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Comment by logfromblammo | Hacker News Reader

Isn't "making the world better" a value judgment that can be shaped by your peers and by your environment, and also not mutually exclusive with making the world worse?

Thus, if an elite makes the world worse in my opinion by reducing diversity of competing opinions in mass media, they could use that platform to propagandize and publicize any philanthropic efforts they may also involve themselves with, such that your opinion of them is neutral or positive.

Do you derive from first principles what things would make the world better and then check to see who might be doing any of them, or do you hear about what certain people are doing, and then make value judgments on their public activity?

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An example from the set of making the world better would be Bill Gates' foundation which is helping eradicate polio [0]. If that is not a good thing I give up.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20080414095646/http://www.polioe...

Giving these individual examples, anecdotes really, is even more simplistic in a sense. Within just about any social phenomenon, you can find examples of practices/effects that are incongruent, or even opposite, to the “main gist” of the phenomenon itself. It's really not about what any particular individual does at some particular time, it's about the collective effect a certain social group.

Of course, having the state of affairs as we currently have it, B&MGF's efforts are certainly to be saluted, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't contemplate and work towards a world where you don't need to depend on the good will of a billionaire to have a chance of people not dying of various preventable diseases; Or, indeed, even to recognize that such a state of affairs is unacceptable.

Bear in mind that the BMGF is a separate entity from Bill Gates and Melinda Gates, albeit nominally controlled by them. It may control funds that do not even come from the Gates family (most notably Warren Buffett).

It isn't clear to me that establishing yet another donor-advised trust is making the world a better place, and it seems to me as though the foundation funded by the trust is not taking action on its own initiative, but instead just giving money to those people and organizations who are already actually expending the effort in making the world a better place.

Yes, it is a good thing, but don't go overestimating the wattage of that halo on Bill Gates's head. I give most of the credit to the people who actually uproot their lives, go to Pakistan and similar environments, and try to administer vaccines to people who deeply mistrust their motives.

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