4 ms·

Entirely altruistic?

corysama 9y ago
Whenever someone rich gets in the news for being nice, people seem to love digging for some way that their motives are not "entirely altruistic". I understand that sometimes these deals are BS and don't actually benefit anyone but the rich person. But, I don't understand why people get so upset over the rich person benefiting in any way shape or form. I've seen such outrage as "He only gave away a $1,000,000 so that he could cut $350,000 off of his taxes!" :/ "The deal eventually, indirectly feeds some money back into the project in the long term making it self-sustaining!" :/ "It not anonymous, so he's only helping thousands of people to be famous for helping thousands of people!" :/ "He's rich, so giving away huge amounts of money is easy for him. Helping thousands of people should not be recognized unless it was hard!" :/ Then there's the classic "So, he's helping this part of the problem. But, why doesn't he help the rest of the overwhelmingly huge collection of tangentially-related problems?" :/ Sometimes it seems that the standard we hold people to is "Helping people must be anonymously self-immolating to avoid disparagement." Then we disparage the same people because, as far as we can tell, they are not helping enough.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Signalling games. The good thing about being a super rich person is that you can tell all the onlookers to shove their signalling games deep in their collective ass. IMO, the conclusions people jump to mostly tell about people doing the jumping. Also, https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth....
- notadoc 9y ago
  Who is disparaging anyone? Or are you speaking from your own observations in your social circle?
  - corysama 9y ago
    Not you. Though I wonder what you were specifically wanting to find out with your question. I'm speaking from observations made sometimes on Hacker News and frequently on Reddit.

Whenever someone rich gets in the news for being nice, people seem to love digging for some way that their motives are not "entirely altruistic". I understand that sometimes these deals are BS and don't actually benefit anyone but the rich person. But, I don't understand why people get so upset over the rich person benefiting in any way shape or form. I've seen such outrage as "He only gave away a $1,000,000 so that he could cut $350,000 off of his taxes!" :/ "The deal eventually, indirectly feeds some money back into the project in the long term making it self-sustaining!" :/ "It not anonymous, so he's only helping thousands of people to be famous for helping thousands of people!" :/ "He's rich, so giving away huge amounts of money is easy for him. Helping thousands of people should not be recognized unless it was hard!" :/ Then there's the classic "So, he's helping this part of the problem. But, why doesn't he help the rest of the overwhelmingly huge collection of tangentially-related problems?" :/ Sometimes it seems that the standard we hold people to is "Helping people must be anonymously self-immolating to avoid disparagement." Then we disparage the same people because, as far as we can tell, they are not helping enough.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
Signalling games. The good thing about being a super rich person is that you can tell all the onlookers to shove their signalling games deep in their collective ass. IMO, the conclusions people jump to mostly tell about people doing the jumping. Also, https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth....
notadoc 9y ago
Who is disparaging anyone? Or are you speaking from your own observations in your social circle?
- corysama 9y ago
  Not you. Though I wonder what you were specifically wanting to find out with your question. I'm speaking from observations made sometimes on Hacker News and frequently on Reddit.