25 ms·

The negativity is because of the legacy of colonialism. "Rich White Guy Solves all the World's Problems" ends up being really condescending, especially when ot

by jayferd 14y ago

The negativity is because of the legacy of colonialism. "Rich White Guy Solves all the World's Problems" ends up being really condescending, especially when other rich white guys are causing or exacerbating many of the problems.

TDL 14y ago
So you would rather have him do nothing?
- specialist 14y ago
  Sometimes "free" is too expensive. Ask anyone who has gone aboard to do good works. There's a very fine line between helping and inadvertently creating a dependency or destroying previously stable social or economic structures. Big example is famine relief. We dump our excess commodities in a local economy. That enriches the power elite. It nukes the local agriculture. People end up worse off.
  - TDL 14y ago
    I actually agree with you on this point. I was more reacting to the "White mans burden" comment.
  - rdwallis 14y ago
    I don't find the argument that famine relief does more harm than good compelling. Can you list some examples of this type of harm? Are they outliers or is it normal for this kind of aid to hurt its recipients?
  - dllthomas 14y ago
    My understanding is that it depends very much on the nature of the famine. Temporary famine caused by natural disaster or warfare can be helped quite a bit by temporary relief. Structural famine caused by ongoing problems is likely to be alleviated temporarily by temporary relief but the root causes deepened, creating the dependency you mention.
anewguy99 14y ago
Am I the only one that gets uncomfortable when white people are treated as an undifferentiated, malevolent mass?
- 9392732 14y ago
  It was a racist comment
- dmhdlr 14y ago
  Rich whites were specified.
  - 9392732 14y ago
    It still groups a large amount of people under one banner segmented with race as a variable. Why can it not just be "rich people"?
    - dllthomas 14y ago
      No no, the point was that we're a differentiated malevolent mass.
      - stcredzero 14y ago
        Well, to be fair, I think the commenter meant partly malevolent and partly unintentionally harmful.
    - lhnz 14y ago
      I did not realise that rich people were all evil...
- illuminate 14y ago
  Complicity is only with those willfully ignorant, I imagine. Colonialism ~is~ a malevolent mass. "Rich white persons" tend to be the force behind colonialism, but theoretically it could be anyone.
sliverstorm 14y ago
especially when other rich white guys are causing or exacerbating many of the problems. Sounds like "Rich White Guy" is the best person to solve the problems, then. Which is a fairer fight- bushmen vs. rich white guys, or rich white guy vs other rich white guys?
- illuminate 14y ago
  "Sounds like "Rich White Guy" is the best person to solve the problems, then" This is not a binary "problems" or "no problems". The manner by which colonialists "improve" the rest of the world is at the expense of the rest of the world. Not commenting on Gates' particular methods, but injecting money generally comes with a cost, and at various freedoms of the countries involved. At best of intention, throwing money at a problem is not usually solving the conditions behind a problem.
  - dllthomas 14y ago
    But measuring what you're doing and the impacts you're having and adjusting as you go is likely to have a better outcome than those with similar goals who lacked such introspection.
    - illuminate 14y ago
      I don't disagree with this at all.
mc32 14y ago
Doers it matter who is solving problems, so long as problems are getting solved? In a few years it will be billionaire Chinese who are solving big problems. What will be the negative attribute for that? Lots of people from all places around the world are solving problems for all of us. If Muhammad Yunus had not been local to Bangladesh, would he be some kind of villain? Is it bad that he's male? Would it have been better had he been a woman (most microloans are lend to women, since they appear more dependable and have greater need)?
pg 14y ago
Precisely what do you mean it "ends up being really condescending?" Let me tell you what I think you mean. I think you're attributing something happening inside your own head to the person you're reacting to. You're angry. The reason you're angry is that you have a bunch of arbitrary prejudices that have been set off by something you read. But you don't want to attribute your reaction to your own prejudices. So the only place left to attribute it to is the stimulus that made you angry.
- djt 14y ago
  Its a tough problem to shake for a lot of people by the sounds of it. He's donating $40 billion and more importantly his time, yet people are reacting so negatively. What I find even harder to understand is that he is using the Scientific Method to do the greatest good for the time/dollars and people in a community that are all about measuring value are calling him prejudiced and making excuses to allow themselves to hate him for their own reasons.
  - derefr 14y ago
    It looks like there are three problems at work here: 1. A framing effect: the narrative of "poor, starving Africans" makes you sympathize with them, and thus consider them the "in-group" of the narrative. 2. A fairness/democratic bias: people think that the best way for a group to decide on something, is for everyone to have an equal vote. Even if half the people making up the group are experts and the other half have no idea what they're talking about; even if what they're "voting" on is a fact like "the distance between [two cities none of them have ever heard of]." (Or, at least, on the face of it. People actually like being ruled by a high-status dictator as long as they have a way to pretend they're not being ruled--and thus aren't losing status from submission. This is why you'll get more enthusiasm for electing a leader than most forms of direct democracy--even when things like holding referendums are pretty easy to implement today.) 3. People believe that only their in-group holds the information necessary to make decisions about what their in-group should do. This one is actually not that far off; central allocation, as tried in Communism et al., failed due to many instances of the Principal-Agent problem: "orders from on high" to do things with neither clarity as to how accomplishing those things will benefit anyone, or an accompanying incentive structure to make those actually the things that will get done. But this only holds for in-groups that are about the size of "tribe" in hunter-gatherer terms: 20-150 people--where the group can come to a single decided set of social mores pretty much by osmosis. When you get entire societies thinking this way, countries composed of millions of people where there's no single thing everyone can agree on, only laws that are barely tolerated--you begin to find that decisions derived from sociological statistics achieve better results than just asking the population what they want. --- Combining these effects, we see a poor, sympathetic in-group being dominated by the will of a dictator, who must not know what the heck he's talking about, not being part of their group and all. It smells vaguely of colonialism [something most Americans are familiar with]: of being ruled over from the seat of power of a distant empire who has no "real" idea of what's important to your own people or what your own desires would be. And so, we don't like it. Even though, in consequentialist terms, it's the best possible thing.

by jayferd 14y ago

TDL 14y ago

So you would rather have him do nothing?

specialist 14y ago
Sometimes "free" is too expensive. Ask anyone who has gone aboard to do good works. There's a very fine line between helping and inadvertently creating a dependency or destroying previously stable social or economic structures. Big example is famine relief. We dump our excess commodities in a local economy. That enriches the power elite. It nukes the local agriculture. People end up worse off.
- TDL 14y ago
  I actually agree with you on this point. I was more reacting to the "White mans burden" comment.
- rdwallis 14y ago
  I don't find the argument that famine relief does more harm than good compelling. Can you list some examples of this type of harm? Are they outliers or is it normal for this kind of aid to hurt its recipients?
- dllthomas 14y ago
  My understanding is that it depends very much on the nature of the famine. Temporary famine caused by natural disaster or warfare can be helped quite a bit by temporary relief. Structural famine caused by ongoing problems is likely to be alleviated temporarily by temporary relief but the root causes deepened, creating the dependency you mention.

anewguy99 14y ago

Am I the only one that gets uncomfortable when white people are treated as an undifferentiated, malevolent mass?

9392732 14y ago
It was a racist comment
dmhdlr 14y ago
Rich whites were specified.
- 9392732 14y ago
  It still groups a large amount of people under one banner segmented with race as a variable. Why can it not just be "rich people"?
  - dllthomas 14y ago
    No no, the point was that we're a differentiated malevolent mass.
    - stcredzero 14y ago
      Well, to be fair, I think the commenter meant partly malevolent and partly unintentionally harmful.
  - lhnz 14y ago
    I did not realise that rich people were all evil...
illuminate 14y ago
Complicity is only with those willfully ignorant, I imagine. Colonialism ~is~ a malevolent mass. "Rich white persons" tend to be the force behind colonialism, but theoretically it could be anyone.

sliverstorm 14y ago

especially when other rich white guys are causing or exacerbating many of the problems. Sounds like "Rich White Guy" is the best person to solve the problems, then. Which is a fairer fight- bushmen vs. rich white guys, or rich white guy vs other rich white guys?

illuminate 14y ago
"Sounds like "Rich White Guy" is the best person to solve the problems, then" This is not a binary "problems" or "no problems". The manner by which colonialists "improve" the rest of the world is at the expense of the rest of the world. Not commenting on Gates' particular methods, but injecting money generally comes with a cost, and at various freedoms of the countries involved. At best of intention, throwing money at a problem is not usually solving the conditions behind a problem.
- dllthomas 14y ago
  But measuring what you're doing and the impacts you're having and adjusting as you go is likely to have a better outcome than those with similar goals who lacked such introspection.
  - illuminate 14y ago
    I don't disagree with this at all.

mc32 14y ago

Doers it matter who is solving problems, so long as problems are getting solved? In a few years it will be billionaire Chinese who are solving big problems. What will be the negative attribute for that? Lots of people from all places around the world are solving problems for all of us. If Muhammad Yunus had not been local to Bangladesh, would he be some kind of villain? Is it bad that he's male? Would it have been better had he been a woman (most microloans are lend to women, since they appear more dependable and have greater need)?

pg 14y ago

Precisely what do you mean it "ends up being really condescending?" Let me tell you what I think you mean. I think you're attributing something happening inside your own head to the person you're reacting to. You're angry. The reason you're angry is that you have a bunch of arbitrary prejudices that have been set off by something you read. But you don't want to attribute your reaction to your own prejudices. So the only place left to attribute it to is the stimulus that made you angry.

djt 14y ago
Its a tough problem to shake for a lot of people by the sounds of it. He's donating $40 billion and more importantly his time, yet people are reacting so negatively. What I find even harder to understand is that he is using the Scientific Method to do the greatest good for the time/dollars and people in a community that are all about measuring value are calling him prejudiced and making excuses to allow themselves to hate him for their own reasons.
- derefr 14y ago
  It looks like there are three problems at work here: 1. A framing effect: the narrative of "poor, starving Africans" makes you sympathize with them, and thus consider them the "in-group" of the narrative. 2. A fairness/democratic bias: people think that the best way for a group to decide on something, is for everyone to have an equal vote. Even if half the people making up the group are experts and the other half have no idea what they're talking about; even if what they're "voting" on is a fact like "the distance between [two cities none of them have ever heard of]." (Or, at least, on the face of it. People actually like being ruled by a high-status dictator as long as they have a way to pretend they're not being ruled--and thus aren't losing status from submission. This is why you'll get more enthusiasm for electing a leader than most forms of direct democracy--even when things like holding referendums are pretty easy to implement today.) 3. People believe that only their in-group holds the information necessary to make decisions about what their in-group should do. This one is actually not that far off; central allocation, as tried in Communism et al., failed due to many instances of the Principal-Agent problem: "orders from on high" to do things with neither clarity as to how accomplishing those things will benefit anyone, or an accompanying incentive structure to make those actually the things that will get done. But this only holds for in-groups that are about the size of "tribe" in hunter-gatherer terms: 20-150 people--where the group can come to a single decided set of social mores pretty much by osmosis. When you get entire societies thinking this way, countries composed of millions of people where there's no single thing everyone can agree on, only laws that are barely tolerated--you begin to find that decisions derived from sociological statistics achieve better results than just asking the population what they want. --- Combining these effects, we see a poor, sympathetic in-group being dominated by the will of a dictator, who must not know what the heck he's talking about, not being part of their group and all. It smells vaguely of colonialism [something most Americans are familiar with]: of being ruled over from the seat of power of a distant empire who has no "real" idea of what's important to your own people or what your own desires would be. And so, we don't like it. Even though, in consequentialist terms, it's the best possible thing.