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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

by 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
- ploum 4y ago
  Where did I say that everything they are doing is worthless? I said exactly the opposite. They are doing good stuff too. Because, statistically, it seems really impossible to only do bad thing. The main take is that "doing good "is not their motivation. They are pursuing their own selfish interests. And when those interests align with the general good, they use that opportunity to do some marketing and say "look, we are doing good." Which is true but they fail to mention "because it’s in our own interest and we are also doing very nasty stuff in our own interest but we will, of course, try to hide it as much as we could". Even if they are doing 90% good stuff, it is really scary to realize that those people have so much power because they had the luck to won at what Cory Doctorow call the "lucky orifice lottery" (they had rich parent then they compounded on that to become even richer). Which means we can’t trust them, we should not trust them. Elon Musk is an excellent example : what he was doing seemed good (electric cars, space stuff) until you realize what he really did (founding the hyperloop project as a scam to prevent, on purpose, any big scale public transportation project that would compete with Tesla).

by ploum 4y ago

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

ploum 4y ago
Where did I say that everything they are doing is worthless? I said exactly the opposite. They are doing good stuff too. Because, statistically, it seems really impossible to only do bad thing. The main take is that "doing good "is not their motivation. They are pursuing their own selfish interests. And when those interests align with the general good, they use that opportunity to do some marketing and say "look, we are doing good." Which is true but they fail to mention "because it’s in our own interest and we are also doing very nasty stuff in our own interest but we will, of course, try to hide it as much as we could". Even if they are doing 90% good stuff, it is really scary to realize that those people have so much power because they had the luck to won at what Cory Doctorow call the "lucky orifice lottery" (they had rich parent then they compounded on that to become even richer). Which means we can’t trust them, we should not trust them. Elon Musk is an excellent example : what he was doing seemed good (electric cars, space stuff) until you realize what he really did (founding the hyperloop project as a scam to prevent, on purpose, any big scale public transportation project that would compete with Tesla).