Hm. I went to Stanford. Famous for diverse, risk-taking non-mediocre graduates. I guess its the exception that proves the rule?
For example, many live in San Francisco, work for Facebook or Google, and do little of note besides the following:
- have an "interesting" hobby - work out at the gym - hang out with friends at the bar or club - work on their career - start a "start-up" - travel - ... other very self-serving pursuits
Most recently, I am very disappointed in my fellow alumni for not standing up for this professor:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/19/ex-stanford-...
And actually, I am seeing to it that alumni and current students do something about this. Enough is enough.
Sounds like a let down to me.
I want to know, how does it feel to have gone to a place like Stanford, only to end up in the same position as someone who went to a state university?
Have you considered that you may not be as good as you think at predicting the needs of society? Based on past experiments, it seems that the market does a pretty good job of predicting what society actually wants and needs, whereas enlightened do-gooders aren't as good as they think.
The upside is that there is lots of cheap soviet surplus technology available even today, because the englightened folks in charge of soviet production focused a bit too much on the first-order "needs" of soviet society like Mosin Nagants and Nixie Tubes, whereas those foolish and vain Americans were wasting their time and elite educations following market demands for frivolous things that didn't serve society, like Color TV and food production beyond subsistence.
I would love to see those studies! I'm struggling to imagine how you'd even find a random sample of do-gooders, let alone measure their effect on their communities.
Of course, a whole lot of poor people (probably the other 5/6 bn) won't be affected immediately but some years later they also start benefitting and today it's almost a (used) 100$ laptop per child equivalent (except for the poorest).
You can argue the same way about mpesa, bitcoin and other innovations/products.
Do charities have a similarly fantastic metric?
Example: Global warming is a result of the "market", an unexpected consequence from decades of growth. It can only be countered by coordinated action.
To get back to the topic at hand: The "elites" should be the ones who lead such a transformation instead of, say, just looking to advance their carreers.
Just a few related questions: Who is going to define who are the elites? If you say the people, then we end up in a democracy just like we have already and yet, I cannot see any optimization.
What if climate change can be evaluated not only as a single metric but as a tradeoff? E.g., nuclear energy vs CO2? Or cost of each marginal ton of CO2 saved vs. the things you can do with the same money (e.g. a few cancer therapies). Are there even appropriate "elites" who are experts in all of the above areas?
So are homelessness, childhood hunger, etc
And why do we crowd around in the Bay Area, pushing out artists and other people? Why don't we spread out across the U.S., spreading ideas and doing good?
By the time he's done, Bill Gates will have done more to impact disease and save lives in the world than probably thousands of your volunteers, yet he was a techie that built a start-up and sounds like the people you deride. Not everyone has to walk the paths you've set out as the proper way to do good in the world. And sometimes it comes later in life.
The problem with the article to me is that the author makes a lot of assumptions, maybe because of his upbringing and his lack of social intelligence. Not every one looks down on people of different social or wealth classes, particularly students who come from lower income or homes with less educated parents.
And more and more often, it does not come at all. The effective noblesse oblige of, say, the New England rich is by-and-large dead outside of New England in favor of a very exploitative, plantation-society-esque Southern "liberty".
There are enclaves where this isn't the case. It's hard to call San Francisco one, because the city and its very, very rich residents have done all they could to chase the poors away. (It is one of many reasons I refuse to consider living there.)
The fact that you chose to make this argument demonstrates you are using your evolved utility-heuristic hardware and not any sort of rational approach.
What you are probably doing is doing is clamping the utility of $100 to zero ("not significant" is the key concept). Then your brain, which is already bad at multiplying utilities, multiplied roughly zero by ten million people, got roughly zero, and then you made this comment.
Actually, it might not have even done that last part. It sounds like you jumped from "$100 is basically nothing" to "might as well not even consider the number of people gaining utility". It's a good effort-saving heuristic.
So that's the first problem with your argument; it's wrong from a utility theoretic perspective. It doesn't matter if the per-person amount is small. You have to multiply it by the number of people being affected (and your utility function's multiplier on their utility function).
The second problem with your argument is that you're making sort of a fallacy of composition. It's true that $100 isn't much in the grand scheme of things for an individual. But all the utility you ever experience in your entire life is just the sum of lots of (arbitrarily) small utilities. You gain almost nothing from any single bite of food, but it would be wrong to use this fact to claim that you don't gain anything from eating. Even if Google or Apple or Costco or Toyota have individually only contributed a few tens of thousands of dollars of utility to my life, their collective contribution represents the total utility I get from modern industrialization, which is very large. Similarly, if 0.01% of a population 10,000,000 can provide an "insignificant" $100 of utility to each person in that population, that's $100,000 of utility per person. For modern software, where marginal costs are negligible, we get incredible economies of scale.
Facebook and Google reach billions of people, providing at least tens of dollars of utility per year (probably more like hundreds), which translates to trillions of dollars of utility over decades. That's probably more utility than has ever been gained from charity.
At bulk scales, like we have in today's society, the kind of analysis your brain does by default doesn't work. It gives the wrong answer, which is why people think it's better to help a small charity case than do something that's mildly beneficial for a huge number of people.
You are stating the opposite viewpoint without any support. And I don't agree with it.
Re: "It gives the wrong answer, which is why people think it's better to help a small charity case than do something that's mildly beneficial for a huge number of people."
I don't know why people are saying I think people should go to work for charities. This is totally a straw man argument, as my opinion is that charities often are a waste of talent.
Re: "It's true that $100 isn't much in the grand scheme of things for an individual. But all the utility you ever experience in your entire life is just the sum of lots of (arbitrarily) small utilities."
I agree. But the vast majority of people, especially in Silicon Valley, think this way. At least a few people should be tackling big problems. For example, as I mentioned elsewhere, we are deploying insecure IoT at scale, which is effectively building a weapon for our enemies to use against us. I'm hoping that someone is going to do something about this. Note that working on this problem is not entirely altruistic -- it is likely to be a very profitable endeavor.
There's a lot to address here. To be honest -- and I'm going to put this as politely as I can -- this discussion is not very interesting to me and I am going to bow out.
But in general, I will suggest that you stick to the facts. Calling someone, e.g. me, "irrational" is irrational. To turn it back to you, I think what you've done is you've learned about a theory in school (that I don't agree with) and you're merely checking to see if I'm in compliance with it. You should do your own thinking.
In addition to serving society, this would also be self-serving. I have to imagine someone working on this would become fairly wealthy or at least very eminent.
As far as I know, something close to nothing is being done about this problem.
Nothing I have seen in the case indicates anything beyond a large amount of awkwardness and lack of comfort. Most of the evidence that she was actually discriminated against with regards to tenure is entirely circumstantial.
Having been intimately involved with these systems while at Stanford I have seen how cunningly many intelligent people at these institutions co-opt and leverage the prevalently liberal political attitudes towards race and gender issues for personal motivations, interests and grievances.
In fact I served as a residence assistant and witnessed someone who is now a very prominent politician wrongly accuse one of our students of racial discrimination. Having known the accused student ... I knew for a fact that no discrimination was involved. The student that made the accusation instantly leveraged the incident on several public forums to build political and social capital. His entire persona was based around "fighting racial oppression" -- even when said oppression was constructed purely for personal gain.
What do you think the average person in the world does? 99.9% of people are even more boring than the person you described. It's hard to find people who are more interesting than that.
> other very self-serving pursuits
There's no relationship between boringness and self-centeredness. It sounds like you might be incorrectly conflating "boring" with your own definition of "meaningless" (in a moral sense). I don't think charity work is likely to be less boring than any "self-serving" interest.