4 ms·

So many people seem to leap into this "billionaires are bad" rhetoric when EA is mentioned. I mean, fine, but it's not really an answer to what I said. I think

by Joeboy 4y ago

So many people seem to leap into this "billionaires are bad" rhetoric when EA is mentioned. I mean, fine, but it's not really an answer to what I said. I think it's maybe an example of the "Gordian Knot" mentioned upthread. I'm not asking whether billionaires are bad or not, I'm asking why so many people would prefer that billionaires keep their money, rather than the money being used to save lives. Can you make the case for me that eg. 250k preventable deaths is a better outcome than accepting a billion dollar donation from a very rich person?

kstenerud 4y ago
IMO, people would prefer that billionaires keep their money because they also buy into the idea of making it big themselves one day, someday. If you get rid of the billionaires, that prize no longer exists for people to wish for. Then there's the "what's mine is mine" argument, that whatever was acquired legally is by rights yours and nobody can say otherwise. In America, this philosophy is very prevalent. > Can you make the case for me that eg. 250k preventable deaths is a better outcome than letting somebody donate a billion dollars? I don't understand... why is this a dichotomy? I must have missed something in the conversation somewhere?
- Joeboy 4y ago
  > I don't understand... why is this a dichotomy? Those are the options for EA-type organizations, aren't they? You accept the money and use it to further your EA goals, or you refuse to accept the money and accept that you're passing up the opportunity to help a lot of people. It's admittedly blurred because a proportion of EA donation goes towards "growing the movement" or controversial "long-termist" causes (as with most or all of SBF's donations aiui), but most (I think 68% last time I looked) goes towards effective global health initiatives. So sure, I get that by refusing to accept the billionaire money you'd send some sort of anticapitalist message. You could tweet about it and probably get a lot of likes. I see why people would like that part, in isolation. But, is that really worth hundreds of thousands of lives? I find it really odd (and frankly horrifying) that anybody would even have to think about that question for longer than a millisecond. 250k is admittedly on the high side of how many lives you could save for $1bn. It's in the ballpark though.
ploum 4y ago
They don’t use money to save lives. They use the money to maximize their prestige and their power. They save lives when it fits their agenda. Look at the Gates foundation : they finance vaccine in Africa, which is good. How to they spend it? By buying overpriced vaccines from companies in which they have interest. They spent a lot of money to avoid the COVID vaccine becoming open source to avoid a precedent, killing thousands of people in low-income countries. (Bill Gates has ideologically always been against the notion of sharing any knowledge, remember "Letter to hobbyists". Saving lives is just what they put on the marketing cover. Truth is that they are spending for their own prestige and also to "feel-good" about themselves. It’s normal. It’s how we are wired as human. When you give money to charities, you simply maximize the "feel good" and minimize the "feel guilty" (which is why most charities are nowadays essentially huge marketing organizations). There’s no way for an individual to really do "good" on a large scale with money. The best use of money is to share it as much as possible and let people decide themselves what they want to do with it. (every single study about effectiveness of fighting poverty came to the simple conclusion that you only need to give money to the poors. It’s the best possible use of money. But we hate to do that because we don’t really want to fight poverty. We want to feel good about ourselves and maybe gain a bit of prestige)
- Joeboy 4y ago
  I don't understand or like Gates' IP fixation. Of the many criticisms I've seen leveled against him, the covid vaccine IP thing seems like the most genuinely bad. But it seems like a huge leap from that to everything his foundation has done is worthless. I say this as a former Gates loather from his MS days. I am fairly confident that stopping people dying of preventable diseases is an actual thing that happens in the real world. There's certainly prestige and feel-good involved in saving lives, but are you sure that makes saving lives bad? What's an acceptable exchange rate? If somebody saves a thousand lives and feels only slightly good about it, would that be acceptable? How many people would you have to watch die of preventable diseases, before you'd start to think it was OK for somebody to feel good about preventing them, or even enjoy a bit of prestige? > every single study about effectiveness of fighting poverty came to the simple conclusion that you only need to give money to the poors Givewell's current list[0] of top "high-impact, cost-effective" charities has two Malaria charities, vitamin A supplements and cash incentives for vaccinations. GiveDirectly (which "gives money to the poors") was in the list until a couple of years ago. [0] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

by Joeboy 4y ago

kstenerud 4y ago

IMO, people would prefer that billionaires keep their money because they also buy into the idea of making it big themselves one day, someday. If you get rid of the billionaires, that prize no longer exists for people to wish for. Then there's the "what's mine is mine" argument, that whatever was acquired legally is by rights yours and nobody can say otherwise. In America, this philosophy is very prevalent. > Can you make the case for me that eg. 250k preventable deaths is a better outcome than letting somebody donate a billion dollars? I don't understand... why is this a dichotomy? I must have missed something in the conversation somewhere?

Joeboy 4y ago
> I don't understand... why is this a dichotomy? Those are the options for EA-type organizations, aren't they? You accept the money and use it to further your EA goals, or you refuse to accept the money and accept that you're passing up the opportunity to help a lot of people. It's admittedly blurred because a proportion of EA donation goes towards "growing the movement" or controversial "long-termist" causes (as with most or all of SBF's donations aiui), but most (I think 68% last time I looked) goes towards effective global health initiatives. So sure, I get that by refusing to accept the billionaire money you'd send some sort of anticapitalist message. You could tweet about it and probably get a lot of likes. I see why people would like that part, in isolation. But, is that really worth hundreds of thousands of lives? I find it really odd (and frankly horrifying) that anybody would even have to think about that question for longer than a millisecond. 250k is admittedly on the high side of how many lives you could save for $1bn. It's in the ballpark though.

ploum 4y ago

They don’t use money to save lives. They use the money to maximize their prestige and their power. They save lives when it fits their agenda. Look at the Gates foundation : they finance vaccine in Africa, which is good. How to they spend it? By buying overpriced vaccines from companies in which they have interest. They spent a lot of money to avoid the COVID vaccine becoming open source to avoid a precedent, killing thousands of people in low-income countries. (Bill Gates has ideologically always been against the notion of sharing any knowledge, remember "Letter to hobbyists". Saving lives is just what they put on the marketing cover. Truth is that they are spending for their own prestige and also to "feel-good" about themselves. It’s normal. It’s how we are wired as human. When you give money to charities, you simply maximize the "feel good" and minimize the "feel guilty" (which is why most charities are nowadays essentially huge marketing organizations). There’s no way for an individual to really do "good" on a large scale with money. The best use of money is to share it as much as possible and let people decide themselves what they want to do with it. (every single study about effectiveness of fighting poverty came to the simple conclusion that you only need to give money to the poors. It’s the best possible use of money. But we hate to do that because we don’t really want to fight poverty. We want to feel good about ourselves and maybe gain a bit of prestige)

Joeboy 4y ago
I don't understand or like Gates' IP fixation. Of the many criticisms I've seen leveled against him, the covid vaccine IP thing seems like the most genuinely bad. But it seems like a huge leap from that to everything his foundation has done is worthless. I say this as a former Gates loather from his MS days. I am fairly confident that stopping people dying of preventable diseases is an actual thing that happens in the real world. There's certainly prestige and feel-good involved in saving lives, but are you sure that makes saving lives bad? What's an acceptable exchange rate? If somebody saves a thousand lives and feels only slightly good about it, would that be acceptable? How many people would you have to watch die of preventable diseases, before you'd start to think it was OK for somebody to feel good about preventing them, or even enjoy a bit of prestige? > every single study about effectiveness of fighting poverty came to the simple conclusion that you only need to give money to the poors Givewell's current list[0] of top "high-impact, cost-effective" charities has two Malaria charities, vitamin A supplements and cash incentives for vaccinations. GiveDirectly (which "gives money to the poors") was in the list until a couple of years ago. [0] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities