An interview with Bill Gates • Hacker News Board

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#121

Post by DanielBMarkham » Sat, Nov 02, 2013, 1:39 PM UTC

I don't disagree with Gates. In fact, I find it very difficult to comment on his moral position at all, and that's what makes this such a fascinating discussion.

If you had a billion dollars, what would you do to make people's lives better? For most of us, this is like talking about what to do if you won the lottery: the stuff of daydreams, not reality. But if you really sit down and think about this problem, it's not an easy one to get a grasp on.

You could do immediate things, like feed them, vaccinate them, or teach them English. These are things where you pay ten bucks, you get ten meals. Easy to measure.

You could do systemic things, where you create a system that's then supposed to do things. Build a school, create a farm, build an irrigation system.

You could invest in systems, choosing winners over losers. Finance that business, support that government program.

There are other options, and it'd probably be interesting to go through them all one day. But at the end of it, you're left with the uncomfortable fact that thousands of other entities have invested trillions of dollars in making people's lives better and have very little to show for it. Entities much smarter than you, operating on a much greater scale than you can. Even if you're Bill Gates.

I'm not ready to give up and say the problem is intractable, but it makes me angry that so many snake oil peddlers, many of whom are politicians, sell the idea that these are solved problems; we just need the money. They are not.

So I wish Gates the best of luck. I'd probably bet on connectivity ahead of saving lives, because I think long-term it's more important for humanity to solve its own problems than to keep individuals alive, but heck if I'm happy with that opinion. And if I were Gates, I might just take us to task for that, as he's doing. Good for him.

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#122

Post by Zigurd » Sat, Nov 02, 2013, 1:40 PM UTC

bolder88 wrote: post #19

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #9

He's right. Poverty, disease and basic things like that are things about _survival_, the internet is not. But mainly, the title is provocative and misleading. The article clearly states, he was asked a leading question "asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria", and he answered. The title makes it seem like he went out of his way to make the compa…

Those things are also about increasing our problems down the line IMHO The world population has doubled in the last 30 years. Doesn't that scare anyone else? Sure, you could save a few million poorly educated people from dying. Then what? They're all going to need food, energy, education, housing, etc etc. Saving people from dying is no good at all if they still have a shitty life and die from something else anyway.

Middle class (by developing world standards) life is the most effective brake on population. Give people basic health care, Internet, TV, a phone, and literate daughters and watch the population growth rate fall to replacement level or lower.

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#123

Post by Xylakant » Sat, Nov 02, 2013, 1:42 PM UTC

Qom wrote: post #74

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…

Note that internet does not necessarily help education. Most people waste their time on the internet, including most of us on HN. You can have as much info available to you as you want, if you go in the wrong direction or take no real action then it will all be for naught.

Well, in that case nothing necessarily helps education. Even books or teachers, people waste so much time in school. I for myself must admit that I tend to think of HN as very educating. I get exposed to information that I'd never find otherwise and to opinions of people I'd never meet otherwise. That's certainly much more educating than a lot of facebook.

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#124

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 02, 2013, 1:42 PM UTC

algorias wrote: post #28

Getting rid of Malaria is obviously a higher priority than internet access from the perspective of any one person living in the third world today. I have much respect for Bill Gates for the work he's doing in that area. However, there is a kind of shortsightedness in his attitude: The thing is, societies evolve because of technology and opportunities. So while it is preferable for each individual to have no internet…

[deleted]

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#125

Post by Zigurd » Sat, Nov 02, 2013, 1:43 PM UTC

bolder88 wrote: post #82

neya wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Saving people from dying is no good at all if they still have a shitty life and die from something else anyway. Wow. That's ultra-elitist. So, let's say you are diagnosed with a rare disease and the doctor gives you two weeks to live unless you get a medicine that costs $1000 which let's assume you can't afford. And you're going to die someday, anyway. Does that mean you have a shitty life and you deserve to die now…

Death is a natural, and essential part of evolution, and is crucial for the survival of the species. If you could magically save everyone from dying tomorrow, then well done! You've just killed everyone from overcrowding.

"Immortality" is really about 1000-2000 years. In that time, accidental death will catch up with you.

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#126

Post by ivanca » Sat, Nov 02, 2013, 1:52 PM UTC

Xylakant wrote: post #120

ivanca wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an egg-and-chicken problem then; you cannot manage the "available health resources" if those are nonexistent, so having those is a priority and that is more similar to what the BMGF is already doing.

A lot of countries in the developing world have existing health care resources, such as doctors or nurses, but managing them is a major problem in a state such as namibia or botswana where the population of a small city is spread out on a territory as large as germany. It helps if you can have a local, less qualified health care worker communicate with a remote specialist before either moving a doctor to the patient…

You are painting a fairy tale outcome, poorly based on reality. Even in Colombia, were there is high-speed internet connections the coordination, willingness and education to make a fruitful use of this resource is scarce. So it's not like "Give them internet and they will figure it out!", it's a lot more complicated than that.

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#127

Post by Xylakant » Sat, Nov 02, 2013, 1:57 PM UTC

deskamess wrote: post #89

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…

Communication is the key.... and the internet is generally pretty awesome for that. However, for rural medicine, the prerequisite (assuming infrastructure exists) is the ability to retrieve and parse the information. You need to be literate, have access to an internet enabled device, and know how to search for what you think ails you. Language could be a barrier too. Use of social worker and nurse pairs to do rural v…

> roads to take people to hospital

The population density in some developing countries is extremely low. Botswana for example has roughly 2mio inhabitants of which roughly a quarter live in Gabs and yet another maybe 10% in the next 5 bigger towns. That leaves the rest of the country with an average population density of less than 2person/square km. Bringing people to a hospital by car on a good road can easily take a day or more. It's also not viable to have an educated doctor able to make that choice in each of the remote villages. So you really really need to find a good way to offload that decision to a person that's remote.

n.b. Botswana is a fairly well developed country, I just choose it as an example since I have family ties there and know the situation better than say Namibia which is similar in the population distribution.

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#128

Post by sanoli » Sat, Nov 02, 2013, 1:58 PM UTC

Xylakant wrote: post #123

Qom wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that internet does not necessarily help education. Most people waste their time on the internet, including most of us on HN. You can have as much info available to you as you want, if you go in the wrong direction or take no real action then it will all be for naught.

Well, in that case nothing necessarily helps education. Even books or teachers, people waste so much time in school. I for myself must admit that I tend to think of HN as very educating. I get exposed to information that I'd never find otherwise and to opinions of people I'd never meet otherwise. That's certainly much more educating than a lot of facebook.

Maybe, but the one thing a poor country can't do without are schools for fundamental education. You can do without internet for everyone, you can do without tv. But if you don't have schools and teachers, which some countries don't have (what they have only passes as schools and teaching) you're pretty much doomed as a country.

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#129

Post by sebastianconcpt » Sat, Nov 02, 2013, 2:00 PM UTC

spiritplumber wrote: post #107

ehsanu1 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Googling for "antbot" returns a variety of seemingly unrelated projects. Could you possibly be more specific? But more curious to know the mechanism behind it that causes mosquitos to stop flying. Though I have to say, robotics doesn't seem like the cheapest way to go about killing malaria - though it would be awesome if it turns out to be.

I make the antbot :) www.f3.to if you care. It is a sturdy platform for doing things like shooting bugs with lasers and the battery life is good.

sounds fun

Re: An interview with Bill Gates

#130

Post by Xylakant » Sat, Nov 02, 2013, 2:02 PM UTC

ivanca wrote: post #126

Xylakant wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of countries in the developing world have existing health care resources, such as doctors or nurses, but managing them is a major problem in a state such as namibia or botswana where the population of a small city is spread out on a territory as large as germany. It helps if you can have a local, less qualified health care worker communicate with a remote specialist before either moving a doctor to the patient…

You are painting a fairy tale outcome, poorly based on reality. Even in Colombia, were there is high-speed internet connections the coordination, willingness and education to make a fruitful use of this resource is scarce. So it's not like "Give them internet and they will figure it out!", it's a lot more complicated than that.

That's not what I'm saying. The same could be said about a malaria vaccine. "Develop it and all will be good" is a fairy tale outcome as well. Even "develop it, make it cheap and malaria will cease to be a problem" is a fairy tale outcome. The real world tends to be much more complicated than that - all I'm trying to point out is that there is a real problem managing available resources, especially in countries with low population densities. We can even see that in some less populated areas of eastern Germany (some areas of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern), but at least we in Germany can luckily afford to throw money at that problem.