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My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

gatesnotes.com

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Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#601

Post by yupitsme123 »

cyberax wrote: post #585
yupitsme123 wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they're local, but its not like there's a limit to how many local charities there can be in the world. Operating at a huge scale requires you to lump people together into groups and make assumptions about who they are and what they deserve, as you've done in your example. To me that sounds antithetical to the concept of charity. And even with the best intentions, if you mess up, you're messing up a huge scale.

I can't reasonably be expected to assess which local charities in Chad are even real. I don't think there are _any_, in fact.

Charity just means helping someone. Do you think no one in Chad needs or is offering help? And if you don't know anyone in Chad who's in need of charity then...why do you want to do charity in Chad?

It seems that our notion of charity has been warped in such a way that it somehow doesn't count unless it's some enormous large-scale mission carried about by Charity, Inc for the benefit of some group of people far away. It's all very abstract, and that just creates room for fraud or exploitation.

Paying off a local person's debts or putting their child through college will probably be far more impactful and meaningful than sending your money off to some giant organization.

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#602

Post by motoxpro »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #597
nearbuy wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polio type 2 and 3 were eradicated and overall we went from 400k cases of paralytic polio per year down to less than 1% of that.

You may want to check your numbers because polio type 2 and type 3 are both still around (in fact, cVDPV type 2 is very, very common). The GPEI website has the recent numbers, updated weekly (although with ~3 month lag). 400k to 4k is not 400k to 0. Eradication means 0. People don't get smallpox vaccines today because we hit 0. American children get ~4 doses of IPV still, despite what you are claiming as "eradication…

Reduced the number of cases by 99%*

That's amazing and I am very happy I live in a world where someone helped that many people, regardless of who you compare their accomplishments to.

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#603

Post by qingcharles »

delusional wrote: post #498
qingcharles wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lobbying is ugly, but essential in the system we live in. You have to be pragmatic about it :(

That depends on what you are lobbying for. I don't think we have to treat all lobbying the same.

The problem is the good guys have to spend donations on lobbying because otherwise the legislators are only hearing from the bad guys. This is a story as old as time I think.

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#604

Post by fooker »

11101010001100 wrote: post #593
heresie-dabord wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Ha ha, well here's mine. First, I'm way ahead of Mr Gates: I'm already worth almost nothing. But if I had billions to give , I would be supporting Science Education, Democracy and Journalism. Scholarships for bright, motivated students. With all due respect to Mr G, I don't believe any of his objectives is possible with stable, educated, science-orientated social progress. Human…

They fund students through grants to PIs. I suspect the amount is on the order of 100M$.

That’s like 25 research groups for 5 years, there are about two orders of magnitude more than that.

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#605

Post by bigfatkitten »

calepayson wrote: post #529
gwern wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He can have other motivations. Between 2020, 2024, Mackenzie Bezos & Laurene Powell Jobs, the deeply unimpressive philanthropy of the Buffett children, and his own divorce, a very rich philanthropist has excellent reasons to aim for the foundation being liquidated in his lifetime, and not handed off to administrators like, yes, the Ford Foundation or Harvard... (And then, of course, given his enthusiasm for AI, there…

I'm an AI skeptic when it comes to business cases. I think AI is great at getting to average and the whole point of a business is that you're paying them to do better than average. But I think current AI (not where it might be in a few months or years) is absolutely amazing for disadvantaged people. Access to someone who's average is so freaking cool if you don't already have it. Used correctly it's a free math tutor…

> a free advice nurse.

It is good for the other use cases, but it is the worst possible source of advice on subjects where the user has no expertise, and where there are serious health or safety consequences for getting it wrong.

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#606

Post by pclmulqdq »

motoxpro wrote: post #602
pclmulqdq wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may want to check your numbers because polio type 2 and type 3 are both still around (in fact, cVDPV type 2 is very, very common). The GPEI website has the recent numbers, updated weekly (although with ~3 month lag). 400k to 4k is not 400k to 0. Eradication means 0. People don't get smallpox vaccines today because we hit 0. American children get ~4 doses of IPV still, despite what you are claiming as "eradication…

Reduced the number of cases by 99%* That's amazing and I am very happy I live in a world where someone helped that many people, regardless of who you compare their accomplishments to.

Attributing that whole reduction to Gates alone is a ridiculous thing to do. He didn't even fund most of the project and the only thing he really brings to the table is money. This has been a multinational effort with literally millions of people for 3 decades. Gates mostly wrested control from them in the last decade.

If he manages to bring the project over the finish line, I will celebrate his achievement. At this point, signs point to failure of the GPEI being a near certainty. Unfortunately, we'll be back to 400k in about 10-15 years if we give up at this point.

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#607

Post by calepayson »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #605
calepayson wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an AI skeptic when it comes to business cases. I think AI is great at getting to average and the whole point of a business is that you're paying them to do better than average. But I think current AI (not where it might be in a few months or years) is absolutely amazing for disadvantaged people. Access to someone who's average is so freaking cool if you don't already have it. Used correctly it's a free math tutor…

> a free advice nurse. It is good for the other use cases, but it is the worst possible source of advice on subjects where the user has no expertise, and where there are serious health or safety consequences for getting it wrong.

I totally agree in situations where folks have access to an advice nurse. Always prioritize an expert over an llm.

Same goes for the others, if you have the means I think you should get a tutor or an editor as well.

However, if you’re choosing between nothing and an llm then the llm starts to become a great option.

I used to work rescue and if I had caught one of my coworkers asking an llm how to treat a patient I would have flipped.

But if I had rolled up to an incident and some Good Samaritan was trying to help out by using an llm that would be awesome!

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#608

Post by perilunar »

Bill Gates is rich in part because his company screwed over so many people. Sure they made some products that people wanted and needed, but they also shipped some real crap and behaved like arseholes. It's good that he's giving it all away; it would have been better if he had less because his company was more ethical.

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#609

Post by dzamo_norton »

perilunar wrote: post #608

Bill Gates is rich in part because his company screwed over so many people. Sure they made some products that people wanted and needed, but they also shipped some real crap and behaved like arseholes. It's good that he's giving it all away; it would have been better if he had less because his company was more ethical.

Something like Robin Hood in the final analysis?

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#610

Post by conception »

ghaff wrote: post #560
ivape wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered about the Gates and Buffets commitment about giving away their wealth in death. It assumes that the people of the future are more worthy of it than the people of now. Whatever poverty will exist in the future also exists now. I suspect they've thought about this too, hence the acceleration. If anything, addressing the issues now has a chance of reducing the issues in the future. There's always so…

Many things take time. And it may be good to fund them. But outsized contributions don't necessarily make them happen that much faster.

I think the phrase is something like you can’t get a baby in a month if you have nine women.
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