21–30 of 212 posts
The biggest problem is resource depletion and overpopulation. Overpopulation will be "fixed" through starvation and death. Resource depletion will leave the current young and future generations with far less extravagant lives. Adding to the overpopulation through vaccination programmes und su weiter is a misstep.
The biggest problem is resource depletion and overpopulation. Overpopulation will be "fixed" through starvation and death. Resource depletion will leave the current young and future generations with far less extravagant lives. Adding to the overpopulation through vaccination programmes und su weiter is a misstep.
Malthusian thought always strikes me as a comfortable little tautology to live in. It seems like it could be a neat way to contextualize one's efforts to delay the onset of, and diminish the impact of inevitable catastrophe. But I only ever see it being used to shit on ideas that on first glance would appear to accelerate the inevitable. Which in and of itself is bit odd. It may be a bit cold to see it this way, but…
The fact that Mr. Gates ignores this leads me to believe that he thinks that the grossly unequal distribution of resources is the result of some process that has a sound basis. Our current 'economic' models, since they do not take into account equality, health, education, or any other important scientific data, are fundamentally unsound, and that is why we have the problems of gross inequality and inadequate distribution of resources.
We should frame this as less exploitation and more fairness rather than more charity.
The biggest problem is resource depletion and overpopulation. Overpopulation will be "fixed" through starvation and death. Resource depletion will leave the current young and future generations with far less extravagant lives. Adding to the overpopulation through vaccination programmes und su weiter is a misstep.
I like the part where the malthusians have never once been right.
He's talking from experience. Between the late 1990's and early 2000's, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wasted around $1.7 billion on a broad-ranging, intensive, national effort to study small schools... based on a flawed measurement of Bayesian probabilities!
The foundation looked only at the probability that a school would be small given high school performance, and seemingly forgot to look at the probability that a school would be high-performing given a small school size. The two are not the same. $1.7 billion, poof!
The following analysis, by a professor of statistics, explains in more detail how the foundation got it wrong: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8863.pdf
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2002/12/death-is-an-outra...
You'll see a number of mainstream foundations in the Methuselah Foundation lists, and those also support the SENS Research Foundation, working on the basis for ways to reverse the cellular and molecular damage that causes aging. The Gates foundation isn't there:
http://mfoundation.org/?pn=donors
But that's not entirely surprising: from the beginning, the Gates Foundation has been a very traditional Big Philanthropy operation. Wealth does not grant vision. Where there is innovation or stepping away from the norms it is of the incremental type, with none of what Peter Thiel calls "radical philanthropy". Is this is a criticism of Gates? Sure. But it's equally a criticism of everyone else. The Gates Foundation is doing what most people think Big Philanthropy should do. The blind spot for aging is near universal.
The biggest problem is resource depletion and overpopulation. Overpopulation will be "fixed" through starvation and death. Resource depletion will leave the current young and future generations with far less extravagant lives. Adding to the overpopulation through vaccination programmes und su weiter is a misstep.
Well actually the first world will rape all the resources, just as it's doing now and the population will sort itself out in the third world, much as it's doing now.
How to rid the world of all known diseases (the Python method) "Well, first of all become a doctor and discover a marvelous cure for something, and then, when the medical profession really starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right so there'll never be any diseases ever again." http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/toridof.htm
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Malthusian thought always strikes me as a comfortable little tautology to live in. It seems like it could be a neat way to contextualize one's efforts to delay the onset of, and diminish the impact of inevitable catastrophe. But I only ever see it being used to shit on ideas that on first glance would appear to accelerate the inevitable. Which in and of itself is bit odd. It may be a bit cold to see it this way, but…
I think it's interesting to discuss it here, the zenith of technocopian optimism and futurism. There's a host of intelligent people frequenting Hacker News, but few have any idea what sort of trouble we are in. No conscious thought at all about the value chain that's involved for them to fill up their car in the awesome Bay area with amazing people doing fantastic work to "change" the world. Why aren't you guys picki…
And the people here who do have meaningful discussion on topics other than tech sure don't do it here. I know, I live outside the cities encompassed by startup nonsense and work in medical research.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think optimization of the world is exactly science. Science is about the acquisition of knowledge. Understanding what causes Polio is science, how it spreads, etc. Changing the world in such a way as to get rid of Polio strikes me as something different, not sure what. For example studying global warming is science, but injecting particles into the stratosphere to cool things down would be a step further.
The "optimization" characterization was invented by "aramadia". You can't assume that premise if you want to make a valid argument against the characterization of Bill Gates's method as science.
I suppose it is "applied science" but that seems like a weak term. My point is just there is a difference between acquiring knowledge about the world, and actively engineering change in that same world. He is doing both.