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Comment by morgante | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of modern innovation and experiments are funded by billionaires today. Most relevant to HN, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Elon Musk are all ready examples.

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Well not many of them get their hands dirty though, do they? Helping with money is one thing, but actually as a person diving in to the project and work on it without dozens of cameras and security guards is different thing.

All evidence points to the people I mentioned getting deeply engaged in many of the experiments they're funding. Friends who work at Space X have confirmed that Elon at least is intimately involved in the projects.

I agree, but that is just handful of them, isnt it?

Perhaps, but I think there's only ever been a few.

It's always just been a handful. That goes for any good-doers of the world. Out of a pool of X people who are fortunate enough to have the capacity to do Y good thing, only a handful actually do it.

Works well enough.

History tends to distort things. The present is an era. The 1990's is an era. The 1800's is a era. The renaissance is an era. The stone age is an era.

Of course accomplishments per era could decrease when we're judging the last few years against much larger time spans of the past.

Getting one's hands dirty at a technical level is incredibly difficult. Bill Gates's training and experience is in computer science and business; to develop the background needed to understand the details of treatment for Malaria, HIV/AIDS, etc would take many many years of intense, focused effort.

Someone like Bill Gates could hire someone with the technical expertise while spending his own time on more productive things that are likely to yield more good for the world--networking with other billionaires to convince them to donate money, working to manage the overall structure of the B&M Gates Foundation, etc.

Complex systems are complex. 200 years ago, the amount that we knew was significantly smaller; one could get to the edge of human knowledge with just a few years of intense work. In contrast, it takes significantly longer to get to a level of expertise at which one can productively contribute.

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