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Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

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Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#231
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What approaches do you mean? In which ways do you think it's broken?

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou... He quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky: Parapsychologists are constantly protesting that they are playing by all the standard scientific rules, and yet their results are being ignored – that they are unfairly being held to higher standards than everyone else. I’m willing to believe that. It just means that the standard statistical methods of science are so weak and…

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Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#232
post #216

Saw this on Reddit, maybe someone can comment: --- From Wikipedia: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is not a charitable trust or a private foundation but a limited liability company which can be for-profit, spend money on lobbying, make political donations, will not have to disclose its pay to its top five executives and have fewer other transparency requirements, compared to a charitable trust. Under this legal struct…

First, so we are on the same page: An LLC and "a non profit" are two orthogonal things. "Non-profit" is a tax status granted to any entity recognized by the IRS, an LLC is a state construct, not recognized by the IRS.

LLCs exist in the court system - they can be liable for things done under the legal umbrella of the LLC, meaning they be sued, and so on. This is the "Limited Liability" part; the members of an LLC are, for some things, not personally liable for any legal trouble. LLCs do not exist, as far as the IRS is concerned.

Because of this, an organization can be an LLC in it's local state, registered as a corporation of some kind with the federal gov't - and that corporation can be Non-Profit; eg; an LLC can be Non-Profit, and nothing can be "a" Non-Profit, because Non-Profit is not an entity, it's a tax status.

So.

You are Mark Zuckerberg. You hold a lot of Facebook stock, and you want to commit that stock to Philantropy. Cool. You could start a federal corporation (which would be recognized by the IRS) and file for Non Profit status.

But why would you? You're not accepting other peoples donations, so you don't need to help them make tax-deductible donations. Your money, "moved into" the LLC, still goes on your personal taxes (remember, the IRS does not care that your state has invented some court construct called an LLC - unless you're a federal corporation, your money goes on your regular tax return), meaning any donations made to, say, a Non-profit research fund, will be tax deductible just like it would any other day, so you don't loose out on any taxes.

Creating a Non-Profit of some kind would mean a lot of legal work, a lot of complexity in terms of how this new federal entity uses it's $3B Facebook stock to vote, if you set up as a foundation there are rules around holding too much stock in individual companies, et cetera et cetera. TL;DR: There's a lot of downside and the only upside is that some guy on Reddit would whine about how you're a fraud in some other way.

If I wanted to set aside $3B of my personal stock and tell the world "I'm gonna donate this money, over time", I don't see why I wouldn't just pay the $50 filing fee to get some legal distance from lawsuits in the form of an LLC and call it a day.

Edit: I should say that this is a short-term perspective. I would expect, as Mark grows older, he may want to move this money into an actual non-profit entity of some kind, with a board and so on that could oversee the management and dispersement of the money over the long haul, or whatever. But in the short term, it just seems like a lot of legalese for no benefit.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have matching donations or can kickstart an otherwise self-sustaining process They won't have been the first people funding research to have thought of this... it's a criteria sometimes used in evaluating in NIH grants, for instance. > Think of it as venture research As opposed to?

As opposed to more standard research funding which isn't as goal oriented. I assume they're looking for a "billion dollar exit" from their research funding.

Overemphasis on commercialization is a common complaint of the current funding situation in medical research, so I don't think we're failing for lack of interest in commercial exits. In fact, many scientist are serial entrepreneurs.

Moreover, many discoveries that went on to make a lot of people a lot of money had no obvious commercial application when they were first being researched... Predicting future markets is hard.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People would have rolled their eyes, if someone said. I wanted to connect the world. I want to connect virutally everyone, where you can just reach anyone at anyplace at any time for cheap. 30 yrs ago, in a different part of the world. My father had to catch a bus from a village to the city, then catch a plane to a major city to make international phone call to the US to his business partners. Today, people in that s…

It seems to me like the biggest things are impossible to see with a "normal" outlook. It's as if you either can't see the big thing, or you see it in a fantasy world, a fiction of some kind (science or otherwise). Take connecting the entire world. Even after the technology existed and had been deployed (the very early system that gave rise to the internet as we know it), people didn't look at that early version conne…

I can't find the link now, but I read somewhere that it took YEARS after the Wright brothers had achieved first flight to get the attention of the world. People didn't see how transformative that thing could become, yet the proof of concept was there.

The truth is the opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12433966

Wrights were actually very secretive and they were reluctant to publish anything before they got the patent. They were so adamant about the patent that they didn't do any public demonstration of flight for years until they were literally forced by competing claims. In those times people making claims for "heavier than air" flights were numerous and it was hard to take anyone seriously unless they do demonstration. They not only chose not to do so until they got patent but also did almost nothing to enhance their technology meanwhile. Their contribution except for first flight is very marginal and their rest of the lives are dominated by nothing but patent worries, bringing massive lawsuits on others and getting royalties. They also made a very generic patent claim essentially asserting that any system that produces lift is covered by it. This produced a lot of friction in bringing new innovations to market leaving USA significantly behind of Europe.

In addition to this, there were flight enthusiasts all over the world, and particularly in France. They were hang-glider enthusiasts at the time, as that was the cutting-edge flight technology. One of the famous hang-glider pilots died due to his belief that a hang-glider ought to be controlled by shifting one's body weight, which led to a fatal stall. This further convinced the Wright brothers that "the control problem" was the most important problem to focus on.

A lot of people wanted to fly.

This is all tangential to your point, though, and wasn't meant to take anything away from it.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#236
I would never discourage them, audacious goals are how real change is achieved.

But in the history of the world, every time you conquer one disease, a worse and scarier one seems to fill the void. And if you wanted to get pedantic, it could be said that Humanity is a disease of the Earth. Eliminating that infestation might qualify under the goal. Perhaps AI is not going to solve the problem by eliminating disease, but eliminating that which can be diseased. Kill the prey, and the predator dies.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#237

Not to take the wind out of anyone's sails, but there is a concern to be raised about relying more and more on charities to fund the public good. When a democratically elected government funds the public good, at least in theory, the public at large has a small say in choosing what counts as "public good". When you leave it to charity, you're relying on the morals of individual wealthy donors to decide what counts as…

Yes, exactly. Unless everyone has some skin in the game, the research will be biased towards curing those with money, perhaps using the rest as guinea pigs.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about using commensal bacteria to design an "external immune system" which can respond to any pathogen we program it too. Bacteria coat basically all cavities in your body and could scan incoming threats and respond to them before the human immune system is every involved.

Sure, as long I get to be the programmer and deploy the updates. :) You can call me God-Emperor Tominous.

That doesn't seem too improbable actually. I think that IDE's for designing genetic circuitry aren't far away.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#239
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"yes we can!" built the atomic bomb.

Only by turning almost 10% OF AN ENTIRE COUNTRY into doing nothing but producing an atomic bomb. That's not 2 billion dollars, that's 2 TRILLION dollars. So, basically, redirecting the US military budget. I approve.

> That's not 2 billion dollars

The Manhattan project cost about $2B in 1940s money; equivalent to around $26B today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#240
post #131

I know it's more of a western problem, but it would be good if someone could find some real solutions to the obesity crisis. If you ask many GPs in the west they will tell you that a majority of illnesses they address are related to weight and diet. With an aging, increasingly overweight adult population alongside a sharp rise in child obesity come big consequences for health care over the next half century. Im not s…

Um, I know a solution to the obesity crisis....

From what I have read there may be more to it than just laziness and over-eating.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/babies-have-a-micr...

It seems to agree with my observation that many people get obese very easily while I would have a very hard time even if I tried.

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