Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy' | Hacker News Reader

Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy ‘Philanthropy'

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39 pointstchalla32 comments

This is one of the laziest articles I've read. Let me boil down the author's entire argument into one sentence: "These tech billionaires want to help millions of people, not just the person next door. How heartless!"

There are many valid critiques that could have been made. For example: "Zuckerberg claims that all lives have equal value, and hence, we should prioritize the countless future humans over existing ones. However, human quality of life has been growing exponentially across generations. Extreme poverty has been decimated over the past generation, and can realistically be eliminated completely in the next few decades. Similarly for medical progress. Hence, it is those suffering in the present, who will suffer the most, and need the most help."

Or with regard to Blue-Origin or OpenAI: "Bezos and Musk think that by pouring billions of dollars of resources into sci-fi projects like AI and Space exploration, we can best help humanity. However, these projects are nothing more than vaporware. We have no idea how or when truly intelligent AI will be built, and worrying about super-evil AI, is like worrying about dinosaur attacks. With regard to space exploration, humanity's problems today have little to do with physical resources, and everything to do with disease and human development. Building space rockets isn't going to bring humanity forward any more than building ferraris. That Bezos and Musk are spending billions on such hobby-projects, shows how out of touch they are with the suffering of the world's poor."

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the above arguments, but I can at least respect them. Unfortunately, the author doesn't present any such argument whatsoever. "These billionaires have big ideas on how to change the world, and how to best help billions of people. How heartless! Clearly they have no respect for us as individuals." /s

Is it horribly irrational to simply assume that the philanthropic gestures of the very wealthy are just targeted to achieve their own personal utility maximization? I think that it is normal to just assume self interest even in the case of philanthropy and this of course limits the type of philanthropy to that which has over-unity personal cost benefit ratio.

If by personal-utility, you're including the satisfaction and happiness that good-hearted people derive from helping others, then I completely agree. Not just for the "very wealthy", but for everyone.

Often, people twist this into somehow being a bad thing. "Bill Gates isn't a good guy. He's just donating billions to charity and saving millions of lives because that makes him happy".

Problem is, you can twist any good deed into pure selfishness, using this chain of logic. "Your father wasn't a good man. Working hard to take care of his family, gave him great happiness, and that's why he did it".

Bezos is right. Most people don't think about the long game. What can we do today to more quickly increase our tech tree 25, 50, 100, 200 years into the future? If we spent more of our GDP 50 years ago on R&D, our knowledge would be much greater than today. Solar energy, electric vehicles, etc would already be mainstream, for example. Our ability to treat cancer(s), alzheimer's, heart disease would be 20 years more advanced.

"Jeff Bezos, too, is thinking at the species-existence level. “The solar system can easily support a trillion humans,” he says. “And if we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources and solar power unlimited for all practical purposes. That's the world that I want my great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren to live in.” That’s why Bezos is spending a billion dollars a year on Blue Origin, his space travel company—and that’s why, controversially, he thinks that Blue Origin is really the only way to spend such enormous resources. If something you did today could materially improve the lives of trillions of humans in the future, then that benefit would have to outweigh anything you did for mere millions of humans in the present."

With a trillion humans, a lot more of the energy available to perform work would be human effort. The humans providing low-level effort will be desperately poor, because that low-level effort isn't worth much.

The Black Death did wonders for the peasant class of Europe by killing a third of them. Those who didn't die were much richer than peasants had been previously. (Nobles were poorer, because most of the wealth of nobles was the peasants who worked their land. Losing a third of your wealth isn't so great; losing a third of your competition is.)

If you want humans to have unlimited resources and unlimited power, you should focus on driving numbers down, not up.

In a different but related analogy, Seeing like a State likes to emphasize how intensive agriculture by peasants who are intimately familiar with the local land, weather, crops, and pests is more productive (in terms of food produced per acre) than modern industrial agriculture. The difference is that the local peasant devotes all his time to cultivating a man-sized area of land. The extra productivity goes to him, and he eats it, but he's very poor. One man using inefficient machines to cultivate 20 fields at 80% efficiency is a lot richer than any of the 60 men cultivating a third of a field each at 100% efficiency, and the society around that one man is richer too because, unlike the 60 peasants, he produces a lot of surplus to trade with them.

Socialism is inevitable. We just need to first develop technological systems which can assist the proletariat in identifying and eliminating corruption by the elite and/or powerful.

We can already afford to feed and house every person on the planet, probably several times over. Yet many are still hungry and homeless. It is not a lack of capital so much as a resource allocation problem - how do you 'throttle' greed so that you still motivate productive work without allowing those with disproportionate power to game the system in their favor. Technology can help us solve this.

You should start with breeding a new kind of humans, ones that would be compatible with socialism.

Of course alternatively, you could just kill a vast majority of them; that's the approach most people attempting to implement socialism end up taking (viz. anything from Soviet Russia to Khmer Rouge). Alas, every time in the output you get lots of mass graves, but no workable socialism.

I think that the idea of technology saving us from our inherent natural tendencies is nice to think about but ultimately naive.

Another benefit of prioritizing future humans is that they're the people on the other side of the Cryo door in a thousand years.

Conversely, why should I care about the trillions of people here after I die? Why should I care if humanity dies in it's birthplace or spreads across the universe like a virus?

To me, a future with a trillion happy people is not better than a future with a million happy people just because there are more happy people. Life has no inherent value that makes me consider it worth spreading.

>Life has no inherent value that makes me consider it worth spreading.

This is probably not true, given that you seem to value your own life. (It also runs afoul of failing to meaningfully designate what makes value 'inherent' or not, or why this is a feature of value you should care about in the first place.)

But the main flaw in your philosophical argument is that it presumes a particular form of 'self-identity' that just happens to exclude future people. But you are not special. A great number of things that are true of you are true of others, and if you can value your own life, you can value others'.

Which means, circumstantially, that any benefit you find for yourself is practically destined to be a benefit for someone else, and more importantly, vice versa. Whatever you want out of your own life is best achieved by figuring out how to create it in arbitrary life, or at least, as generally as possible. At the very least, you have a rational argument that you can distribute needed workload better.

EDIT: You might be thinking "if I'm dead, who cares", but this is just another identity problem. There could very well be a future person who is born with your exact brain, and you've got no reason to think such a person isn't also you. In reality, most of us are mostly like you.

I do value my own life, because it already exists. I also value other life that also exists. I do not value future life that does not exist. Future life and current life seem very different to me.

Putting your billions towards the long view seems to require you not putting your billions towards the short view. The short view is the one that affects those who are already alive so that seems like a better option to me.

I don't think that's true though. If you put your billions into the long view, you're still putting it in someone's hands today, and they will spend it today. They just won't spend it as myopically.

>The short view is the one that affects those who are already alive so that seems like a better option to me.

My argument is that "to me" doesn't have to end at the inside of your skull. That's a matter of your own social conditioning and chosen philosophy. "To me" could very easily include people who are not alive yet, if you wanted it to. So your identity doesn't necessarily end at yourself -- people frequently incorporate their friends, family, peers, society, species, etc., into their identity. You very probably do this too, so it's more odd that you'd make an exception for money in this case.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I do understand people incorporating their friends and family into their identity but I'm not sure how that logic would extend to people that don't exist (yet).

What you're saying seems to be an explanation of why people care about the future. I'm looking more for an argument about why people should care about the future.

I hope that makes sense. Regardless, I've enjoyed your comments to so far. I appreciate you taking the time to write them.

The joy, wonder, and awe I experience today is a large part due to the sacrifices of people who are no longer alive. If you could do something today to positively affect the well being of someone in Africa, would see the value in it? How is that so different than doing something that would affect the value of people who will exist in the future?

Alright, well you've given me a laugh, because you're basically asking me to tell you what the meaning of life is. :) And I'm probably arrogant enough to think I have something interesting to say on the matter, so I'll try to answer your question. Hopefully I can be concise, but let's see.

There are two different persectives on the world that I see people grappling with regularly. Let's 'characturize' them as "Heads" and "Tails" to remove any preconditioned linguistic biases:

"Heads" is the perspective of a mind which holds a model of the world in which they imagine that they can fast-forward through time and fly through space. They look at the world and say "I've extrapolated outward. I've imagined what will happen to my body when I die, and what will happen to the world when it dies, and to the sun when it dies, etc. And I see that being a scattering of unobserved molecules in the tiniest region of space for a mere instant is not much of anything. Life, as far as I can tell, is objectively meaningless."

For some people, this realization leads to confusion, if not outright existential crisis. But we can look at it and wonder why it has any credence? What's wrong with it?

1. You can't actually fly through space and time. You're extrapolating, and even if those extrapolations are true, they do not stop being extrapolations. (Some take this "who really knows?" hopeful thought and pronounce the invalidity of exptrapolation instead. I think this is shallow, but it does evade the crisis.)

2. No meaning is "objective". Life isn't objective, and it can't be "objectively" meaningless. It's subjectively meaningful, and who cares about objectivity anyway?

Point 2 can lead us to the "Tails" perspective: "I've looked at the world and seen hypocrisy and the relativism of meaning. I've imagined what is good and been told it is bad and that what is bad is good. There is no good or bad, only winners and losers. History is written by the victors. Life is meaningful, but it doesn't have the same meaning for everyone. And your meaning means nothing to me."

Both of these perspectives are self-contradictory in the same way: they fail to reconcile the objectivity of reality with the subjectivity of experience.

Heads declares that life is objectively meaningless, and procedes to improperly internalize this realization: Heads is not an objective being, so why would they think they can hold objective meanings in their head? They can't! Heads subjectively experiences the meaningless life, but declares it to be an objective truth.

Tails declares that reality itself is subjective, because all meaning is subjective. But they have trouble accounting for the selection processes -- if history is written by the victor, who chooses the victor? Victors can't choose themselves, or we'd all be victors. They can't be destined or selected by a higher being or purpose, because that would imply an objective reality.

So what's the deal? Meaning is always subjective and meaningful. "Bare" reality is always objective and meaningless. "True" reality is both at once, and we can look at things as being comprised of either as we wish. I can look at you and see a pile of pointless molecules, or I can look at you and see an intricate reflective signal which communicates something significant only to me. I know I can do these things, regardless of what the implications of that are (which I won't speak to.)

Why should you care about future people? Future people are just an extrapolation in your brain. They don't actually exist, so what good is valuing them? Well... you're a future person. Or you once were. (But that's as much an extrapolation.) But what are you now? Still nothing but an extrapolation. Your identity is a mental model. You have to decide why you care about one extrapolation over another. Why does one ghost matter more than another?

Personally, the ghosts that are realist to me are the ones that we both see. And I see future people, and I hope you see them too. And I hope you want to be one of them as much as I do.

If we're going to squint at charities, there's a lot more squinting to be done one or two rungs down the ladder from Gates and Bezos. Of course, that would involve uncomfortable observations about people who care about what is said about them and have the resources to spread their displeasure, so we don't see that journalism.

The part of this philosophy that I disagree with is that I believe solving the problems of today will put us in a much better position to solve tomorrow’s problems.

With that in mind I feel that completely discounting people alive today in favor of a theoretical future is both cruel and short sighted.

If it's unethical for billionaire tech founders to focus on the needs of future generations, what moral grounding does, say, environmentalism have?

By this logic, would it not be fair to say that every dollar invested in green solutions comes at the expense of other worthy societal projects that could meaningfully change the status quo?

Those efforts are largely seen as virtuous. Seems to me the only difference here is the origin of the money: tech.

I agree. And reading through the article, I didn't really see any argument made against why what Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos are doing is unethical.

When all is said and done, Bill Gates will go down as the person who saved more human lives in a systematic and deliberate way than any other human in history. We need people like him. We also need people like Jeff Bezos, who seems to naturally operate on a super long-term thinking mental model. I've said it before on here: Thousands of years from now there will be hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of people populating multiple star systems in this galaxy. Their existence will be due to the efforts of people like Bezos and Musk, and the steps they are taking today to address space travel and AI.

> Bill Gates will go down as the person who saved more human lives in a systematic and deliberate way than any other human in history

There's nothing special about doing it in a systematic and deliberate way. According to legend, the Yellow Emperor taught the Chinese to practice agriculture. In terms of contribution to human life, this would dwarf anything Bill Gates could ever accomplish.

In reality, of course, agriculture arose in an unorganized way, but does that make it less significant?

Reminds me of Haber-Bosch, credited for saving billions of lives via synthetic fertilizer. http://www.scienceheroes.com/

Assuming this is true, it seems reasonable that on larger timescales, and with greater resources, even more future human lives can be saved. It's a refreshing view, considering my main impetus for a long time has been, "Reduce suffering in the universe." Actively trying to create more life is antithetical to that goal, as suffering is an integral experience of a sufficiently intelligent being. I don't mean to say that that's where I've landed, but my mind is beginning to claw at the edified ethical structures it has built up, thanks to this mega-long-term frame.

Does it make sense to make the universe more welcoming to life, if life is the vehicle of suffering? Would Super-AI's possibly have unbounded levels of suffering-potential? If there is a non-zero chance of that being true, is creating AI the ultimate ethical iniquity possible?

The people that were saved by this fertilizer, did their lives contribute to a net reduction in suffering in the universe? I'm doubtful of that but I'm beginning to question the edge value of this Singerian utilitarian philosophy.

Of course, there is something special about doing it in a systematic and deliberate way. Gates has studied how to best use his money to save the most lives and is doing just that.

Do you think there is a moral and ethical difference between someone who harms someone in a systematic and deliberate way and someone like Oppenheimer who played an essential role in developing nuclear weaponry?

> In the eyes of Bezos and Zuckerberg, it’s equally bad to concentrate on the suffering of the living, if doing so means ignoring the needs of the untold billions of people who are not yet born.

> To think in such a manner can certainly be considered heartless.

How does that follow? They're considering the needs of untold billions of individuals not yet born; I would say that it's heartless to consider the needs of those billions presently alive to the exclusion of those not-yet-living. Self-serving, even.

>> To think in such a manner can certainly be considered heartless.

> How does that follow? They're considering the needs of untold billions of individuals not yet born

Are they really considering the needs of unborn individuals, or just ignoring the needs of actual living individuals to focus on sci-fi tech stuff that excites them?

By focusing too much on the speculative sci-fi needs of future generations, you may condemn those generations to suffer through the same hard problems we have now that were left unsolved so some tech billionaires could focus on sexy stuff.

The main thing I dislike is Bezos mentioning there being trillions of humans, with the assumption growth must continue and we'll figure it out.

The assumption that we must grow and spread through the galaxy, rather than determine if there's some sort of reasonable limit to keeping Earth in order first, seems inherently flawed in assuming unlimited population inflation in itself is net 'good.'

Maybe solving the 'sci-fi' problems will make today's problems irrelevant. I feel that's what they all are counting on.

a trillion humans, 8 of which own 90% of the wealth

It is natural for the Ruler to desire more Subjects.

"you must suffer now so that generations to come can worship me"

I don't like the idea of the current debt based economy that allows infinite amount of US debt to be printed in the first place, effectively meaning that other countries has to be poorer.

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