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Wow, this guy sure hates Mr Beast. I haven’t seen much but I did see the one where he created 100 wells. The author says these wells will fail soon and do not g

Wow, this guy sure hates Mr Beast. I haven’t seen much but I did see the one where he created 100 wells. The author says these wells will fail soon and do not get repaired or maintained. I think the reasoning is ridiculous. Shame someone for digging a well because it might not be repaired in the future????

michaelmior 2y ago
There's also been a number of analyses that suggest he was lying about the number and location of the wells.
- M4v3R 2y ago
  There was one video from a disgruntled ex employee, who just noticed that in the video footage some wells are missing/duplicated. That does not prove he didn’t build them. It's only one of the possible reasons. The other possible reason is the footage for these wells might've been damaged or missing so they had to go with what they had. Now don't get me wrong, some of the stuff he's being accused to has much more merit, for example in one video he showed a dilapidated hospital that he claimed to rebuild from scratch, but other footage revealed that the hospital was in fact in much better condition initially. So he's basically trying to make it look like he's doing more than in reality, and that's definitely something that needs to be called out.
  - michaelmior 2y ago
    There are many plausible reasons to be sure, but I think in those cases, it would have been much better to do actually explain what happened than effectively lie. (It may have been a lie with no real ill intent, but still a lie.)
decremental 2y ago
[dead]
alwa 2y ago
I feel like part of the author’s point was that the well-digging thing is a long and tired example of attention-hungry rich outsiders prancing in to “fix things” and not caring about (or considering) the long-term consequences of their ideas. Even the really good development organizations are constantly learning lessons about unintended second- and third-order consequences: it’s particularly cynical, then, to make a spectacle out of doing the naive thing that seems obvious but that we already know doesn’t really work well. Doing something pointless with your lavish resources is insulting when, with the same resources and the humility to study what works and ask for good advice, you (or the local population) could instead have done something sustainable. It’s putting your ego and your public profile ahead of the very real material needs whose egregiousness you’re profiting from. It’s bad enough when it’s nonprofits just making their (sometimes lavish) salaries off the pointlessness. In this case, the man has made a career out of directly turning people’s disability and economic disadvantage and suffering into his primary product that he profits from. His $750-million company got that way entirely by exploiting people’s misery for views and profit. By selling the idea that the problems aren’t all that real, that all it takes is a rich dude with a magic wand and some righteousness. “Fixing” 100 people’s problems and pretending you fixed a society’s worth. And his little treatise that leaked a few weeks back makes his logic explicit: do the minimum to sound flashy. > He argues that it is far cheaper and funnier to offer a prize of five packs of Doritos a day instead of $20,000. Then one section asks “What is the goal of our content” before replying “the goal of our content is to excite me”. At least an evil capitalist WellCorp, Inc. would have to dig wells that keep working after the camera crew leaves, if it wanted to stay in business for very long!
- boxed 2y ago
  > Doing something pointless with your lavish resources is insulting when, with the same resources and the humility to study what works and ask for good advice, you (or the local population) could instead have done something sustainable. That seems like a false dichotomy no? The article is specifically about MrBeast, who would NOT have "lavish resources" if he did what you propose. The stunt nature of the work IS the income stream. I think it's more reasonable to ask if he's just creating short term gains, or making things worse. I would guess the former. Which is honestly better than the alternative which is he does cruel prank videos with the same budget.
stackghost 2y ago
It's the same phenomenon as the What Three Words thing. The pitch was that it would solve commerce because in parts of the world they don't have "proper" street addresses. Or the Three Cups of Tea guy. His foundation had a bunch of schools built in the Himalayas, ostensibly to educate girls, but many of those schools were empty or used to store grain shortly after being built, and less than half of the funds he raised actually went to building "schools". Just another outsider who thinks they know better.

michaelmior 2y ago

There's also been a number of analyses that suggest he was lying about the number and location of the wells.

M4v3R 2y ago
There was one video from a disgruntled ex employee, who just noticed that in the video footage some wells are missing/duplicated. That does not prove he didn’t build them. It's only one of the possible reasons. The other possible reason is the footage for these wells might've been damaged or missing so they had to go with what they had. Now don't get me wrong, some of the stuff he's being accused to has much more merit, for example in one video he showed a dilapidated hospital that he claimed to rebuild from scratch, but other footage revealed that the hospital was in fact in much better condition initially. So he's basically trying to make it look like he's doing more than in reality, and that's definitely something that needs to be called out.
- michaelmior 2y ago
  There are many plausible reasons to be sure, but I think in those cases, it would have been much better to do actually explain what happened than effectively lie. (It may have been a lie with no real ill intent, but still a lie.)

decremental 2y ago

[dead]

alwa 2y ago

I feel like part of the author’s point was that the well-digging thing is a long and tired example of attention-hungry rich outsiders prancing in to “fix things” and not caring about (or considering) the long-term consequences of their ideas. Even the really good development organizations are constantly learning lessons about unintended second- and third-order consequences: it’s particularly cynical, then, to make a spectacle out of doing the naive thing that seems obvious but that we already know doesn’t really work well. Doing something pointless with your lavish resources is insulting when, with the same resources and the humility to study what works and ask for good advice, you (or the local population) could instead have done something sustainable. It’s putting your ego and your public profile ahead of the very real material needs whose egregiousness you’re profiting from. It’s bad enough when it’s nonprofits just making their (sometimes lavish) salaries off the pointlessness. In this case, the man has made a career out of directly turning people’s disability and economic disadvantage and suffering into his primary product that he profits from. His $750-million company got that way entirely by exploiting people’s misery for views and profit. By selling the idea that the problems aren’t all that real, that all it takes is a rich dude with a magic wand and some righteousness. “Fixing” 100 people’s problems and pretending you fixed a society’s worth. And his little treatise that leaked a few weeks back makes his logic explicit: do the minimum to sound flashy. > He argues that it is far cheaper and funnier to offer a prize of five packs of Doritos a day instead of $20,000. Then one section asks “What is the goal of our content” before replying “the goal of our content is to excite me”. At least an evil capitalist WellCorp, Inc. would have to dig wells that keep working after the camera crew leaves, if it wanted to stay in business for very long!

boxed 2y ago
> Doing something pointless with your lavish resources is insulting when, with the same resources and the humility to study what works and ask for good advice, you (or the local population) could instead have done something sustainable. That seems like a false dichotomy no? The article is specifically about MrBeast, who would NOT have "lavish resources" if he did what you propose. The stunt nature of the work IS the income stream. I think it's more reasonable to ask if he's just creating short term gains, or making things worse. I would guess the former. Which is honestly better than the alternative which is he does cruel prank videos with the same budget.

stackghost 2y ago

It's the same phenomenon as the What Three Words thing. The pitch was that it would solve commerce because in parts of the world they don't have "proper" street addresses. Or the Three Cups of Tea guy. His foundation had a bunch of schools built in the Himalayas, ostensibly to educate girls, but many of those schools were empty or used to store grain shortly after being built, and less than half of the funds he raised actually went to building "schools". Just another outsider who thinks they know better.