
How the Gates Foundation Reflects the Good and the Bad of “Hacker Philanthropy” - pavornyoh
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/25/how-the-gates-foundation-reflects-the-good-and-the-bad-of-hacker-philanthropy/
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imh
>How might Gates spend its money more wisely? McGoey offers little guidance on
this.

This is the crux of the article to me. These problems don't have known
solutions. The options are to do expensive research/experiments or just keep
the status quo. The status quo doesn't work, so let's do some exploration,
like Gates did. There are difficult ethics involved, but if you think
something will do better I would argue it's unethical to ignore it. The real
touchy issue is how to do that and minimize the impact of inevitably being
wrong sometimes.

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pjscott
The argument given here that they should prioritize "obesity, cancer and heart
disease" more is ridiculous. Those are a lot harder to deal with than diseases
that you can just vaccinate against, like measles or polio -- so, given a
finite number of philanthropic dollars, anyone halfway reasonable is going to
prioritize the stuff that gives more bang for the buck.

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lumberjack
The argument is rather that a layman should not be in charge of redirecting
talent from one research effort to another, because they are a layman.

It's a "utopian should" though. Billionaires can boss people around. Not much
to do about it.

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username223
> Billionaires can boss people around. Not much to do about it.

Work toward a system that creates fewer billionaires, maybe?

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adventured
Ideally we would have drastically more billionaires, so long as they're
produced out of economic expansion.

The rise of the plentiful billionaire has coincided with lower global
inequality, radically lower infant mortality, less war, far greater standards
of living globally, increasingly plentiful food and scarcity of famines,
increased life expectancy, higher real median incomes, etc.

Humanity has never had it better, not even remotely close in fact.

~~~
username223
Ideally we'd have drastically more $100k-ionaires, i.e. people who don't have
to worry about basic needs, but who aren't rich enough to manipulate laws and
their fellow humans to their own advantage. Unfortunately, things haven't been
headed that way for the past few decades.

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jkire
Most of the arguments seem to boil down to the equivalent of "they tried X, it
didn't work, they should have used the money better". When trying to reform
any system, be it software, business or education, risks almost always have to
be taken to get any meaningful results.

That being said, it would be really interesting to read a dissection on how
much philanthropists (especially new "hacker philanthropists") acknowledge
that there are risks, and how they weigh those risks up. After all, the
consequences of making mistakes when trying to reform an education system can
have a large and lasting effect on the students involved.

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lemming
_Though the World Health Organization spends more than Gates does on
health..._

Regardless of its purported problems, the fact that you can have a sentence
like this about a private organisation is amazing.

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orionblastar
The problem is this, he is trying to solve problems with the same thinking
that went to build Microsoft and make him a billionaire. These problems have
to be solved with a different type of thinking than the ones that caused
rivals to Microsoft to go out of business and cause people to lose their jobs
and go into poverty.

Public education has a problem where most students are poor and suffer
emotional and psychological issues that make it hard to study and focus on
work. Many have broken homes and dysfunctional families. You can't just throw
money at a problem like that and expect it to be solved. Not unless you are
using the money to make sure those families are no longer poor and have money
to raise them to a middle class income. But you can't just pay them money, you
have to create jobs they can work for that pays them the money.

With Microsoft they earn money by automating things that eliminate jobs, and
people enter poverty when their jobs are eliminated and they aren't qualified
for any other sort of work. So you'd have to set up an education for the
student's parents to get them better jobs so they can get out of poverty.

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username223
> ...increased data collection on teacher effectiveness, the introduction of
> performance-based teacher pay...

A friend of mine teaches music in a public school, and half of his performance
review depends upon his students' math and english scores (à la Common Core).
Many of his students were raised in families that don't value education. And
if all of that absurdity isn't enough, he's making a lousy salary, with the
prospect of making a modest living in five years if he plays the
administrative game well and gets a bit lucky.

It's not that complicated: if we paid teachers like we pay coders, we would
have better teachers. That would cost something like 1% of GDP per capita in
the US.

