Mark Zuckerberg saw the failures of other social networks and "learned from experience" and didn't create Facebook? these billionaires keep trying precisely because they've succeeded in areas where others have failed, so they believe they can do it again. are they always right? no, but eventually someone will come up with something that works. if no one ever tries, no one ever will.

> if no one ever tries, no one ever will.

That's not enough. Repeating the same stupid ideas again and again and again without learning from past failures is not a viable approach.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

They're not the same ideas, they don't look a priori stupid, and you won't know for sure until you try.

The only stupid thing is following this absurd "argument" from the article. Kids, stoves. Seriously, what the fuck? Giving up on things after first negative experience is no way to live a life - literally, you would not survive to adulthood if you followed that brilliant idea.

Wishful thinking. "Don't say we can't travel the stars, maybe someone will come up with FTL, you never know until your try, look at the wright brothers", etc.

At some points you have to stop trying stupid things.

Here the stupid idea is thinking education is a solo activity while in truth it's a social one. A 50's multiple choice quiz on papers is the same as a quiz on computers. It's a very small part of what learning is about.

What failures did he learn from? The other two social networks at the time, Friendster and Myspace were both hugely popular still when he launched Facebook.

> what would have happened if Mark Zuckerberg saw the failures of other social networks and "learned from experience" and didn't create Facebook?

The world would be a much better place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook

Even setting that aside, your premise doesn’t make sense: you can’t “learn from experience” by watching others. The whole point of the phrase is that you have to do it yourself to learn.

Because it doesn't hurt? When you have $30 billion losing $100 million doesn't hurt.

Yes...but, in the bigger picture: For self-absorbed, A-list young billionaires, the educational outcomes for the little kids were never all that important. Their never-miss-it-anyway $1e8 bought boatloads of arbitrary power over little people, ~8 years of favorable PR, cool talking points when hanging out with their uber-rich social set, and other things that were valuable to them.

I'll admit that there's a flip-side viewpoint here: If you're a billionaire, in a society that very obviously has a lot of problems, and all you've got for tools and skills is a billion-dollar hammer that you're real handy with...well, okay - try hitting some things with your hammer. When the world is screwed up badly enough, even kinda-clueless change has a decent chance of improving something...right?

I suspect most humans with a billion dollars under their belt would be quite inclined to believe they can succeed where others have failed. After all, most people "fail" to become billionaires like they did.

Yes...but your phrasing suggests that is a rational belief. Vs. I'd attribute it far more to over-inflated self-esteem. Anybody who is both rational and has made it to billionaire has failed many times, at a wide variety of things. And knows the world is vastly more complex than any human actually understands.

Bogus analogy. That is more like "Child burnt rice once, yet did not give up on cooking and we might wonder why".

> But the interesting observation is that billionaires don't learn from experience.

This is my personal speculation, but self-learning can be extremely helpful for people with a lot of investment in a specific topic and high intrinsic motivation - a description likely to fit most people that made a vast fortune by themselves and their usual peer group. This is probably a serious filter bubble making them believe that self-learning is the way forward for everyone, since it worked for (nearly) everyone they know.

I'll give that question a try: because it scales!

I run a small science club where the kids learn and experiment in small groups guided by tutors who enjoy the stuff. And I'm running out of money fast: I cannot charge much for the courses and workshops (those without money run along free of charge anyway) and I need to spend money on rent, materials and especially the tutors. And the last expenditure is growing linear with the amount of classes I offer and is easily the biggest.

People in business, especially in tech business, try to set things up in a way where you can automate stuff away and it's easy to see schools and classroom education as a great opportunity to try the same approach.

> The author doesn't answer and I don't have an answer either.

The answer is in the analogy: the billionaire didn’t get burned. If the child touched the stove but it was merely warm, they wouldn’t learn to avoid it.

Losing millions when you have billions is not a big deal.