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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Was just talking with some folks last weekend about this in a different context. Open-ended foundations can easily have their missions drift and also become essentially sinecures for an executive director.

Ford Foundation is a great example of what can happen. Olin is a good example of a foundation that was set up to dissolve after some length of time.

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Mission drift can sometimes go in a positive direction. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for example, functioned primarily as a tax evasion vehicle while Hughes was alive. After his death, the HHMI was in deep trouble with the IRS and sitting on an endowment of ~$5 billion. So it appointed former NIH director Donald Fredrickson to turn it into an actual research funding organization and mend relations with the tax authorities and research community.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-08-11-fi-2620-s...

You may know this already, but both Olin Foundations are good examples, actually. I believe the John M. Olin foundation dissolution plans were specifically in response to the Ford foundation's drift. The F. W. Olin foundation (John's Father) coincidentally dissolved in the same year, but that was due to largely accomplishing their original goal of endowing engineering buildings at colleges, and pivoting to founding a new engineering college entirely.

I don't really know the details but an organization I was/am involved with did get money from the "Olin Foundation" but didn't know specifics beyond that. Yeah, one of my fellow board members observed that Olin was pretty much the canonical example of a foundation that set itself up to be dissolved.

I've always wondered about the Gates and Buffets commitment about giving away their wealth in death. It assumes that the people of the future are more worthy of it than the people of now. Whatever poverty will exist in the future also exists now. I suspect they've thought about this too, hence the acceleration. If anything, addressing the issues now has a chance of reducing the issues in the future.

There's always something to learn from everyone. Elon reiterated one thing frequently - "We have to get to Mars soon because I don't want to be dead before it happens" (paraphrasing). If this philosophy is used for the right purpose, we can get some cool things happening sooner. Recent events also show that there are people who are not interested in being charitable at all, so it's even more of an imperative.

> It assumes that the people of the future are more worthy of it than the people of now

I don't think that is the assumption. The assumption is that people will treat them well for planning to give away their money without them needing to live their life without their precious wealth.

This is a weirdly conspiratorial idea to my eyes. Not because people don't have unsavory hidden motivations that they give good excuses for, but because this doesn't really seem to confer any benefit.

The benefit of wealth is your capacity to spend it. If they don't spend it in order to give it away on a future date, they have lived their lives without it.

You can say that they are selfishly maintain optionality while they are alive, but that's a less biting critique, I guess.

I might spend millions easily enough, but I might struggle to spend millions more on top of that. Bill Gates has a hundred thousand millions. Personally I probably wouldn't spend it because figuring out how to spend it sounds like hard work. I think this idea was first explored in trashy 1902 comedy novel Brewster's Millions, but is somewhat true.

Yeah, multiple opulent houses seems like a lot of work. Even if I hire people to manage seems like a lot of head-space. I can stay in really nice hotels and eat in nice restaurants for a lot less money and effort. OK, maybe a private jet or at least NetJets or whatever the current thing is.

At a much smaller scale I've thought about a small city place and concluded it just wasn't worth the effort vs. renting at a nice time of the year.

Not hard at all. His goal is to eliminate unnecessary deaths. 1) stack rank causes of unnecessary deaths (malaria, malnutrition, etc) 2) identify places where people die those deaths because nobody gives a shit about them 3) start giving a shit

In fact the acceleration seems like it’s happening because it has suddenly become far easier to identify unnecessary deaths because someone who shall remain nameless here lied about fraud in US Aid and cancelled all their funding leaving millions of people to die unnecessarily deaths.

Gates decided to step up and prevent as many of those deaths as possible in his lifetime.

Many things take time. And it may be good to fund them. But outsized contributions don't necessarily make them happen that much faster.

I think the phrase is something like you can’t get a baby in a month if you have nine women.

> There's always something to learn from everyone. Elon reiterated one thing frequently - "We have to get to Mars soon because I don't want to be dead before it happens"

I understand the idea of learning from everyone, even those whose values I strongly disagree with.

But after learning about everything Elon has done in the public sphere, would this statement be more likely just narcissism rather than a deep and inspiring virtue?

That doesn’t really matter though? The end result is we’ll get to Mars faster than we’d otherwise do.

The way things are going here on Earth (thanks in part to Musk and "Glorious Leader" Trump), we ain't makin' it to Mars before global resource wars completely cripple all our scientific aspirations, including becoming a "space-faring" species. It's all wasted effort at this point, because nobody seems willing to do what it's gonna take to ensure that humanity has any future at all.

I think it matters a great deal! If that result comes at the expense of - let's say - progress fighting climate change because Elon also ended up defunding and destabilizing a lot of science with the same instincts that got him to proclaim his mission of going to Mars, it is not obvious that we only ought to focus on the end result, and even if we do, that only one set of end results need focus.

We may be closer to going to Mars, an extremely inhospitable place, at far greater expense than simply making the world we were evolved to survive in a little better.

I very much would like to see a human on Mars very very soon —- only because I really hope it will be Elon.

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