The negativity is because of the legacy of colonialism. "Rich White Guy Solves all the World's Problems" ends up being really condescending, especially when other rich white guys are causing or exacerbating many of the problems.
Let me tell you what I think you mean. I think you're attributing something happening inside your own head to the person you're reacting to. You're angry. The reason you're angry is that you have a bunch of arbitrary prejudices that have been set off by something you read. But you don't want to attribute your reaction to your own prejudices. So the only place left to attribute it to is the stimulus that made you angry.
He's donating $40 billion and more importantly his time, yet people are reacting so negatively.
What I find even harder to understand is that he is using the Scientific Method to do the greatest good for the time/dollars and people in a community that are all about measuring value are calling him prejudiced and making excuses to allow themselves to hate him for their own reasons.
1. A framing effect: the narrative of "poor, starving Africans" makes you sympathize with them, and thus consider them the "in-group" of the narrative.
2. A fairness/democratic bias: people think that the best way for a group to decide on something, is for everyone to have an equal vote. Even if half the people making up the group are experts and the other half have no idea what they're talking about; even if what they're "voting" on is a fact like "the distance between [two cities none of them have ever heard of]."
(Or, at least, on the face of it. People actually like being ruled by a high-status dictator as long as they have a way to pretend they're not being ruled--and thus aren't losing status from submission. This is why you'll get more enthusiasm for electing a leader than most forms of direct democracy--even when things like holding referendums are pretty easy to implement today.)
3. People believe that only their in-group holds the information necessary to make decisions about what their in-group should do. This one is actually not that far off; central allocation, as tried in Communism et al., failed due to many instances of the Principal-Agent problem: "orders from on high" to do things with neither clarity as to how accomplishing those things will benefit anyone, or an accompanying incentive structure to make those actually the things that will get done.
But this only holds for in-groups that are about the size of "tribe" in hunter-gatherer terms: 20-150 people--where the group can come to a single decided set of social mores pretty much by osmosis. When you get entire societies thinking this way, countries composed of millions of people where there's no single thing everyone can agree on, only laws that are barely tolerated--you begin to find that decisions derived from sociological statistics achieve better results than just asking the population what they want.
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Combining these effects, we see a poor, sympathetic in-group being dominated by the will of a dictator, who must not know what the heck he's talking about, not being part of their group and all. It smells vaguely of colonialism [something most Americans are familiar with]: of being ruled over from the seat of power of a distant empire who has no "real" idea of what's important to your own people or what your own desires would be. And so, we don't like it.
Even though, in consequentialist terms, it's the best possible thing.
Western countries telling the rest of the world what to do is not only condescending; it repackages old imperial propagandas of improvement, development, dependency, etc., and serves to further entrench Western power abroad.
Bill Gates is not a Western country. He is a really smart guy who has proved himself pretty good at solving big problems by spending his own money. [1]
If you read the article, he actually criticizes aid linked to furthering political interests. All he is saying is "Aid and development programmes should use feedback to improve things they do." I can't think of a good reason why any one on hacker news who would disagree with such a simple, logical argument.
Are we so blinded by misdeeds of Western nations in the past that we want a man who has experience running some of the largest scale aid operations in the world to shut up and not talk about what he has learned just because he is a citizen of America and he is white?
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2012/01/12/bill-ga...
Except that the Gates Foundation acts like one. Its endowment is larger than the GDP about half of the countries of the world. It exists to promote a "creative capitalism" in which the domain of public, governmental services is now understood to be yet another market open for business (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/exec/billg/speeches/2008...).
Let's say that during America's period of slavery, there was an extremely wealthy northeastern industrialist who donated a large portion of his wealth to improve the living conditions of slaves. He wanted them to have better food, better clothes, better medical care, etc. But even though his wealth was gained by legitimate free enterprise and not slavery, he had never called for the outright abolition of slavery, just lamented the poor living conditions of the slaves.
The industrialist's contribution should certainly be applauded, as it would certainly do good, but without addressing the fundamental injustice, it only makes a system predicated on vast suffering slightly more tolerable.
In short, hoping for the winners of a corrupt system to save the losers is foolish. If we had real free markets and real democracy, it might be a different story, but we don't. Our situation cannot be remedied by charity, welfare, or incremental reforms. We need fundamental structural transformation of our political and economic institutions. Anything short, however noble the aim, is equivalent to trying to make slaves more comfortable without freeing them.
Why can it not just be "rich people"?
Second, even if the parent commenter's ancestors were colonists of some stripe, people aren't bound in any way to say that the actions taken by their ancestors were the right ones.
Sounds like "Rich White Guy" is the best person to solve the problems, then. Which is a fairer fight- bushmen vs. rich white guys, or rich white guy vs other rich white guys?
This is not a binary "problems" or "no problems". The manner by which colonialists "improve" the rest of the world is at the expense of the rest of the world.
Not commenting on Gates' particular methods, but injecting money generally comes with a cost, and at various freedoms of the countries involved. At best of intention, throwing money at a problem is not usually solving the conditions behind a problem.
In a few years it will be billionaire Chinese who are solving big problems. What will be the negative attribute for that? Lots of people from all places around the world are solving problems for all of us. If Muhammad Yunus had not been local to Bangladesh, would he be some kind of villain? Is it bad that he's male? Would it have been better had he been a woman (most microloans are lend to women, since they appear more dependable and have greater need)?
Ask anyone who has gone aboard to do good works. There's a very fine line between helping and inadvertently creating a dependency or destroying previously stable social or economic structures.
Big example is famine relief. We dump our excess commodities in a local economy. That enriches the power elite. It nukes the local agriculture. People end up worse off.
Can you list some examples of this type of harm? Are they outliers or is it normal for this kind of aid to hurt its recipients?