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Comment by gooosle | Hacker News Reader

It asked for specific metrics backing your claim.

Your claim was that tech billionaires contributed more towards the good of society than any other group.

You provided a list of metrics that are in no way exclusively attributable to tech billionaires, and no actual data/number on how and how much these are attributable to tech billionaires.

Your analogy is completely unrelated too.

It's more like if you said 'whales are the best animal' and then gave me a bunch of random metrics about the state of the world.

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What does it mean for a metric to be "attributable" to somebody? For example, is length attributable to me? Is weight attributable to the whale?

What are you talking about?

Now you're playing games around the semantics of the word 'attributable'? Lmao

I also love how all of your analogies/examples immediately switched from amazing societal improvements to measurements of physical object characteristics. Truly amusing stuff.

Let's take one of the metrics you suggested - 'number of lives saved' - go ahead and tell me how tech billionaires have saved more lives than any other group.

Or maybe just admit that you're talking out of your ass.

I'm trying to simplify it so it's easier to understand. It's not semantics, it's a different category of thing.

Yes the billionaire I listed have saved more lives than 99.999% of humans. They do this by paying for specific individuals to be treated for specific fatal diseases, and by funding research that has led to cures and preventative vaccines that have already saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people

You don't seem to understand that your own personal feelings of love towards the 'benevolent billionaire' and their vanity projects do not in any way support your claims. Especially when you're quantifying your claims in such extreme and absurd ways.

You also don't seem to understand that if a team of scientists discovered a cure - that doesn't automatically get 100% attributed to whatever billionaire funded the building the scientists were working in at the time.

Yes I'm willing to concede that Bill Gates did not single handedly cure polio. Would you agree that he has done more good for the world than most people?

I have no way of measuring how much good Bill Gates had done for the world. He has certainly done a lot of evil as well. I literally have have no way of objectively quantifying either, and neither do you, which is why your claims cannot possibly be objectively supported by any rational means.

Ok but then would you agree that you also can't say Salk did any good for the world?

No, I wouldn't agree with that at all.

Also big difference between saying 'X did this good thing' and 'X did more good than everyone else combined'.

And the onus is on you here - you made the absurd claims - now either back them up or walk them back :)

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