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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

#651

Post by surement »

AlexandrB wrote: post #510
surement wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by any means necessary This implies that they got rich by pillaging instead of countless people voluntarily giving them money in exchange for what they offered.

They got rich by cheating, stealing, and breaking the law. They were even convicted of it[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor... .

Your evidence is the most absurd "antitrust" lawsuit in history. What law did they break? Macs come with Safari and Android devices come with Chrome, where's the lawsuits?

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

#652

Post by energy123 »

GoatInGrey wrote: post #395
energy123 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulated capitalism, where cases of market failure are addressed.

I sometimes wish we actually had unregulated capitalism. Housing and healthcare would be much less terrible without legislated bottlenecks, among other areas.

Agreed with the nuance. We need less bad regulations (housing and health) and more good regulations (food and environment).

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

#653

Post by pphysch »

JamesBarney wrote: post #178
pphysch wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone with a truly global perspective will notice multiple elephant-sizes omissions from Gates' statement. The premise that deep, systemic societal issues can be addressed directly while stepping on egg-shells around political topics is laughable. In 2025, you cannot separate starving kids and poverty alleviation from global politics and the world order. His #1 goal listed is almost offensive when you consider what…

> No mom, child, or baby dies of a preventable cause This goal might offend you but it doesn't offend me, and I don't think his motives (whether it's for legacy or personal brand) matter to me or the mother of a child who didn't shit itself to death because a vaccine for the rotavirus.

I think you missed the point: Gates is implying an ongoing genocide (including famine) is either unpreventable or simply not worth mentioning.

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

#654

Post by SoftTalker »

jonas21 wrote: post #342
SoftTalker wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The antivax movement is a tiny number of fringe wackos. Normal people are not against normal vaccines, even if some of them had concerns about one recent one in particular.

16% of American adults believe that vaccines are unsafe [1]. That's 40 million people, which is not exactly a tiny number. While concerns about the Covid-19 vaccine are highest (24%), significant numbers of people still feel that "normal" vaccines are unsafe, like MMR (9%) and flu (11%). [1] https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/vaccine-confiden...

9% (if accurate) is pretty fringe in my view. Nobody wins anything or has a mandate for changing anything with 9% support.

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

#655

Post by MR4D »

kevinventullo wrote: post #574
MR4D wrote: post #571

As a guy who on numerous occasions has been in favor of raising taxes on the wealthy, why doesn’t he just write a huge check to the IRS and be done with it? At least that would make him consistent.

“Donating” to the IRS is an imperfect solution that scales to all billionaires. If he’s only solving for his individual wealth, he can fine tune it to more specific causes.

But think of all the people who will die before he donates it all. Thats why he’s being inconsistent.

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

#656

Post by calepayson »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #628
jpc0 wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the situation here is more a matter of they don’t have a dispatcher to guide them. In some rural area of Africa they came across a car crash. Two people hop out and assist while a third drives off to notify someone to send emergency help. An on device LLM might be very useful there depending on what it says…

If the LLM tells the untrained passer-by to do a tracheotomy, it's not going to go well.

Emergencies can freak people out but not once in my eight years in rescue have I ever encountered a scenario where a random bystander might do as drastic of an intervention as as a tracheotomy.

I have shown up at scenes where people have googled what to do though and, you know what, it was super helpful.

If someone is dumb enough to perform a tracheotomy because an llm, google, or a passerby told them to. The issue isn’t any of those factors. That person is just so incredibly dumb as to be a danger to everyone around them.

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

#657

Post by calepayson »

jpc0 wrote: post #620
calepayson wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

Most first aid can be broken down very basically. Call a professional for help. Are they breathing, is their heart beating, are they bleeding. If you haven’t called someone that can actually save the persons life no amount of first aid will help. Unfortunately unless something is obviously preventing breathing as someone untrained theres not a lot you can do if they aren’t breathing. Heart beating is pretty easy, che…

My time in rescue gave me a ton a faith in good samaritans. To try to do something in an emergency is productive 99% of the time (imo).

The only case I've experienced where it wasn’t was when someone in our area was actively listening in in emergency channels and trying to preempt ambulances. The issue was that they had training in the basics but often went past that in care they provided. Something that I believe is not covered by Good Samaritan laws.

I’m much more worried about folks like that than people who find themselves in an emergency and are trying to help.

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

#658

Post by calepayson »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #618
calepayson wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

I'd rather see a Good Samaritan being talked through CPR or whatever by a dispatcher who's trained to give that advice over the phone, rather than having a hallucinating LLM tell them to do something deadly.

Me too!

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

#659

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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…

> 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 editor for any papers you write, a free advice nurse.

Interestingly, I think AI, if its biggest boosters are correct, will end up being an absolute disaster for disadvantaged people.

The fact is that the vast majority of people in the current world are able to survive by selling their labor. If AI makes it so that, say, 50% of the world's population is no longer able to survive by selling their labor, that leads to massive serfdom, not some sort of Star Trek utopia.

And the thing that is shocking to me is that I haven't seen any (like, absolutely zero) credible explanation from AI boosters of how this dystopian end state is avoidable. I've either heard misdirection (e.g. yes, I agree AI is amazing at what it can do, but that doesn't explain how people will eat if they don't have jobs), vague handwavy-ness, or "kumbaya talk" about stuff like basic income that seems to completely ignore human nature.

I would absolutely love to be convinced I'm wrong, but that would need to start with at least something approaching a rational argument as to how the benefits of AI will be more equally distributed, and I have yet to hear that.

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

#660

Post by more_corn »

card_zero wrote: post #642
lechatonnoir wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a weirdly conspiratorial idea to my eyes. Not because people don't have unsavory hidden motivations that they give good excuses for, but because this doesn't really seem to confer any benefit. The benefit of wealth is your capacity to spend it. If they don't spend it in order to give it away on a future date, they have lived their lives without it. You can say that they are selfishly maintain optionality whil…

I might spend millions easily enough, but I might struggle to spend millions more on top of that. Bill Gates has a hundred thousand millions. Personally I probably wouldn't spend it because figuring out how to spend it sounds like hard work. I think this idea was first explored in trashy 1902 comedy novel Brewster's Millions, but is somewhat true.

Not hard at all. His goal is to eliminate unnecessary deaths. 1) stack rank causes of unnecessary deaths (malaria, malnutrition, etc) 2) identify places where people die those deaths because nobody gives a shit about them 3) start giving a shit

In fact the acceleration seems like it’s happening because it has suddenly become far easier to identify unnecessary deaths because someone who shall remain nameless here lied about fraud in US Aid and cancelled all their funding leaving millions of people to die unnecessarily deaths.

Gates decided to step up and prevent as many of those deaths as possible in his lifetime.

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