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An interview with Bill Gates

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Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#151

Post by vidarh »

Volpe wrote: post #99
bolder88 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point is they're two separate groups of people. From the majority of people from 1st world countries, it is more valuable. I'm never going to meet anyone who has had malaria, or even anyone who knows someone who has had maleria. It's a non issue. But I'll certainly experience and interact with a larger internet population.

wow. So because you'll never see it, it isn't a problem. You getting cheap/free internet is more important than millions of people dying [1]... [1] http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/

He's being realistic. How many of us are donating even percent of our income towards malaria eradication? Eradicating malaria has been possible for decades. It has not happened because people amongst others continues to prioritize luxuries over other peoples lives.

We can pretend we're not amongst "those people", but the fact we're spending time on HN debating this matter instead of doing something about it pretty much demonstrate that most of us are.

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#152

Post by vidarh »

s_baby wrote: post #142
algorias wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't pivot your way out of ecological catastrophes, you know... There are many instances of "innocent" actions of mankind that ravaged huge areas of the world very rapidly (the beaver plague in south america, just off the top of my head). Ecosystems often find themselves in very delicate states of equilibrium, an equilibrium that can be irreversably broken with the slightest missstep. There are very good reasons…

Considering more than half of all humans ever have died from Malaria it's a reasonable risk to take.

Source? I find that very hard to believe. For starters, not nearly all humans do or have lived in places where malaria is particularly widespread.

Secondly, while deaths from malaria are high in developing countries, according to WHO it still "only" accounted for 4.4% of deaths in low income countries in 2002.

While the percentage of Malaria deaths has undoubtably dropped substantially as the fight against Malaria has intensified, the drop in recent decades do not seem to justify that the worldwide deaths causes by Malaria has at any point been so far above 50% to compensate for lower rates later and for the parts of the world where Malaria either is not endemic or not widespread enough to cause significant deaths.

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#153

Post by bolder88 »

asadlionpk wrote: post #109
bolder88 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an insane choice. Do you really value raw lifespan over quality of life?

so you would risk having cancer for internet access? Does internet define your quality of life?

Of course it does. I use the internet to generate money.

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#154

Post by makomk »

vidarh wrote: post #56
Xylakant wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's right. Poverty, disease and basic things like that are things about _survival_, the internet is not. I'd say he's at least partially wrong. Diseases are often cause by lack of knowledge and education, outburst can often be contained with good means of communication. I know people doing projects that use the internet (or cellphone text messages) to allow remote villages to better manage the available health res…

> Diseases are often cause by lack of knowledge and education Case in point: Polio is endemic in only three countries today: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria. While in Afghanistan it'd be possible for it to be down to the war, in Pakistan and Nigeria it is down to skepticism and misinformation from religious groups (often based in past experiences) that are often amongst the most important information bearers in the…

I'm sure the CIA operatives posing as vaccination teams didn't help make vaccination any more popular in Pakistan either.

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#155

Post by tunesmith »

vidarh wrote: post #151
Volpe wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow. So because you'll never see it, it isn't a problem. You getting cheap/free internet is more important than millions of people dying [1]... [1] http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/

He's being realistic. How many of us are donating even percent of our income towards malaria eradication? Eradicating malaria has been possible for decades. It has not happened because people amongst others continues to prioritize luxuries over other peoples lives. We can pretend we're not amongst "those people", but the fact we're spending time on HN debating this matter instead of doing something about it pretty mu…

I don't know about "realistic", but it expresses a value other than "all lives are created equal". I think if someone has a value other than "all lives are created equal", then focusing on expanding internet usage ahead of malaria eradication is a conclusion that could be deduced from that (when combined with other values we might all share).

The problem is that all sorts of other whacked conclusions can also be deduced from "not all lives are created equal", so you need a whole other host of values to protect against that.

However, I don't think the converse is true. If someone is focusing on expanding internet ahead of eradicating malaria, it doesn't necessarily mean they don't believe "all lives are created equal". It could instead mean they are simply ignorant, which is not bad if they are open to perspective. That is kind of Gates' point - he's being evangelical about pointing out that if you have that value, you should probably pay attention to things like malaria. Other sources point out the same thing. Check various conversations over at lesswrong, or check out the top-rated charities at givewell.org, or just google the many arguments on efficient charity-giving.

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#156

Post by kapad »

Google has let me down, but I remember an article I read a few years ago in the Indian edition of the TIME magazine. It spoke of how millions of dollars spent on medicines for malaria between the late 90s and early 2000s had done nothing in terms of numbers for the malaria problem. The problem had just gotten worse. The antibiotics required to cure a person kept getting stronger and more expensive, since the malarial parasite was becoming immune to common antibiotics. The article then did a case study of on single NGO that did not distribute medicines, but rather distributed mosquitoe nets. There was a sharp decline in the numbers for people affected with malaria in the region in which this particular NGO was operating. Some times connectivity, access to communication and information is much better then spending millions and billions of dollars on medicines, medical staff and medical research (on stronger anti-biotics. Throw all the money you want at vaccine discovery and it is not wasted.) when a much cheaper and easier alternative would have gotten better results. If lack of information and communication was a cause of the bad approach being used, then the internet definitely will help in such situations.

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#157

Post by Xylakant »

Shivetya wrote: post #143
Xylakant wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's right. Poverty, disease and basic things like that are things about _survival_, the internet is not. I'd say he's at least partially wrong. Diseases are often cause by lack of knowledge and education, outburst can often be contained with good means of communication. I know people doing projects that use the internet (or cellphone text messages) to allow remote villages to better manage the available health res…

No he is more right than wrong. We already have communications options available in those regions. The very same ones used over the last decades, whether its radio, hardline phones, cellular or even satellite. Doctors and nurses out there already have communications. The issue here is that spending money to provide internet to the masses there is not as beneficial as making sure they live to use it.

I'd say he's more wrong than right. There are basically no landline connections in large parts of Africa, since it's basically infeasible to cover the large distances involved with cables. Satellite is unaffordable for all practical purposes - when I'm talking about doctors and nurses I'm not talking about western foreign aid people but locals. If your average income is in the range of single digit USD a day, satellite comm is infeasible. Also, the communication system must be manageable and maintainable by locals with a basic eduction.

So the best available communication is often cellular, if any.

On the other hand malaria is a disease that only affects some parts of the population - namely the one that lives in malaria affected regions. Large parts of southern Africa are mosquito-free, hence no Malaria. To make up for that there's a ton of others diseases, so if you eliminate Malaria, you still have to fight Schistosomiasis [1], Trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) [2] HIV and a lot of other diseases for which treatments may or may not exist. In a country where the average infection rate with HIV hovers at about 30% the gain from eradicating Malaria is limited at best. Let's not get into poverty and access to most basic health care.

It's not a simple problem that allows for a simple solution and even eliminating every conceivable disease that affects people in developing countries will only be one minor factor to improving the situation there. Those people need access to knowledge and information as much as they need health care and water. Otherwise they'll forever be stuck on western subsidies - just healthier and longer.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schistosomiasis [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_trypanosomiasis

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#158

Post by Xylakant »

sanskritabelt wrote: post #139
Xylakant wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's right. Poverty, disease and basic things like that are things about _survival_, the internet is not. I'd say he's at least partially wrong. Diseases are often cause by lack of knowledge and education, outburst can often be contained with good means of communication. I know people doing projects that use the internet (or cellphone text messages) to allow remote villages to better manage the available health res…

It's true that diseases are often caused by those things, but in this particular case malaria is caused by the /Plasmodium/ organism and transmitted via infected mosquitoes. If you're imagining a situation in which one individual in an outlying community gets sick with mysterious symptoms that turn out to be malaria, you have simply failed to grasp the magnitude of the problem.

I have family ties in Southern Africa, I've been there multiple times, I've seen it and I still don't think I grasp the magnitude of the problem. However, on thing I know for sure: The problem is not limited to large portions of the population being infected with malaria. They also have a wide variety of other, quite nasty diseases that will all still be around once you eliminate Malaria - if you succeed at that. The sub-Saharan countries for example suffer from a massive AIDS/HIV epidemic, at some point the estimate was that every third adult in Botswana is infected. Things are better now with about 24% infection rate - that's still a quarter of the population. A common belief was that having sex with a virgin would cure your infection - with predictable results: Think anywhere on the range of merely spreading the epidemic to flat out rape of young virgins. I'm very sorry to respond in kind: I think you fail to grasp the magnitude of the problem.

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#159

Post by bolder88 »

tunesmith wrote: post #155
vidarh wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's being realistic. How many of us are donating even percent of our income towards malaria eradication? Eradicating malaria has been possible for decades. It has not happened because people amongst others continues to prioritize luxuries over other peoples lives. We can pretend we're not amongst "those people", but the fact we're spending time on HN debating this matter instead of doing something about it pretty mu…

I don't know about "realistic", but it expresses a value other than "all lives are created equal". I think if someone has a value other than "all lives are created equal", then focusing on expanding internet usage ahead of malaria eradication is a conclusion that could be deduced from that (when combined with other values we might all share). The problem is that all sorts of other whacked conclusions can also be dedu…

All lives are not created equal. That's just bs. Of course not all lives are created equal. For example if I had to pick between the lives of Einstein and Hitler, I'd pick Einstein.

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#160

Post by mistermann »

spiritplumber wrote: post #136
sanoli wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it related to this by any chance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser

Not very related. That looks very expensive. Mine is intended to retail for $10 to $20.

A $20 laser? I'm skeptical.
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