Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else have a problem with an American billionaire deciding which worldview should be exported to the world? I'm sure the Gates have only the best intentions, but that doesn't mean that their particular brand of philanthropy is inherently the best solution to the diverse needs of the world's extremely disparate population.

View on HN

We can have a discussion about weather we should have billionaires in the first place, but Gates is employing his vast resources in an attempt to improve the world with a humble data-driven approach to reduce suffering in the world. For that, I'm quite thankful.

Precisely - nobody bats an eyelid when billionaires spend their money on yachts, if they spend their money on philanthropy, it should be applauded.

Bill Gates is busy with a decade long PR effort to whitewash his reputation - successfully. That he does some good along the way is 'collateral upside'.

I do not pretend to know his motives. All I can see are his actions.

Any mobster donating to the church or charity could claim to 'do good'. But it doesn't just matter what you do, it matters how you got there. Gates is where he is today - a position to lecture the world on how to behave - by a series of uncompetitive and monopolistic practices as well as a bunch of stuff that should have been downright illegal, and likely would have been if not for an 11th hour change in government.

The comparison of Gates to a mobster is unfair. We're comparing bundling a shitty internet browser with Windows to committing murder here.

Gates didn't take a life in building his fortune, but now he is saving lives. He is a net positive.

> We're comparing bundling a shitty internet browser with Windows to committing murder here.

It goes a lot further than that, and most mobsters never murdered anybody. It's just business, right?

Besides that, the comparison was made not to suggest that Gates murdered people but that a life full of wrongs can not be justified by charity at the end of it. And to this day Gates profits every day from a lot of their uncompetitive actions. See 'the Microsoft Tax', the way they are co-opting Linux nowadays to lure people to Azure, the way in which they tried hard - and to some extent succeeded - in tainting FOSS, specifically the kernel either directly or by proxy and so on.

It's tough to agree with you since the tech companies of today practice profoundly more uncompetitive and monopolistic practices than Microsoft ever did.

Just a couple:

- killing independent software providers in a very determined way

- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

- The SCO Saga

- The Browser Wars

- Forcing manufacturers to bundle Windows with their computers

The list is long. Whether Google, Apple or Facebook are more uncompetitive and more monopolistic today has no bearing on what MS did when it did.

And yes, there is plenty wrong with Google, Apple and Facebook (and a bunch of others) but they are not the subject here. That's classic 'whataboutism'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Would we even be here talking about him if not for his so-called PR efforts? I think the important point here is that so many billionaires are extremely rich and fly under the radar. Bill got his money in underhanded ways like basically all billionaires, yet at least he's out here trying to apply philanthropy efficiently.

Fair enough, but at least with the likes of Larry Ellison what you see is what you get.

I'm cynical enough to upvote this comment, but I must say that I still prefer 'solve malaria' Bill to the ruthless cutthroat Bill of the 90s.

Agreed. What would be good as well would be to see Bill and whoever runs MS come clean about all the shit they pulled and to try to make right what they actively destroyed.

Eh, I feel like if you were just trying to whitewash your reputation, effective altruism wouldn't be the way to do it.

You could get a lot more PR per dollar spending on something more emotional, less abstract, and more visible to the people he's trying to influence than the kinds of issues he works on.

He seems to spend more coherently with what you'd do if you were trying to actually do good than if you were just trying to optimize PR.

You should check out Citations Needed two part podcast series on this. https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-45-the-not-so...

https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-46-the-not-so...

For every Gates there’s a Koch. When we, as a society, decide to rely on philanthropy to fund important public works, we delegate the decision of “what’s important” to the world views of a few individuals rather than the people as a whole. In other words we move even more from One Person One Vote to One Dollar One Vote.

The issue your raise is covered by Anand.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/201...

Thanks for the link.

What worldview? Equality and low infant mortality?

Let me try to phrase this in a way that is as neutral as possible, because I'm simply trying to describe a phenomenon and not make a value judgement.

Bill Gates is an American businessman. His values, identity, source of income, and entire way of life is derived from a particular culture - American, Western, market-based culture. A culture which, depending on your viewpoint, has certain good qualities and certain bad qualities.

The point I am attempting to make is: Bill Gates is in a position of power - defining power as the ability to harness forces. When the Gates Foundation, or any other powerful entity, gets involved with a particular less-powerful culture, it unquestionably affects the social structure and culture of that society. In the case of the Gates Foundation, it inevitably it becomes more of an American, westernized one. It is easy to see this from the shared link; it is written from an American worldview and frames everything in American terms.

I am simply asking if replicating American (broadly, Western) cultural values is necessarily the correct solution to solve poverty and other problems around the world.

Personally, I would rather see the diverse cultures of the world manage to develop technologically and socially in their own unique ways, rather than simply adopt Western social structures.

> I am simply asking if replicating American (broadly, Western) cultural values is necessarily the correct solution to solve poverty and other problems around the world.

> Personally, I would rather see the diverse cultures of the world manage to develop technologically and socially in their own unique ways, rather than simply adopt Western social structures.

100% agree... in an ideal world. Income equality between where a lot of issues are centralised and where the money to solve them comes from isn't balanced.

Trying to solve issues on a global level will always mean one culture will have some form of dominance, otherwise you might compromise back to an ineffective solution.

It isn't ideal, but across the spectrum of Good, Better, Best - solving the problem in the medium-term in a ham-fisted American way is probably still "Better" than waiting on solutions. There are, of course, cons to that strategy - but there's an opportunity cost (a very real, human opportunity cost) in searching for the perfect solution.

Gates is not forcing an American way of life or cultural takeover by pushing for lower infant mortality among other things. The values that Gates is a proponent of are pretty secular and universal- things such as equality, fairness, freedom, access to healthcare, etc. If you feel like your culture is irreparably destroyed by giving women more rights then your culture is objectively inhumane and should adapt.

"Affects the social structure and culture": That may be true, at least to some degree. There are a lot of degrees that are well short of "replicating American cultural values", though. It's not true that Bill Gates shows up, and suddenly Africans become culturally American.

I think we can extrapolate that to ourselves - or at least, I often do that to myself. I'm relatively wealthy thanks to having the luck of the thing I'm interested in and good at being in great demand. What moral right do I have to that relatively large share of wealth, and why am I allowed to choose how much to donate to charity, and which charities?

(That is not a rhetorical question, but a genuine moral dilemma.)

I don’t have a problem with it personally

They are also laying out the facts - anything in you don’t agree with?

Also think ‘the best is the enemy of the good’ applies here

First, you are oversimplifying everything. Secondly, you absolutely have weight in that - so go on and offer better solution. Maybe your perspective is correct one, but so far you have not offered anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com