Comment by mlthoughts2018 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlthoughts2018 | Hacker News Reader

> “ Where did $8 billion go? Feeney gave $3.7 billion to education, including nearly $1 billion to his alma mater, Cornell, which he attended on the G.I. Bill. More than $870 million went to human rights and social change, like $62 million in grants to abolish the death penalty in the U.S. and $76 million for grassroots campaigns supporting the passage of Obamacare. He gave more than $700 million in gifts to health ranging from a $270 million grant to improve public healthcare in Vietnam to a $176 million gift to the Global Brain Health Institute at the University of California, San Francisco.”

What an absolute gut-punch of deeply sickening waste.

I feel extremely outraged reading. It’s a absolutely shocking waste of money. I can’t believe this is celebrated or held up as good. This is a form of basically negligent homicide.

$3.7 billion on education? $76 million to lobby for Obamacare.

How can you not instead fund known, effective charities like Against Malaria or SCI. $1 billion to a wealthy Ivy League credential mill - that’s astronomical waste.

This is the charity equivalent of seeing a lottery winner blow their money on sports cars or Vegas. This is appalling.

I mean this so sincerely. People should be sick and outraged over this degree of negligent waste.

Why? It was his money and he could have bought diamonds and shot them into the sun if he wanted. Instead it seems that the vast majority of the spending was a net positive to society and will do some good.

Yes, there was probably a more impactful way of spending it from a humanitarian perspective, but presumably there wasn't a more satisfying way to spend it for Feeney.

Nearly everything that everyone does is a negligent homicidal waste if you view it through the lens of opportunity cost. Unless you are living the life of an acetic, working every living hour, and donating it all to charity, you personally are hundreds if not thousands of people a year.

Your objection falls flat. We can definitely analyze everybody else’s behavior another time - it’s not relevant here and only serves to distract.

This one person had a huge fortune and explicit goals to spend it in efficacious charities.

From that point of view, this particular story is one of exorbitant waste and missed opportunity, the magnitude of which should stupefy people.

We’re not talking about some other joe schmoe who failed to be as ascetic as possible - that’s just rhetorical deflection. We’re talking about this particular instance of egregious waste.

Your comment is like if some heard about the Deepwater Horizon spill and replied, “everything looks like waste or hazards if you measure every cubic milliliter of spilled oil, can’t we just given them a break for trying to harvest it and do something with it?”

I guess I’m still don’t understand the fundamental shock and sense of waste you describe. Frenzy didn’t hurt anyone here and provided a net benefit to society.

Failure to optimize is equivalent to directly perpetrating harm, especially when the stakes are high ($8 billion) and optimizing is jaw-droppingly simple and easy (read recommendations from Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, GiveWell, etc., and spend some ultra tiny fraction of time comparing the impact on lives between e.g. donating $1 billion to fucking Cornell vs $1 billion to a cause like Against Malaria or SCI).

Tell the children who have died and will die from directly preventable malaria or waterborne parasites that Feeny’s negligence has done no harm.

By not spending the money on them, he literally facilitated their deaths. For what? Cornell has a fancier campus? Obamacare had a nicer grassroots website? It’s sickening.

And it’s no defense to distract by saying nobody can be perfectly ascetic or optimize away every wasteful purchase or discretionary spending. That’s not at all related or up for discussion. We’re talking about one guy with a stated goal of funding efficacious charities with $8 billion of available funds to do it over time. Just about as pure a thought experiment of negligence as there ever was.

Whew. Finally. I was scrolling looking for a comment like this. How is almost no one saying this?

The speakers they mentioned are the most establishment politicians you can find. What does that say about his actions that those are the people representing him?

How can you give $70M+ to something that is grassroots too?

Yeah how dare this guy give away money to things he thinks is good, and not to these other things that I think are good.

This is immediately the reason why these donations are anonymous!

Guy gives away nearly all his money, and people are still not happy about it.

You are deliberately ignoring the reality of it. It’s not “good” to do something when the opportunity cost you passed up is that X-hundred thousand preventable malaria deaths or waterborne parasite deaths occur.

It’s a luxury to blow $1 billion in donations to Cornell. That’s not humanitarian anything. That’s not charity. At best that’s gross negligence, at worst narcissistically relegating hundreds of thousands of people to preventable deaths.

We’re not talking about wasting a few thousand dollars on selfish consumption. This is egregiously wasting the better part of $8 billion. It’s gobsmacking, the scale of it.

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