> the debate over whether Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation were an agent for good or an agent for helping Bill Gates sleep at night was a huge thing when I was in graduate school.
Having worked with multiple researchers who received grants from the Gates foundation for noble projects such as abolishing famine in Nicaragua and improving food security across central America, the amount of wasted money opened my eyes to the shallowness of their attempts to fix the world.
Care to expound upon this? It seems natural to me that something fighting against market failures would do things that would be financially irrational.
They spend a few thousand bucks conducting the experiments and collecting samples in those countries and then pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to gene sequencing companies. They get a spreadsheet in return that no one knows how to read or that has glaring discrepancies. I had to explain to 3 biogists that even though their PCA plot looks decent, a total explained variance of like 10% is not much to brag about. They had grants in the millions of dollars...
Most definitely both. But we, flawed, humans tend to think in black vs white