Larry Page: I’d Rather Leave My Billions to Elon Musk Than to Charity | Hacker News Reader

Larry Page: I’d Rather Leave My Billions to Elon Musk Than to Charity

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I think this could be rephrased as "Charitable organizations aren't interesting enough to deserve my money."

People, especially highly successful people, view charity as giving money away. Musk's inspirational projects seems much more appealing by comparison. There is a lot of truth in the idea that doing something like colonizing mars could do more good for humanity than giving people enough money to eat for a day or a week. Even what Bill Gates is doing has little impact on people's daily lives here. Eradicating polio is the most noble of goals, but it takes place far away and the benefits are difficult to see.

I think the best solution is to make charity cool again. FDR turned giving money away into something that was literally awesome, using the Tennessee Valley Authority to reshape the landscape with bridges and dams. 21st century technology allows us to have a much larger impact on the lives of many more people, regardless of where they live. Elon Mush doesn't have a monopoly on big ideas. As a technology community it's up to us to come up with projects that help people in need while still capturing our imaginations.

It doesn't matter if big problems are solved for profit or solved for charity. What matters is that they get solved. The danger is that fiduciary responsibilities will get in the way of doing good, working families will take a backseat to boards of directors and the rich will get richer [1] while everyone else struggles to keep even. This is why it would be better to make charity more interesting as opposed to giving money to dynamic and inspirational profiteers. It's always been difficult to combine making money with being of benefit to the world, but we need to raise the entrepreneurial and creative bar now more than ever. When one of the authors of "Don't Be Evil" decides that his money is better off in the hands of private corporations it should be a warning to all of us.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

"his money is better off in the hands of private corporations it should be a warning to all of us" - where else should it be? why is "private" with a vision worse than "public" squandering funds?

The biggest goal for public spending is to spend it in the representative's state. See various bridges to nowhere, non-sensical military and space projects funded or kept alive over better ones just because a parts supplier was in state, etc.. It's pretty easy to have something with a better goal and better result than that.

"Better goals" like marginally more effective web ads?

Not what Musk does, but thanks for playing.

> FDR turned giving money away into something that was literally awesome, using the Tennessee Valley Authority to reshape the landscape with bridges and dams.

Some more libertarian-minded folks would probably make the point that the government is never actually giving away money, it got that money by obtaining it from somewhere else. Regardless, government spending is definitely not charity in any traditional sense.

Not to mention, that was a very difficult time. Spending money on a project like that was perhaps necessary just to keep things going. Getting back to your original point, can you make spending cool, or transfer of money from the wealthy to the poor cool by private means (charity) when it isn't required?

> Some more libertarian-minded folks would probably make the point that the government is never actually giving away money, it got that money by obtaining it from somewhere else.

Almost everyone giving away money got it from somewhere else.

From mutual agreement in exchange of goods and services, or by force. Not the same. Only thieves and governments do the latter.

I dunno. I think the system of laws by which we elect people, they set taxes, build a road, and if we don't like the exchange we turn them out, is as close to "mutual agreement" as a city or larger-sized group of people can come up with...

Wrong Wrong Wrong. Could not be more wrong.

Freedom of Contract is one of the most important concepts of free market capitalism. People must have the right to review the terms of contract, decide to sign or not and be held to the terms, and there should be penalties for breach on both sides and conditions for dissolution of the contract.

The "Social Contract" you are talking about is no contract at all. It is imposed by force, you are given no chance to sign, a false choice (red or blue!) and only 1/385millionth of a say in it. There is no remedy for breach and no conditions for dissolution. It is the very opposite of voluntary exchange and mutual agreement.

DO NOT conflate the two, or go back to whatever liberal arts school terribly educated you.

PhD in STEM, if it matters. And as someone who specifically and directly moved from one city to another because I didn't like the local policies (school district, in this case), I'm a straightforward and simple example of someone who left one social contract for another and paid for the privilege, thanks.

(If I repeat the word "wrong" a few more times, will it improve my opinion?)

The mistake of both libertarians and liberals in these loud arguments is that they focus on the top (national government) where the real social contracts start locally. If you start to build up a system of local social contracts; well, if it quacks like a government, it's a government, even if you'd rather call it a Homeowner's Association with Guns.

Governance is fine, but there are contractual forms of governance and non-contractual (non-consensual) forms of governance.

But please don't use "social contract", it's just a liar's word. It is neither social or contractual what people do under a "social contract". It is naked force: "Do what I say or I will hurt you".

Since you have a PhD, I'll assume that you are not so lazy you can't separate these things in your brain.

Your level of confidence seems entirely out of line with the level of education in politics and history you display here. Instead of insulting people from a position of ignorance, why not read more books? Sorry for putting it bluntly, but every one of your comments in this discussion so far is a rudely worded assertion of something that at best is highly contested, and at worst something you could not even possibly believe if you had read more than a few libertarian newsletters and websites. Not even if you had read only libertarian-leaning theorists (such as Hayek). Stop it.

Since you've advanced literally no argument, I don't feel a need to respond to this. Sorry I hurt your brain?

Here is an argument, which I have carefully tailored to the level of the arguments you have advanced:

Democracy, augmented with some anti-majoritarian safeguards, is a reasonable way of organizing society on a basis that generally advances overall liberties, and social-contract theory provides a reasonable philosophical basis. Libertarian freedom-of-contract is essentially a right to indentured servitude with only the barest attention paid to anything resembling actual real-world liberty or genuine consent, and only people who are either primitivist hippies living in the woods, or malicious exploiters, promote it as a fundamental good. And also anyone who disagrees with this paragraph is dumb.

The problem here is that you are choosing your definitions for "real-world liberty" and "genuine consent", etc. I guess if your point was only to make a point about the parent post doing the same thing, then, erm.. good job? But as an argument in it's own right, I don't find this very compelling.

Anyway, technologue has a point in suggesting that the "social contract" is worthy of skepticism. And I, for one, will join him/her in rejecting the notion of nebulous implicit contracts of this type. When considering this, I'm reminded of what Thomas Paine said about the absurdity of the dead being able to bind the living.

Well sure, "social contract" is an imperfect metaphor, but it's not devoid of meaning, nor divorced from the idea of contracts.

It's the living that bind the living.

Specifically, previous but still-living generations. No one comes of age in a vacuum. If you inherit the benefits (or situations) of the previous generations, you don't just inherit the good stuff, you inherit the debts of the previous generation as well.

Looking way, way back, one can say that the first settlers in a given region might have formed a consensual contract, and the "social" contract is what each continuous generation inherits.

1. Collect all the downvotes.

2. ???

3. Declare victory.

Sometimes trolling is its own reward.

Check their comment history.

How'd you get that cool light gray text for all your posts?

> "People must have the right to review the terms of contract, decide to sign or not"

You are describing a universe which only exist in an imaginary island where all the Galts are living. "Freedom of Contract" works when there are one or two similar-sized parties involved, but it does not scale well beyond that. Try renting a car with a customer agreement tailored for your liking; or try negotiating custom EULA with vendor of whatever browser you are using to post your comments.

Also, you'd better hope that the accessible methods of accumulating wealth haven't already been commoditized (which amounts to hoping that you are special in a world with plenty of people).

Do you actually sign a contract when you buy a loaf of bread?

It isn't signed, but there is definitely a contract in that situation.

My point is that the terms in the sale of a loaf of bread are implicit, just like those in the social contract. The idea that it isn't a free market until you sign a document is demonstrably false.

The contract law behind buying a loaf of bread is well-codified and settled.

The term "social contract" means whatever the person using the term wants it to mean.

Not the same thing. At all.

If it's well-codified and settled then you'll have absolutely no problem providing a complete, and completely uncontroversial, version of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code

Enjoy.

> The "Social Contract" you are talking about is no contract at all. It is imposed by force, you are given no chance to sign, a false choice (red or blue!) and only 1/385millionth of a say in it.

For the vast majority of people, contracts provided by the market are an even worse false choice: Maslow's Hierarchy imposes needs on every individual, fixing the supply of labor at a lower bound which is empirically observed to lie far above the demand for it, thereby commoditizing the unskilled worker and coupling his salary to the minimum dictated by his Maslow needs rather than to the value he creates. The difference goes to his employer, and a non-governmental tax is exacted upon each of his purchases that is distributed to local capital-holders according to their wealth, exacerbating the imbalance in an exponential feedback loop. There is no remedy when his employer resorts to wage theft (frequently), because the justice system requires time and capital that he does not have to achieve the simplest forms of redress. There are conditions for dissolution, but he fears them, because written between the lines are an economic certainty that will dash him repeatedly against the rocky shores of unemployment and homelessness.

This is a laughable notion of consent. When did he agree to have Maslow's needs imposed upon him? When did he agree to abide by the rules of a game that systematically disadvantages him? When did he agree to initial conditions that give him far less than 1/400millionth of a share in economic power? This is the very opposite of what someone with a choice would have chosen.

The only things this hypothetical worker has going for him came from the government: minimum wage laws (and yes, I believe these are a good thing, since wages in commoditized labor markets tend towards the lower end rather than the higher end of the economically feasible range), worker safety standards, subsidized food and health care, education for his children, and so on. None of this is speculation: we can look to history to see what happened when government did not "intrude" on these areas of life.

That's amazingly naive. Violence comes in more forms than just striking someone.

Democratic governments don't even enter into that frame of reference unless you want to have a governmental system where you elect a personal representative.

Ironically if the Government was not spending that much money, fiat money would be worthless.

I don't know where you reside, but I always find it interesting when people in the US refer to taxation as thievery. In a representative democracy, the "government" is the people[^1]. Don't like taxes? Rally support behind yourself, and run for office.

[^1]: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_trans... see: preamble.

I don't think your opponent believes that the US system is a "representative democracy" or a "democracy" or whatever it is that lets N-1 people take arbitrary stuff from 1 person. Your "rally support" solution would not fix the situation.

You're forgetting that that 1 person is also getting stuff from N-1 others - his freedom, safety, absence of famine/war/disease, ... It is simply illusionary to expect a person to be really well-off if everybody else around him is dirt poor. Yes, there were rich people throughout history, but today the average US/European citizen has better healthcare than anyone 20 years ago.

I don't think that it's fair to say that any "democratic" type of government lets any number of people take anything from any 1 (or any arbitrary grouping) person, it's that the self governed group decides that the cost of existing is paid collectively. And rallying support, from my understanding, is the only way to fix any situation in any type of "democracy".

[edit] More directly to your point, it's irrelevant what anyone thinks is "letting" government "steal", the "thievery" is enabled by laws which are created by elected representatives, therefore "the people" (aka government) is directly responsible for taxation.

What about slavery? What about robber-barons paying strike breakers to shoot organizing workers - or for that matter, the missing Coca-Cola union organizers in Columbia?

What about businesses that made their money from violations of treaties with the Native Americans? Or from contracts to organize the data necessary for the Holocaust?

What about the people who ended up with a leg up in life due to inheriting any of the ill earned wealth above?

Or do you write most if not all off as thieves?

Yeah a normal businessman doesn't threaten to throw me in jail if I don't give him money for his pet project. Please DO NOT conflate taxation with charity, they are NOT the same in any way, shape or form.

"this could be rephrased as"

Could also be rephrased as "I'm talking out of my ass because if I gave it any serious thought I would realize there was a big problem in putting all my 'change the world eggs' into one basket".

And to those who say "well he didn't mean that literally" then apply that same logic anytime any famous person says something w/o thinking it through.

There is a lot of truth in the idea that doing something like colonizing mars could do more good for humanity than giving people enough money to eat for a day or a week.

A lot of "truth"?

Far-flung speculation is more like it.

The possibility of an extinction event on Earth isn't exactly far-flung speculation.

A major point of SpaceX is distributing humankind so that such a thing wouldn't wipe us all out.

But... SpaceX is a corporation, so the main point is in fact making money.

I'm not certain that assumption is necessarily correct.

Elon Musk seems more focused on affecting meaningful change and driving technology forward. He's using corporations as a vehicle to do that and making money is an incidental side-effect.

If profit was his primary motive, there would have been many other ways to invest his fortune from PayPal which entailed far lower risk and potentially significant gain.

private corporation. Big difference. They also do not plan on going public until their Mars program is established.

Fair enough. I didn't know they were private.

The basic point is, perhaps that money would be better spent addressing the potential causes of such an event.

Rather than treating it as an inevitability. And fantasizing about what we can do to help the 0.001% who will be rich enough to buy themselves a way out.

I'm curious to see how spending the money would solve an extinction-level meteor strike. Or any number of other not-fully-predictable disasters.

Is it worth living if you're locked inside a tunnel in a place where you can't even go outside, where you're only with a handful of people who will hit a genetic bottleneck in short order, where you're unable to then move from your extraordinarily fragile location to another one? It's not like we're going to have the variety of heavy industries required for creating spacecraft available on the near-atmosphereless planet where you basically need to stay inside all the time.

If something wipes out Earth, we're screwed. It was nice being here, but it's over. Whatever made Earth so uninhabitable that it makes a colony on a barren planet the only remaining splinter of humanity, isn't going to leave Earth in a recolonisable state.

It's not to say we shouldn't reach for the stars, just that I think the justification "save the species!" is massively overblown. If you really do want to "save the species!", then you're going to be far more effective in spending that space travel money in other areas: identifying events that cause global catastrophes and working on technologies to subvert them. Sending a person to another planet is amazingly expensive; setting up a self-sufficient colony even moreso; and setting up a colony that is capable of self-sufficiently colonising other planets more expensive again.

Not to mention that the social elites that will get sent to these colonies (shipping people is expensive, so you want to front-load skilled people) are also going to have to want to rear the number of children required to repopulate - and if you're not significantly expanding the population with each generation in such a case, you're making another extinction even all the more easy.

You're looking too narrowly at the potential here.

What might begin as an underground colony full of social elites or skilled professionals required to run the infrastructure could result in a fully-habitable environment.

But if you don't plant the seeds and experiment with this, then it certainly won't get anywhere. Elon Musk is planting the seeds.

When he says "back-up the species" (not /save/, one would note), he's referring to planting the seeds for a long-term habitation which very well could be self-sufficient and continue progressing in the event of an extinction-level occurrence here on Earth.

I understand the potential; it's why I said "massively overblown" rather than "wrong".

>A major point of SpaceX is distributing humankind so that such a thing wouldn't wipe us all out.

No amount of innovation is going to allow the private space industry to terraform and colonize another planet, ever. I'm sorry but that's just techno-utopian babble.

"Ever" is a very strong word for a technological project which doesn't contradict any known natural laws. Do you honestly not see the possibility that we might be able to build a self-sustaining, comfortable colony on Mars in 100 years? 500? 1000?

I honestly do not, for the reason that the cost of such a venture is simply too high. If we cannot even manage to bear the minimal costs of stopping catastrophic climate change on our own planet, then what makes you think we will ever have the will, much less the ability, to undertake the terraforming of a lifeless planet millions of miles away?

Do you have a source for that? :-)

I'd be curious to see a rational argument as to why this couldn't be the case.

https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/

My take on this that Larry Page is more of a "find a cure for the disease" rather than a "treat the symptoms" kinda guy. To be honest, I can find myself in a statement like that.

To be honest, who would not want to "find [one's self] in a statement" (who writes like this?) like "I want to find a cure for the disease"?

Bill Gates and Malaria: Trying to find a cure (vaccine) and is treating the symptoms in the interim.[^1]

Would you want to "find yourself" in that statement?

[^1]: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Mala...

"It seems as if he's making a larger point, which is that the right company run by the right person can have a major effect."

Benevolent dictatorship is an excellent form of governance. The problem is it doesnt scale well and is hard to extend beyond the life of the dictator.

Instead of going to mars, Page could just buy houses for 1 million poor families in the U.S. That would probably have a greater effect.

Yes, but I've heard some people say that the Gates foundation is not very good at approaching malaria. If you asked me to choose between them and Musk to approach malaria, my instinct is to go with Musk.

> I've heard some people say

Ah yes, the goto phrase of every shitrag that calls themselves a newspaper.

"I've heard some people say drinking my own urine replenishes the body with electrolytes."

Yes, the Gates foundation is literally trying to cure disease, but alternatively consider malaria in sub-Saharan Africa to be caused by the relative poverty there (after all, they have the same vaccine and prevention technology available as the US does, just not enough money to buy it). In that sense, even finding a cure for disease is itself treating the symptoms of a figurative disease. And that disease is cured by economic growth, better care of natural resources, reaching a technological singularity - things that Musk might be working on.

I always thought technological singularity meant the point where AI > human intelligence. I never realized it was also the first big tech advancement that was omni-benevolent. Does "reaching a technological singularity" mean "the end of scarcity and the eradication of evil in the minds of man"?

Traditionally the technological singularity represents the point at which we develop AI which can improve upon itself, beginning a phase of exponential AI growth which occurs pretty much instantaneously from a human perspective. I was using the term somewhat hyperbolically to represent the start of a post-scarcity society, when production becomes so efficient that everyone can have clean water and shelter.

The thing that annoys me is that the prescriptions for economic growth are well known - rule of law, freedom of choice, functioning and non-corrupt judicial and police institutions.

These things are well known and proven beyond doubt, yet they just cannot seem to be adopted by countries who need them. It's like a tribe who all have a treatable disease but insist on talking to the witchdoctor instead.

There is at this time no viable vaccine for malaria. Malaria is much more prevalent in tropical zones than temperate zones because mosquitos are more prevalent in tropical zones than temperate zones.

Being a wealthier nation does help to develop the public heath initiatives and infrastructure, though the reasons for the poverty in sub-Saharan Africa are in no small part tied to the many centuries of exploitation by wealthier colonial nations. Much of post-colonial Africa started on the path of independence 50-60 years ago after centuries of resources being exploited and populations subjugated, and some areas were still under colonial rule in the 70s. The IMF and other post-colonial organizations have managed to institutionalize western imperialist-style economic exploitation without needing to bother with military occupation. It will take a very long time for those countries to recover from centuries of abuse (much ongoing) and begin to develop a stable national infrastructure that could support the kind of economic growth and the ability to manage natural resources responsibly.

"Technological singularity" - nerd rapture magical thinking won't cure malaria.

> alternatively consider malaria in sub-Saharan Africa to be caused by the relative poverty there

There's a good argument the other way too, with malaria holding people back economically: http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/08/malaria-one-trick-ponies...

>I think the best solution is to make charity cool again

Both charities and corporations are political economic vehicles. Inherently preferring one over another isn't rational. Charities incentivise participation through altruism and the promise of political access. Corporations through self-interest and power. Corporations can make water pumps as easily as charities can find frivolous ends. If we are saying charities are less efficient than corporations, that is one thing.

I think the statement is more about time horizons. Governments and foundations have long inherent time horizons. But short electoral and fund-raising cycles turn them myopic. Charities, similarly, must raise funds on an on-going basis. This makes them, on average, more short-sighted than even corporations. Particularly corporations backed by horizon-seeking visionaries such as Elon. Page is not denigrating the work of charities per se. He is observing that today is being kept at the expense of tomorrow. The portfolio deserves balancing, and the best way to do that, he thinks, is through long-viewed companies.

I don't think that gives Page enough credit. I'd phrase it as "Charitable organisations aren't effective enough to deserve my money". Elon Musk is, above all, a do-er. He has shown the capability to not only think big about very relevant problems, but implement solutions. I suspect it's those qualities that give Page confidence that his money would make more of a difference in Musk's pockets.

> "As a technology community it's up to us to come up with projects that help people in need while still capturing our imaginations."

Some problems have boring (and known) solutions that are never going to 'capture the imagination'. Like clean water, sanitation and vaccines. I think it's dangerous to create a culture where we forgo a project simply because it doesn't sound exciting. Impact should be what matters.

Larry Page can do what he wants with his money but he's completely wrong to conflate capitalism and philanthropy.

"doing something like colonizing mars could do more good for humanity than giving people enough money to eat for a day or a week."

The people who say stuff like this are always far, far away from the experience of not having anything to eat. It could be true that Musk's projects in the long run could have do more good for humanity in the long run, but also in a different sense. How is colonizing Mars, or having electric cars does more good for a whole continent that hasn't solved dozens of problems well below any technological/energetic one? What I'm saying is, it might do more good for the developed world, but not for Africa. Bill Gates was right when he criticized Google's balloon internet project. What the african population really needs is different. To say otherwise is to be too removed from the real, basic, almost elementary problems that are still present in the continent.

(edit: I meant no offense to the parent with my first sentence. But I've been to Africa, and I live in a 3rd world country with some very, very poor regions. Space programs have very little effect on life there.)

I haven't considered the subject thoroughly enough to have an opinion either way, but your comment made me think of this letter: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

The real issue I have with this argument is that we can have both. The question is about priority. How do we measure the benefit to human civilization of colonizing mars in 2020 instead of 2030? Is it worth postponing the elimination of world hunger?

While you are right, I can relate to Page's view. Feeding people, for hunger-squashing sake, is a very immediate solution to a very immediate symptom. Does it attack the cause? Probably not. Using Africa as an example:

If Africa's land can't feed the people there, for some intrinsical reason, then feeding people in Africa is unsustainable, and we'd better move them elsewhere.

If Africa's land is capable of feeding the people there, then the real question is: Why can't it today? Are we going for the cause, or for the symptom?

It could be that by eliminating hunger temporarily we'd start a virtuous cycle of some kind, but it'd be a totally random side-effect.

In the grand scheme of things, feeding people for hunger-squashing sake, while noble and charitable and christian-good, amounts to very little. Colonizing Mars is the first guarantee that humans don't go the way of the Dodo in a Great Dying event[1]. Earth had five of those, and we still have to prove ourselves less stupid than dinosaurs.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinc...

I think the best solution is to make charity cool again... It doesn't matter if big problems are solved for profit or solved for charity. What matters is that they get solved.

I think a lot of problems can be solved using a for profit model. I think, overall, it tends to be for the best if you can find a for profit model that is viable for the problem in question. I think the problem is not that it is for profit, I think the problem is that some for profit models are just not well suited to solving certain problems.

This is an idea I have thought a great deal about. I have a serious medical condition. I have spent the last 13 years getting myself well when doctors claim it cannot be done. I have come to believe that one of the problems is that doctors make their money off of treating illness. They do not actually make their money off of keeping you well. The more your treatment drags out, the more money they make.

I have heard that in China, they put a doctor on retainer and only pay him when they are well. So doctors in China only make money if you are well. I do not know how accurate this is or how effective, but, as someone who is getting well in part by avoiding the medical establishment, I feel very strongly that our current "health care system" is very broken and one of the things wrong with it is not that it is monetized but how it is monetized.

I have thought long and hard about how to try to share information about what worked for me. Given the negative reception my story gets almost everywhere I go, it may not be possible to help anyone else. But one thing I am clear about: I do not want to be "a consultant" and monetize the information much the way doctors get paid. Doctors in the U.S. mostly trade short term gains for long term costs. I got well by trading long term gains for short term costs as much as I could. When doctors put people like me on strong drugs, the drugs have a long handout listing the horrible side effects. But then as people like me get sicker and sicker, it is blamed on our disorder, not on the drug side effects. I have no desire to join doctors in following this model that allows them to charge big bucks and claim credit for the short term improvements while blaming long term deterioration on my condition. I believe that is a failed system and I believe the way it is monetized is part of why it goes down like that.

I think charity also tends to fail. Think of the very negative connotation for the phrase "charity case." I don't think we help people that much when we first have to write them off as losers before we do anything for them. Given that I have been homeless for over two years and left the soup kitchens and most other homeless services as soon as I could, yeah, I think my opinion on that is informed and not merely pontification of an unclued privileged person trying to justify not giving money away.

I don't have an answer. I mostly cannot get people to even engage me in discussion on the topic (of how I got well). But I agree much more with your statement about solving big problems and not caring if it is for profit or for charity than I do with your idea of making charity cool again. I do not really want charity. Charity has helped keep me alive but it is not going to get me off the street or restore me to a middle class lifestyle. I need to be taken seriously as a competent professional to achieve that. Being viewed as "a charity case" is the opposite of the professional respect and business connections I would prefer to achieve.

Honest question: do you have a criticism of "charity" besides your own negative psychological reaction to derogatory uses of the term? I believe charity can be an empowering force if it helps people break out of the cycle of poverty. If anything, your criticism indicates that we need to work to reframe charity as compassion rather than some kind of condescending pity. But that seems like a problem to fix, not a reason to view charity as likely to fail.

> I don't think we help people that much when we first have to write them off as losers before we do anything for them.

I'm not really sure how to respond to this. Who's writing them off as "losers"? I'm pretty sure charitable organizations don't consider the people they help to be losers. If you're complaining that people look down on the poor, that's certainly an unfair stigma, but why does this mean charity isn't helpful?

Edit in response to your edit: I did not say "charity is not helpful". I said that other models typically provide superior solutions if you can work it out right.

Original reply:

Yes, I have a lot of criticisms of it. I was talking to my son the other day about something and he gave me the supporting example that a charity in Africa found that if it gave away mosquito netting to poor moms to protect their babies from diseases carried by mosquitoes, they typically sold it. But if they sold the netting for 50 cents, which was half a day's wages for these women, then proper use of the netting shot up from something like 10% to something like 80%.

Giving away things for free tends to undermine self esteem and self determination, tends to come with a lot of controlling conditions, and tends to be very poor quality. I left the soup kitchens as soon as I could in part because the food is terrible and it exposed me to concentrations of people who were often ill and actively smoking cigarettes next to me. Staying away from sick people and cigarette smoke and eating good quality food is part of how I stay out of the ER.

I could go on but I don't really see much reason to. I have a lot of very practical reasons. It is not merely some kind of negative psychological reaction. It is a very well reasoned position, based in part on having done a lot of volunteer work when I was younger and a lot of reading about such topics.

I don't think we should eliminate all charities but I do think that the more we can find other ways to solve problems, the better those solutions are likely to be. Charity tends to produce pretty bad solutions which keep people limping along and generally does not have a good track record of lifting people out of poverty.

Thanks for the response, your points make a lot of sense. I will say, however, that after searching for info on the mosquito net situation you described, I came across this article which seems to contradict your point:

http://www.trust.org/item/?map=fighting-malaria-selling-v-gi...

Regardless, I agree there's room for improvement in terms of increasing the effectiveness of charitable operations.

I have heard that in China, they put a doctor on retainer and only pay him when they are well.

Since you indicated that you weren't sure if that is true, I can assure that it is not. Most doctors in China are paid formally by salary, and under the table by patients who can afford bribes on a fee-for-service basis.

Thanks. Let me clarify that my main point (in mentioning what I had heard about China) was that there are potential alternate paradigms for paying doctors which do not directly incentivize dragging out illness. In the U.S., one of the best hospitals we have also has doctors on salary. They make the same amount regardless of how many tests they order. They credit this with helping make sure the focus is on giving the patient the best possible care without any conflict of interest subconsciously influencing the doctor's treatment plan.

Have an upvote.

Remuneration in the medical profession is fascinating and trying to properly align incentives whilst avoiding unintended consequences is very complicated. I am not sure there is a model that properly works yet.

As I see it, there are only two fundamental ways to pay for health care: you can can pay for treatment as and when you need it, or you can pay a flat rate in exchange for treatment at no additional cost. Hopefully we can agree that the former option is barbaric, as you are effectively denying modern medicine to anyone not rich enough to cover it up-front, which is most people. The latter option is essentially health insurance. Paying the doctor a retainer only when you are well is tantamount to making your doctor a de-facto health insurer (and all of the horrible consequences that entails).

Insurance works off averages, so it works more efficiently the more people buy in. Logically then, the most efficient health insurance is where everyone buys in. Hence, the most efficient system is nationalized health insurance, which comes with many other benefits - for example, it lends massive bargaining power to the people for reasonable drug prices.

You state in your original comment "I feel very strongly that our current "health care system" is very broken and one of the things wrong with it is not that it is monetized but how it is monetized." This implies that you don't believe in socialized medicine. What in your opinion is wrong with it?

I'm from Germany. Once I was hit by a car on my bicycle. The driver wasn't looking and hit me. My hospitalization was paid for by a nationalized system of public and private insurers. A short trial was held for fault. I was awarded money that would cover replacing my bike and a few hundred more dollars for my troubles.

In the US, I probably would have gotten a large cash settlement out of the deal. But a nationalized system like that in most other first-world countries does not require tort-reform because effectively the commitment to your health, cradle to grave, is a given.

Paying doctors piece-meal, like assembly-line workers or auto mechanics, creates perverse incentives and only tangentially works towards good outcomes.

Please do note that I put "health care system" in quotes. That was not an accident.

I worked in insurance for over five years. They are not in the business of taking care of people. They are more like some version of Las Vegas but all the "winners" first have to lose an arm or get run over by a car. I am not a huge fan of insurance.

I was a homemaker for many years. I also was studying to go into urban planning when my life got derailed by divorce and health issues. Urban planners used to plan pedestrian-friendly spaces in part with an eye towards health of the community members. I have also read a fair amount about the differences between how Europe handles things and how the U.S. does. Europe is generally more family-friendly and people friendly, which is good for the health of it's people.

Medicine is not about making people healthy. Eating right, exercising and living right are what foster good health. Medicine is crisis management when things go wrong. Viewing medicine as "health care" is fundamentally fubarred. You cannot crisis manage your way to good health. It simply cannot be done. Good health is built over a long period of time, with every bite you put in your mouth, every time you fail to become a drug addict or alcoholic, every time you find a way to get your sexual needs met that does not expose you to high risk of infection from strangers with unknown personal habits, etc.

So when the U.S. reduces discussions of "fixing our health care system" to the question of "who should pay for it?", the situation is already essentially hopeless. It cannot be fixed from that starting point.

As for who should pay for medical care (which is not, in my mind, "health care"): The government. Insurance is not in the business of taking care of people. It is a numbers game and, like Las Vegas, in order for the house to even keep it's doors open, much less make the occasional big payout, there have to be a great many more losers than winners. It's simple math in that regard and the actuaries look out for that end of it like vigilant hawks. And when the actuaries decide the company is paying customers too much money for X benefit on X policy, the policy gets sent to the legal department and they "clarify" what the paragraph in question means and the claims department gets retrained to "pay this benefit correctly" and we start sending denial notices to the customer for things we used to cover. That will never, ever, ever, ever, ever make this country healthier.

And I worked for a good insurance company with a very ethical reputation. From what I gather, a lot of other insurance companies are far more gruesome.

I think it was case in _ancient_ China. Current China is more capitalist than US will ever be.

Thank you.

"I have heard that in China, they put a doctor on retainer and only pay him when they are well. So doctors in China only make money if you are well."

Perhaps thousands of years ago, but this is not the case, even among the current crop of naturopaths.

Besides that you could not likely afford the retainer for any serious injury treatment, leaving you back where you started.

> I have heard that in China, they put a doctor on retainer and only pay him when they are well. So doctors in China only make money if you are well.

Never lived in a China like this.

"...but it takes place far away and the benefits are difficult to see..."

This worries me. It's like saying that because the people affected aren't here, in America, it's not worth doing.

No, what he said is that they don't have big ideas. Charities aren't going to move humanity forward and make big changes. They are also very inefficient with the money.

I believe Vinod Khosla has discussed his dislike of charities.

Someone like Elon is taking a dollar and turning it into $100. Where does it make more sense to put the money?

> It's always been difficult to combine making money with being of benefit to the world

In a free market, money is made by providing a benefit.

> There is a lot of truth in the idea that doing something like colonizing mars could do more good for humanity than giving people enough money to eat for a day or a week.

How about doing neither and instead use the money to solve some of the problems the earth suffers from today? Colonizing Mars, seriously, wtf ...

Reaching for a stretch goal has a way of solving a lot of problems on the side. The space race didn't cure polio, but it did give us smoke detectors, memory foam, improved water filtration, and many others that I can't list off the top of my head.

Here's a wikipedia article dedicated to them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies

And here's the mandatory relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1232/

> FDR turned giving money away into something that was literally awesome

Yeah, like the FDR war bonds to finance war activities in WWII in order to burn Japan and Germany (civilians included) to the ground ? Using even popular children cartoons for propaganda : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99zmpod_zbE

Seriously, if you want to use an example of someone who did good things, choose actually a good person in the first place.

> to burn Japan and Germany (civilians included) to the ground You say that like it was a bad thing.

The big problem with corporations (as far as I see it) is that they act as a dehumanising mechanism for representing shareholders. An individual who has tight control over a company (like Elon Musk) can shoot for long term goals in order to achieve their noble aspirations. However, in most cases, the legal obligation of the directors of a corporation to represent the interests of their shareholders seems to default to purely financial interests. A board of directors aren't really obligated to represent the humanitarian or altruistic interests of their shareholders. In fact, typically financial interests are only served in the short term.

This means the capital that a shareholder represents is only ever set to work to meet financial interests. It's up to the shareholder to then divert their profit from their own investments into charities. This seems very inefficient to me.

My solution is to include a much richer mechanism for representing shareholder interests locked into the company charter. Shareholders could vote on what things they valued, and on values that they assign to those things. Then, instead of a quarterly bottom line that represents monetary value, the bottom line would also include those externalities that the shareholders voted on.

For example, you could have a company where most investors were patriots who cared about the economy. They could vote to assign a value to every month of employment that the company provides to an American worker. So, when the bottom line was calculated, each full time worker was treated like an extra source of income. This means when the board of directors considers whether or not to close down a factor and outsource to Mexico, the reduction in costs has to justify the expense to the patriot virtues of the investors.

The obvious objection is that if you only valued jobs you might run a company into the ground. However, running the company into the ground also gets rid of all the jobs. So it's not something the board of directors would want to do. Balancing short term gains over long term company growth is something directors have to do anyway.

This example really illustrates the power of this approach. In our current system, a company can move a factory to Mexico even if all its shareholders want to keep jobs in the USA. Those shareholders could then earn a significant amount of dividends from the move, and then try to invest those dividends charitably in order to express their patriotic virtues. However, no charity is going to be able to replace all those lost jobs for the price of those dividends. Charities just aren't efficient and reliable enough.

A valuable addition to the charter would be to make it so that the votes and results were made public. People who claim themselves job-creators would be able to put their money where their mouth is - and called to account if they failed to do so.

"There is a lot of truth in the idea that doing something like colonizing mars could do more good for humanity than giving people enough money to eat for a day or a week."

There is? Tell me, how would colonizing Mars help the average man?

Frankly I can't think of any higher calling to donate to than environmental groups. Now there are good groups and bad groups (both nationally and local) - and it's up to you to do your research.

Well, I guess if our environment goes to hell, building a colony on mars might be a good idea. But somehow I doubt the "average" man would be able to afford a house on Mars.

"I think the best solution is to make charity cool again."

No, charity doesn't need your branding efforts. It needs accountability.

Throwing money at a generic "charity" initiative is the best way to see your money disappear in the pockets of a handful of corrupted individuals.

When giving for charity, you need to be able to see what exactly results from what you gave.

Say, $10 million required to build a hospital with this and that, all written in specs, and by year 2016. People pool money, and if the funding goal is reached, the providers keep the people taking the money accountable to build the hospital to specs.

And not "give for charity", feel good, go back to your life, and achieve absolutely nothing because no one is held accountable.

The latter is what 90% of charity is like. It's only remotely better than throwing money at lottery tickets and hoping it results in good things.

And then you're surprised why Larry Page has the common sense to say the things he says.

What you mention definitely occurs, but the 90% hyperbole is totally unnecessary. It's nowhere near that percentage of philanthropic efforts.

So if you were Page, you would hold Musk to the same accountability standards? (Anyway, I don't think this accountability thing has anything to do with Page's motives).

Ultimately it all comes down to empathy and compassion. When your child, spouse, or parent is sick, you will not go and develop a tool for improving life of future generations. The people in scientific or innovation fields are rarely motivated by empathy; they are driven by something that is cool, interesting and exciting.

Charitable organizations are not effective enough, that's a separate issue.

"People, especially highly successful people, view charity as giving money away"....that's a shame really. It's more accurately viewed as investing in the commons.

Frankly, I'd rather he leave it to Bill Gates.

Going to Mars may be sexy, but stomping out Polio makes millions of lives better.

Its hard to realize that, I suppose, when your life is in the bubble of a limo. That's honestly what makes Bill Gates second act so amazing.

Pretty much. Donate to improve science, perform basic research, etc.

Why on earth would you donate to a for-profit? It makes no sense.

Because when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

For how may be exceptional in their fields, some people may still have a narrow vision outside that (or no vision at all).

Specifically, Page is a technically-minded person who's showing not to be able to see outside of the strictly technical realm, so choosing between a charitable organization and a technological one, is not really a choice, because in his perspective, there's no such thing as the first option.

I was actually surprised (but not too much) that a person like him may have such narrow vision.

I suppose I just have different blinders than it doesn't occur to me that people view the world that way. :/

> Specifically, Page is a technically-minded person who's showing not to be able to see outside of the strictly technical realm, so choosing between a charitable organization and a technological one, is not really a choice, because in his perspective, there's no such thing as the first option.

Or maybe he's actually smart, as you would expect from a technically minded person, did the math and realized, that there ain't many good charitable organizations to give, nor that the for-profits are worse than charities in pursuing goals beneficial to mankind.

The fact that charitable organization may be generally ineffective (or inefficient at beast) is a very common argument, the problem is that there are alternatives which are in the middle ground, see social enterpreneurship, and they are definitely effective

Such alternatives consider human problems as both a human problem and a technical one, and work with both.

This is exactly the point; I expect a technical mind to be at a high risk of seeing only one part of the problem.

Reality is of course much more complex. Enterpreneurs are limited by the fact that having a "human" opinion carries a high risk of damaging the stock value.

Note that I wouldn't certainly consider Elon Musk's social enterpreneurship. Kiva would be (it's just an example).

It's possible to leave money to both. I'd prefer that over being lopsided.

Yeah, I'm glad this isn't an either/or situation. There are enough billionaires in the world willing to donate that they don't all collectively need to pick one over the other.

I get the feeling Larry Page will outlive Bill Gates by a couple decades.

Considering Gates is almost two decades older than Page that's a pretty logical conclusion. But Gates foundation will likely outlast him. With the kinds of things he's doing it seems pretty simple to layout a plan for after he's gone (e.g. next we solve HIV, then clean water, then etc. etc.).

And as soon as he's dead, whoever is running it may totally screw up the mission.

The Gates Foundation is to exhaust all of its funds within 20 years after Bill and Melinda's deaths [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundati...

Seconded. This shows an amazing lack of empathy on the part of Page. I love science and technology, they move society forward. But we shouldn't obsess exclusively on progress while ignoring the people who are born without access to health care and schools let alone access to the cool new technology we build.

I disagree. Going to Mars "because it's cool" would be somewhat callous. Going to Mars to backup humanity has the real, bona-fide potential to save more lives than any amount of Earth charity; if it succeeds and it really does end up "backing up" humanity (including, might I add, more than just the raw fact of humanity on Mars, but the tech, the other incidental settlements, etc., all the rest of the tech stack and colonization that would occur), it could be the difference between humanity existing and not.

For that matter, space tech of this level of magnitude is extremely likely to have massive positive impacts on Earth-bound humanity too.

We're still not really in a good position to judge the likelihood of a species-wide existential crisis right now, but we do know that the cumulative odds of one occurring only go up over time....

At the very least, it is not a clear-cut case in favor of either position. In the real world, you, perhaps unfortunately, can't afford to try to serialize your problems and attack them one-by-one... you must attack them in parallel.

Well that's very speculative. Mostly I disagree with the heavy-handedness of his stance. I think it would be great for humanity to donate part of a fortune to research & technological advancement and the rest to helping people in need alive today.

I'm not sure what's heavy-handed about it. The statement was with regard to Larry's wealth, not a general guideline for post-mortem wealth distribution.

If Larry thinks a Mars-shot would be a better investment for his particular (large) slice of the pie than other investments, that's his business. It doesn't imply that the rest of the world needs to either agree or follow him as an example.

Well it's unfortunate that we didn't get more of his comments. It would be interesting to hear why he thinks the Mars shot is a better investment if he does in fact think that. It could be Slate's framing but it's easy to read the article as Page saying "Musk is doing more for humanity than the people building schools or curing malaria." Which to me sounds lacking in empathy. Both of these things are subjective. Page has a right to not think it's important to build schools and cure malaria and I have a right to consider that stance lacking in empathy.

I think we all agree that we have individual rights. When you make your opinions public you open them up to discussion.

You absolutely do. I think it's hard to draw any solid conclusions from this snippet though; an alternative explanation is that Page thinks there are already plenty of people and resources directed at building schools and curing malaria, and that his own money is better spent widening the solution spread than reinforcing the more classical work.

>Going to Mars to backup humanity has the real, bona-fide potential to save more lives than any amount of Earth charity;

I really find this morality baffling. As I see it extinction level event would be a tragedy on account of the deaths of billions. But the human species, as a whole, is not an individual; it does not think or feel or suffer. Its cessation has no moral value beyond the death of the individuals which make it up.

I'm open to hearing an argument to the contrary; usually discussions of space colonization, it's assumed obvious that perpetuating humanity is important. But I don't see it, and so I tend to view anything that helps actual individuals as a better use of resources.

It's hard to logically argue about morality. I personally think that we have a moral responsibility for future generations. some people would say that we have a moral responsibility for preservation of plant species. In this sense of couse preservation of the human species is also a matter of morality. If you only count morality as something towards organisms that do live and can feel pain, then it makes no sense to eat meat. But actually most people eat meat. So you see there are many different moral standards.

> As I see it extinction level event would be a tragedy on account of the deaths of billions. But the human species, as a whole, is not an individual; it does not think or feel or suffer. Its cessation has no moral value beyond the death of the individuals which make it up.

Right. So technology that provides humanity, or some part of it, the means to get people out of the way of what would otherwise be an extinction level event saves the actual, individual lives of all those people that would otherwise have been in the way.

I value life more than dead matter. Earth has the potential to be a seed, spreading life abundant amongst the stars, until the entire biosphere mass we know today is but a fraction of a percent of the total in the Universe. Or we could get wiped out in the cradle.

It is possible that humanity could be wiped out and Earth could re-roll another species that could do it instead... but once you dispose of the fashionable self-loathing and look at it rationally, it's not a good bet. (But that's a longer post.)

That said, there's also a pure research vs. direct action aspect, again going back to the fact that the tech for a true off-planet space presence will inevitably produce extremely useful technology for those of us still on Earth. It may be easier to see by putting it in the past... no amount of cooking bread and giving it to hungry people would ever have produced refrigeration technology, or the wide dissemination of it. Had people 100 years ago followed the advice of only taking direct actions to prevent poverty, we would, paradoxically, have a lot more of it today. Again... we can not serialize our approach to problems, we have to attack them in parallel.

What benefit does going to mars have over say a series of deep bunkers? Building a metropolis on Antarctica is easier than going to mars and sustaining life, just by the virtue of Antartica being closer than mars and still having an atmosphere that earth life can live on. Same with deep bunkers. Even life on an impact winter earth sounds more viable than life on a clean mars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_winter#Survivability

I don't see how that follows. Look, any one person, no matter how rich, can only do so much to address the world's problems. Gates chooses to direct his charity one way, Buffet does his thing, and Page has his angle. There's nothing wrong with different people choosing different aspects of the overall situation, and focusing on the aspects that they care about.

I often daydream about what I'd do if I was billg rich. And I keep coming to the conclusion that there are certain, very specific charitable activities that I'd choose to fund, and they wouldn't necessarily be the same ones that gates chooses. For example, my prime angle would be to focus on poverty by contributing funds to help with education for disadvantaged people, and by focusing on programs that teach and promote entrepreneurship. Now, does that mean that I don't care about people with polo, or malaria, or people in developing countries who need clean water? No, it just means that I'd choose to address the things that resonate with me for whatever reason, while acknowledging that one person can't do it all.

It sounds to me like Page just has his vision of how he would want to help make the world better, and I don't see how it makes sense to criticize him just because his hot buttons aren't the same as yours (or mine, or whoever).

Unfortunately the parent link is to a second hand source rather than a direct quote. The way Slate frames Page's answer makes it seem lacking in empathy to people alive today who suffer. Maybe it is just Slate's framing, but reading the article makes it sound like Page's intention in saying he would leave his money to Elon Musk is to say that Elon Musk is doing more for the world than people curing polio or building schools.

Which he has every right to believe, just as I believe saying something like that is lacking in empathy.

Well, I won't argue against you have the right to say that. Heck, I might even agree with you, pending further discussion.

My only point is that Page's position is not implicitly "bad" or undesirable, in that he clearly is concerned about helping the world - he just has his own strategy for how to do it.

It's also not just about "a backup" for mankind. IF we are able to start colonizing Mars, we basically have found a way to unlock the resources of the Solar System. The economic and civilizational growth will be beyond our imagination and benefit everybody.

>Going to Mars may be sexy, but stomping out Polio makes millions of lives better.

Right, both are trying to better man kind in their own special ways.

Its a do we solve 1st world problems or do we remember about the rest of the developing world. As I grow older I struggle with which camp I am in.

Mars and an electric car do sound good...but conquering deadly pathogens and diseases sound awesome in a different way.

>> "Its a do we solve 1st world problems or do we remember about the rest of the developing world."

I agree. Mars is very cool to me and something I'd love to see. BUT my life is already pretty good. There are millions whose lives are short and horrible. Bringing their lives up to my current life standard seems like a more logical first problem to solve than making my already nice life better while theirs doesn't really progress.

I had to re-read that a couple times. Commas are helpful!

> Its hard to realize that, I suppose, when your life is in the bubble of a Google limo.

One is oriented more short-term (polio), whereas the other is more long-term (not putting all our eggs in one basket).

Both are good.

Stomping out polio is not short-term.

What with the anti-vaccination idiots, stomping out lots of things that should be simple is proving difficult.

We are really friggin close to eradicating polio!

The Americas (North and South) have been polio free since 1994. The last 1% is what has proven to be difficult.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis_eradication

Well, "good" depends for who. The beneficiaries would be first-world population in one, and third world in the other.

Besides, putting all eggs in a basket could be a fitting metaphor, except if the person holding the basket has a perverse passion for stomping on it.

Moving to Mars wouldn't be a way to save the population, it would be an excuse to find another planet to destroy.

There really is nothing to destroy on mars. You can't destroy an ecosystem where there is none.

I think Bill Gates is going to have enough billionaires already giving their money to his foundation.

I like the idea of at least a few going in a different direction. Letting Elon Musk throw billions at an audaciously big goal because he has a record of achieving and society might benefit as well.

Well, until you start looking seriously at existential risk. Then you may realize how many orders of magnitude more humans will be helped with similar probability by spreading to new habitats.

Page lacks not "Empathy" itself, but rather the "Locality of Empathy"; his temporal discounting of empathic investment appears much lower than Gates'.

Exactly. Page seems like someone who knows how to "shut up and multiply".

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Shut_up_and_multiply

The stated reason for going to Mars is to create a backup population for humanity. If a major asteroid impacts earth (or any other Extinction Level Event) then potentially every human will be as dead as those killed by Polio.

If. Polio is a real problem now. Asteroids are a theoretical problem.

Deadly asteroid is not a theoretical problem. Just a matter of when.

No matter what there will still be more than 7 billion people left on earth.

Surely developing the technology to deflect a killer asteroid is orders of magnitude cheaper than the technology to colonize Mars.

Can we not work on all the problems in parallel?

Not actually. An impact is inevitable, given enough time.

given the time scale of the duration in which a major impact event is likely humanity's technology will have advanced radically beyond which we could possibly imagine

Yes, and the way that will happen is that money will be invested into space technology companies like SpaceX.

or it will just happen anyway over the course of thousands of years

No, actually, if everyone chooses "invest in other things" over "invest in technology", then it won't happen. If it will happen, it will be because of technology investment, not as magic that occurs independently of them.

It's impossible to imagine how humanity would stop investing in technology or would only invest in technology that would not be related to space travel

What do you mean a theoretical problem? It can happen - just because you can't imagine it happening or that it might happen years, decades or centuries from now, does not make it any less real.

I tend to agree. From my point of view, polio doesn't exist in this part of the world. It's as phantasmal as an asteroid.

If we go to Mars then for that population wouldn't lots of viruses be a theoretical problem?

I think what rubs me the wrong way about this is giving it to a for-profit enterprise.

If Elon is willing to step down and run a non-profit to get to Mars, I'm all for it. But I suspect he isn't willing to do that. This is about profit - which isn't bad - but its not charity and therefore is very unlikely in the end to help the bottom 10%.

No one invests in a non-profit. Investors want ROI and going to mars is pretty capital intensive.

EDIT: correct me if I am wrong, but YC doesn't expect to make a RIO with Watsi. They just want to make the world a better place. It is a donation not an investment. Most VCs are not that nice.

EDIT: EDIT: Found it: "Since some people were confused when we funded Watsi, I'd better clarify that the money we're putting into the nonprofits will be a charitable donation, rather than an investment in the narrow sense. We won't have any financial interest in them." Link here: http://ycombinator.com/np.html

Watsi is the first non-profit Y Combinator is backing.

http://ycombinator.com/watsi.html

Disclaimer: HUGE Watsi fan.

I disagree. We have had a bunch of significant investments in Akvo and we are non-profit. The investments aren't structured for maximum financial ROI, but maximum societal ROI. Nevertheless they are investments.

http://Akvo.org/

Y Combinator invests in non-profits.

> No one invests in a non-profit.

I thought that was called a donation.

Let me introduce you to people who want more than ROI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_investing

There are a variety of ways you could structure things. A non-profit could take loans or sell bonds. I've heard talk of a pay-for-success model for public-good bonds. [1] The non-profit could create a for-profit subsidiary, like Mozilla does. A non-profit could enter into a joint venture (e.g., with an aerospace company).

I think the main barrier to approaches like this is attitudes like yours: for-profit people often have a hard time of steering by the public good. And, of course, the mirror attitude, where non-profit people are suspicious of anything that looks like capitalism. But there's no necessary conflict; the whole theory of capitalism is that companies are making the world better. And if you want to make the world better, the best way to do that is sustainably, and for-profit companies have done a lot of great thinking on how to stay in the black.

[1] http://nonprofitfinancefund.org/pay-for-success

Non-profit status doesn't mean anything about an organization except that dividends are not paid to shareholders. E.g. it doesn't mean that executives don't pull down giant salaries or that sweetheart deals never transfer resources to outside parties. There are wonderful and terrible non-profit and for-profit organizations. It's better to judge an organization by its accomplishments than by its non-profit status.

If it was about money Musk would have retired already. Tesla and SpaceX are both hugely risky endeavours. It is not unlikely that them being for profit makes them more likely to succeed in the long term.

The profit motive and capitalism have given the Western world the best life for the "bottom 10%" in the history of mankind.

Look at the Internet when it was "non profit". It sat there for years in universities and labs, availing the lower 10% not at all. When the profit-motive was allowed to explore the possibilities, the Internet exploded. Now the Internet is available fairly universally.

Nobody on earth is rich enough to get the bottom 10% out of poverty.

700,000,000 (bottom 10%) divide Bill Gate's net worth (70 billion) and they will all get $100 each.

The only way to improve the lives of the poor is through capitalism. We've seen this in China: "Between 1981 and 2008 ... 600 million people were taken out of poverty." [1] The profit motive is an incredible force.

Btw, I say this as a huge fan of Gate's charity.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China

So, I was never good at (or interested in) economy.

What I don't understand is where this 'wealth' is coming from. You say no one can provide it now. But it's seemingly coming out of thin air (your chinese example: What happened? The people are the same. Resources are probably comparable. Building an iPhone in CN generates money .. how?).

The whole big picture, macroscopic view never made sense for me. The 'click' is missing. It seems that this wealth is more or less as arbitrary as shares (look to me).

Here is a pretty good primer: http://www.reddit.com/r/finance/comments/utf5u/where_has_all...

In an agrarian society most people are working on small plots of land growing food and/tending animals. Their labor combined with the natural resources is enough to create food for their families and a little bit left over. They take that little bit left over and trade it to a guy that makes clothing, and a guy that makes tools. All the goods and services in the whole country don't amount to all that much -- enough food to feed everyone plus some clothes and tools.

Now move to the industrial agricultural age. The same food (better really) that it used to take 90% of the labor of the country to grow now can be done by 5% of the people. Instead of having only enough surplus to support a few guys making clothing or building tools, most of society can go off and find things to do with their time to trade to the farmers for food and to each other for whatever everyone else is doing. Now all the good and services of the country not only include a wide variety of food, clothing, and tools, but it also includes concerts, amusement parks, computers, dishwashers -- all of which can be traded for the very same bushels of corn or herds of cattle that the agrarian society was producing.

All of this is very simplified but it should give you the basic idea. Bill Gates can give the global poor money and they can use that to import goods and services made elsewhere, but that's just a temporary change. If you really want the societies to be richer, you need the people in that society to be doing things with their time that are of great value to others. That's what increases the total amount of wealth in the world.

Think of life and humans as a chemical reaction, like fire.

We consume and process things to make other things.

A tree by itself has limited value to a human, but if you process it into a house, it has a lot more value to a human.

Lets say you need 100 trees to make a house. 100 trees is worth $10,000.

A person with the job of chopping trees (a lumberjack) can cut down 300 a year, so they make $30,000 a year in income. Lets say the lumberjack wants to buy a house.

A house is worth $20,000 to him. He pays a firm to build him a house for $20,000. The firm buys 100 trees from someone for $10,000 and then turns them into a house for the lumberjack. That extra $10,000 they received is called "value add". They added value because humans (the employees of the firm) had to turn the wood into a house.

This is what the economy basically is, and you can be in two roles:

1: The resource extractor

2: The resource processor

Or in other words, you can be the wood or the flame.

How to do you make a big fire?

Get more and better resources (like wood and air)

Start fires in more places than one (parallel processing of the wood)

Start hotter fires (blowtorch vs a match)

Pretty much all of the above is controlled by laws and policy of the government. The citizenry are like the flame - they have innate, unfaltering properties. It is the role of the government (the person trying to build a big fire) to know these properties of the citizenry, and setup the right conditions so they burn their brightest.

What I don't understand is where this 'wealth' is coming from.

Wealth is the result of

- Raw materials (natural resources)

- Capital (building the factories)

- Labor (running the factories)

- Technology (figuring out better ways of doing things

Obviously, technology is improving all the time. We're figuring out better ways of production, so that more can be created even with fewer of the other inputs.

Indeed, while we're stuck with pretty much the original set of raw materials, technology lets us figure out things to do with stuff that we never even realized was a raw material.

Capital is always building on itself. That is, given adequate maintenance, you have all the factories that you had last year. Plus you build new ones this year. So capacity is always increasing.

Labor is always increasing in two ways. First, the population of the world grows, so we've got more people to do the work. But more importantly, the more people we've got to divide the work amongst, the more each person can specialize. And the more each can specialize, the more efficiently he can work at it.

So all these factors work to bring greater wealth to the world.

You can think of wealth as "total stuff+useful services produced" which is approximately the same as "total stuff+useful services consumed".

First, you can go from idleness to producing - if I sit on my ass I produce no wealth; if I assemble an iPhone then I create wealth since an iPhone is more useful&valuable than the unassembled components. Second, you can have great differences of production efficiency. You can make the exact same people with the same effort generate order(s) of magnitude more wealth per year by making different products, making the same products more efficiently, or combining people with capital(=machinery, automation, economies of scale). Third, trade generally creates wealth as such. There are classic examples, but the sense is that re-distributing tasks to the places where they're done relatively more efficiently allows both parties to have much more goods&services than if they'd be isolated and didn't trade.

The point is that there can be huge differences of how much wealth a person is generating, and those differences form the differences in national wealth. Simply "giving people fishes" to go on the same way doesn't generate wealth. "Teaching the people to fish" does generate wealth.

And there are two exceptions, where charity is key - first, if people are starving, then feeding them allows them to keep their means of future wealth generation, instead of eating their seeds and milkable animals, and selling their tools. And second, if you "give a fish" to kids&young adults, then that enables them to "learn fishing" and generate more wealth in the future instead of being stuck in ineffective menial jobs (that don't generate much wealth for them nor their employers) from early childhood till death.

Say you live on an island without much technology. Everybody on the island farms manually, but everyone is still hungry because they can't grow enough. Then one day somebody invents a tractor. Now all of a sudden there is enough food for everyone to eat as much as they want. The island just got wealthier because technology increased their efficiency. This process is basically how the world gets wealthier, through increases in worker efficiency.

The easiest way to see it is like this: Lets say you make chairs. Someone pays you 100$ for a chair. You make the chair with a small amount of materials, and sell it to the buyer for 100$.

At the start of this process, there was 100$ and maybe 5$ of materials. After the transaction, the 100$ is still there, but there is also a chair worth 100$ in circulation. So 105$ of assets turned into 200$.

Did those 600 million people work at all to be out of poverty or the invisible hand fed them? If they had to work to get out of poverty, I would imagine $100 would buy them enough meals, sleep, medicines to start looking for a job.

>> "Nobody on earth is rich enough to get the bottom 10% out of poverty."

Nobody is proposing just giving out money to help poor people. You do what Gates is doing. Target specific problems. If you read his annual letter this year (if you haven't it's worth it) he makes the point that by preventing death through things like Malaria, Polio etc. there are several knock on effects. Less children will die and if you can educate them you have more people to push the economy forward. Families will also reduce in size (people will have less children as the ones they have are less likely to die) and the problem of over population will be improved. I think these are some things that neither money alone nor capitalism can solve but if we can solve the underlying problems as Gates is doing capitalism can take over.

False dichotomy. Those aren't the only two choices.

Nobody's suggesting we get rid of capitalism. But effective participation in capitalism requires quite a lot that capitalism itself isn't good at providing. Government, for example. Freelance government, like warlords and mob bosses, isn't great for economic development. Good parenting and a stable home life are not things that capitalism is producing a lot of. Education and public health have very long payback times and difficult-to-capture benefits, making the ROI pretty low. That's made worse by people using capitalism's mechanisms to profit from destroying value, and a very short-term focus driven by public markets' focus on the next quarter's earnings.

As an example of what a more subtle approach gives you, look at Brazil's Bolsa Familia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsa_Fam%C3%ADlia

They are basically giving money to the poor: $13 per month per kid who stays vaccinated and in school. Studies suggest it's having a substantial impact on poverty and inequality. So yes, giving modest amounts of money (0.5% of Brazil's GDP) can reduce poverty because helps recipients to prepare themselves to participate effectively in a free-market economy.

One clarification: What I wrote could be read as suggesting that education and public health have a low ROI. That's true for VCs. But it's false for society as a whole: having an educated, healthy populace is excellent for wealth production. It makes sense for governments to invest heavily in that because government can easily capture some of that created value just by taxing everybody. Which they are already doing.

The only problem is that government investment has led to mixed (and often disastrous) results in the past.[1][2][3][4][5]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elusive_Quest_for_Growth

[2] http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/ca...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba

If you know of an approach that succeeds 100% of the time, I look forward to hearing about it. But choosing North Korea as your counterexample in opposition to modest government investment in long-term poverty reduction/capital creation efforts like education and health care is a ridiculous straw man. No statistics are available, but they surely must be one of the worst.

> Nobody's suggesting we get rid of capitalism.

With all due respect, speak for yourself.

Elon Musk risked $160M of his $160M fortune on SpaceX and Tesla (and Solar City). Most people with $160M do absolutely nothing with it of any consequence to humanity. If part of Musk's ambition is to turn his $160M into $160B I'm personally all for it. In the process of fulfilling his own ambitions he's pushing the entire race forward. The long term benefits of switching to renewable energy are be measured in trillions. Human investment in space travel will ultimately be more valuable than Earth itself.

Almost everything about the plan to go to Mars, especially about creating a "backup population" is uncertain. Compare that to the current, immediate suffering and lost potential that is caused by poverty and disease.

That's a bit of a negative way to look at it. I think in the end the goals don't have to be mutually exclusive. Elon Musk does what he does best, and Gates does his thing.

They're both great goals and I'm glad we live in a time when going to mars is something we can propose as a serious point of discussion, instead of being an unrealistic dream.

Some people may have said this before Polio vaccine was discovered:

"Almost everything about the plan to help Polio victims, especially about creating a "polio vaccine" is uncertain. Compare that to the current, immediate suffering and lost potential that is caused by poverty and disease."

See how this works?

Polio is a disease that that's causing immediate suffering and lost potential. And it was even more so before discovery of the vaccine, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

The only specific alleviation that colonizing Mars yields is that people who don't want to live on Earth don't have to live on Earth.

There are some very good reasons to pursue the colonization of Mars, mostly in the form of advancing science. A backup population is not one of these good reasons.

One plan is long term, the other is short term. Both are needed.

Curing polio is a force multiplier that will probably help us get to Mars, in the form of more demand for satellites and space related industries, as well more inventors and scientists.

Colonizing Mars will be a force mulitpler as well, mostly through indirect technology benefit and ancillary space industries(asteroid mining). It probably won't impact the effort to cure polio but will probably increase our ability to cure other diseases.

Polio is an occurrence with a probability of one, and a non-zero impact.

An catastrophic asteroid impact is a low daily probability, with an impact of up to one (one being complete wipeout of the human race).

I think it's a tossup which yields better happiness or productivity for humanity to address in the short run. In the extreme long run, of course, if you don't solve the second, there's little point solving the first issue.

The problem is a lack of resources - that resource being some collective focus of humankind, as there's no real physical resource limit preventing us from pursuing both at the moment.

As the probability of the asteroid problem is low short term we should tackle the poverty problem first. Then we will have more people to tackle the asteroid problem in the long run.

If number of people are not the limiting factor to working on both problems, why would one a) impose a condition to work on the problems in a sequential order, and b) prefer an order based on gaining more people first?

And there are other catastrophic events.

Why Mars? The moon is nearer and no less hospitable (frankly they both suck).

Mars is a vanity project however he chooses to dress it up. An interesting vanity project sure but a vanity project all the same.

And personally I have no issue with that, I just wish he'd be honest. We didn't go to the moon the first time for any good reason, we did it because it was there. Governments can't afford to pay for the "because they're there" projects any more but if Musk, Page and co can then great but don't pretend it's for the good of humanity - "because it's there" is all the justification you need for something that amazing.

The cynic in me says we went to the moon because putting a man on the moon made real the capability of getting an ICBM to anywhere on the earth - both to ourselves and the rest of the world. The optimist in me hopes we can setup shop somewhere, anywhere off-planet without similar motivations prodding us.

And it's not like Page isn't interested in health: https://plus.google.com/+LarryPage/posts/Lh8SKC6sED1

In the context of this quote: "You’re working because you want to change the world and make it better; if the company you work for is worthy of your time, why not your money as well? We just don’t think about that. I’d like for us to help out more than we are."

His philosophy could make sense.

It's his money and he has every right to do as he wishes but I don't agree with this school of thought.

>"if the company you work for is worthy of your time, why not your money as well?"

Because you're being compensated for your time? Giving money to public companies is giving money to shareholders, not to a cause or an ideology. What's to stop a corporate raider from stirring up a revolt for disbursement of the cash/share buybacks?

He can be philanthropic AND support Musk, false equivalence on his part. Set up a foundation for a specific cause that invests in Tesla stock and has a defined budget for every year based on stock performance, dividends etc. I'd like to read his full comments but on face value it seems like a very silly thing to say.

The idea that our species is geopolitically stable enough to ever maintain two populations is laughable.

Which begs the question, who's picking the 'Nauts off the ISS these days? Not sure the US has a taxi anymore with the Crimea situation unfolding.

Fortunately, as proven during Cold War and before, scientific cooperation can work fine regardless of political situation.

And what if an asteroid hits Mars first?

Better make a back up of that back up. To the moon!

How will those people with polio feel when we are vaccinating the back up population on Mars but not those on Earth?

It would be much cheaper and easier to build a city underground or underwater than on Mars. Wouldn't protect against species 8472 or the Death Star, but still.

Hint: It's not the asteroids we should be worried about.

Consider being the last enclave on Earth with clean water, reliable power, and happy people.

How long until the unwashed masses claw your bunker open with their bare hands for a chance at bettering their lot?

That's the reason we need to have colonies off-planet; in case the situation on Earth gets beyond saving.

Why don't we just build a Stanford torus and use robots and guns to keep the Earth people out? I've seen this movie...

I don't know, a bunker under a mountain doesn't get clawed open with bare hands.

That said, sure a vacation home on Mars would be great. Just that it's not very viable ... the preparation would have to be immense. It would, however, prolong the species a while later than living on Earth, as the Sun turns into a red giant. Perhaps in a few centuries.

If 300,000 people are living on Mars and an asteroid hits Earth, that's still 7 billion people dead.

Likely a lot more than 7 billion if you were to look at the population projections between now and the time we could have 300,000 people settled on Mars.

The point though, is that 300,000 people with knowledge acquired from the entirety of history is better than an empty solar system.

The point is that the human race survives.

Yeah, but I don't quite see why I should care about that aside from my default state of caring about the actual people.

Yes, it is, but the human species won't die..

It would be cheaper and faster to build the technology to find and destroy/deflect these asteroids than to create even a small permanent colony on mars.

That's what I initially thought, but asteroid deflection technology is dual-use. It can push asteroids into collision paths, potentially increasing existential risk. Colonies outside Earth guard against many other extinction risks such as plagues and nuclear war; even unlikely events like rogue comets and runaway nanotech.

Practically speaking, both require similar improvements to today's technology: cheaper access to space, larger payloads, better shielding, etc.

> If a major asteroid impacts earth

A good reason to support the B612 Foundation (http://b612foundation.org)

No, no it is not.

Any asteroid that will be an Earth killer will have such a high velocity (due to its highly elliptical orbit) that it won't matter. Consider 2012 XE54 [0]. These objects are nigh undetectable as evidenced by the detection of 2012 XE54 two days before it passed half the distance between the Moon and the Earth. A close call by any account.

Moving people off a single point of failure (Earth) is a much better use of resources.

http://www.space.com/18854-newfound-asteroid-close-flyby-ear...

The reason 2012 XE54 was only detected two days before it passed the earth is because we currently are not flying the right instrumentation to detect such objects any earlier. Fixing that problem is the whole point of the B612 foundation's project. Also, an infrared telescope can be launched a hell of a lot sooner and cheaper than Mars can be colonized.

Why's it called B612? I couldn't find any mention on the site.

It's the asteroid the Little Prince lives on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Prince

> potentially every human will be as dead as those killed by Polio

Everyone would be dead so there wouldn't be anyone left to care.

Okay, putting on my astronomer hat:

The asteroid was the root cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. The direct cause was ecological collapse.

To oversimplify things a bit, the impact event kicked up enough pollution to undercut the food chain by starving out anything that relied on photosynthesis, which starved out the herbivores, which starved out the carnivores and omnivores.

Typical asteroids are not large enough to wipe out all human life in one go. A large impact could kill billions between direct fatalities and follow-on deaths via starvation and plagues, but your survivor population would still easily exceed anything we can sustainably place on Mars (or any other extraterrestrial location) within the next few hundred years.

Even if it completely refactored modern civilization, you'd probably see some population capable of organizing and recovering a sustainable society. And that is with mass starvation, with plagues due to loss of sanitation infrastructure, with conventional farming being disrupted for years, and with the assumption that some idiot decides it's time for a preemptive nuclear war.

Furthermore, any sustainable Martian colony you could produce could equally well be isolated in a hardened bunker on Earth, if surviving a large asteroid impact were the only concern.

To wipe out all humanity with one impact, you would need to hit the Earth with something in a slightly larger class - say, the Moon.

"To wipe out all humanity with one impact, you would need to hit the Earth with something in a slightly larger class - say, the Moon"

No, if an object as large as the moon hit the earth - the earth might even be destroyed (but probably not). To wipe out humanity a body of the size between 10-100 miles in diameter would probably suffice. Fortunately near-earth orbits with a body of that size is rare.

What I would like to know is what kind of event do you imagine happening (beside practically completely obliterating Earth) that would make Mars more hospitable than post-apocalypse Earth?

I'd imagine polluted water and air with still some flora and fauna would still be better than none of those things.

I'm not sure what the point of your argument is, but this strikes me as short-sighted reasoning. Going to Mars is just the first step. It's about making (human) life multiplanetary. It's a long term game and extends beyond the solar system, and this is how it starts. (Let's just hope we don't kill ourselves before this happen).

Going to mars is pretty much pointless before we figure a way to terraform the deserts we already have on Earth. There is no more natural ressources on mars than in the middle of the Saharah or Gobi, and the climate is way worst (not even talking about the atmosphere). So why go to mars if we already have unused lands on Earth?

Start by building a self-sustaining base in the middle of the desert. If you manage to do that you'll be improving the life on Earth for a lot of human being. When all deserts, including Antartica are terraformed, colonized, and we run out of space on Earth, then maybe we can feel the need to colonize mars.

Before than, it's just dreaming about living in a sci-fi movie.

I'm just paraphrasing Musk's vision. It's not a dream; he's actively working on getting to Mars within the next decade or so. People seem to forget their history. It wasn't that long ago America was (re-)discovered. I'm puzzled why people - especially HNers - don't understand the significance of working on this.

No one has said there aren't other things worth working on. And maybe they are more important short-term (even Musk has admitted this much). So: by all means, go forth and work on them!

If our universe is just one branch in a multiverse, then we already have plenty of backups.

If you truly believe in this line of reasoning, then make a deal with someone to pay you a million dollars per every round of russian roulette you survive. This way you'll make a version of you in one of Everett branch incredibly rich. And maybe even able to give money to that branch's version of Bill Gates.

Yeah, but I can't do that to my family in the other branches.

There is something very ... problematic about the suggestion that ensuring the survival of the race is of greater importance than, or even of comparable importance to, prolonging and improving the lives of individual human beings, is there not?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf9iTZ433zs

If we ever reach a point where we are capable of establishing a permanent, self-sufficient colony on another planet, it's difficult to imagine that such a civilization would be unable to deal with any potential calamities on Earth itself.

What event could possibly make Earth less hospitable than Mars? Even assuming nuclear Armageddon or an extinction-level asteroid impact, you're still left with an environment much closer to habitability than what you would find on Mars.

> What event could possibly make Earth less hospitable than Mars?

If we reach such a point, lack of room on Earth might be a serious issue

Take the 7B people on Earth, and assume they're all families of 4. Put them each on 1/4 acre of land. Say that additional infrastructure like roads, schools, and retail will take an extra 50%.

That gives us roughly 1 million sq miles to hold the entire population of the planet on a comfortably-sized lot. That's 1/10 the size of the USA, about the size of the land area of Alaska plus Texas.

The people aren't going to be the problem with land usage.

It's really not just about "one backup colony" but rather the beginning of unlocking the abundance of the Solar System to improve (and move!) life, foremost because you think that when it comes to civilization you believe that the best days are still ahead of us.

The bizarre thing is, most extinction-level events (e.g. a large asteroid impact) would probably leave Earth still more hospitable than Mars to life as we know it. If we have the capability to survive in a climate so cold that there are CO2 avalanches, where there is practically no nitrogen or oxygen or readily available fuel and where the air is flooded with radiation equivalent to two chest X-rays every hour, what are we afraid of?

Forget Mars. Elon's best move would be to go "Dr. Strangelove": build a bunker and hire a harem.

Backup for humanity? Look, it'll be nuclear war that ends us. And if we can launch people to Mars cheaply we can certainly deliver bombs there as well.

Wouldn't it be a lot easier to invent something that will deflect an asteroid?

I cannot remember where I read it, but Musk's view is that curing polio, cancer, etc are all nobel and important, but there is only one way to guarantee human's long-term survival: Exploring space.

Not that I [dis]agree, but I think this point needs consideration.

(Not that I feel good about donating to a for-profit)

Isn't curing polio, etc a requirement for ensuring the survival of the species? What I mean is: doesn't it matter that we try to save each person rather than just a person?

Even when polio was at its worst it never threatened the survival of the species. Curing polio would save many people's lives, but it would have minimal impact on the survival of the species.

Think of it as this way: curing polio means more Einsteins for the future.

Why then don't geniuses come from third world countries. Improved standard of living will help that, not pure numbers.

Actually, no. If right now 50% of kids started to die early, we'd have pretty much the same number of kids growing up to be Einsteins; we'd just compensate it by more births just as we have always done.

In the same way, if a large portion of the population was suddenly killed today, in the long run it wouldn't affect the number of people. The total population limit/equilibrium is determined by food production, tech and social habits; but actual mass deaths (say, as ww1/ww2) are just a short term disturbance in the number of people and quickly get corrected.

It doesn't mean that curing polio is useless - it makes many people much happier; but simply there is no direct relation between happiness of one generation and wellbeing of non-immediate future generations. Culture gets passed on; built infrastructure gets passed on; reseach gets passed on; but there's almost no difference caused by generation suffering horrible conditions/war/torture [assuming no large permanent loss of knowledge/infrastructure; just the suffering&deaths] and that generation living happily. In the short term there's an effect, sure, but in the long term?

Is Germany suffering now in any way because the 30-year-war in 17th century killed 30-40% of the population? Would it be any better place if that war&suffering hadn't happened ? Definitely no. The lost people recover in a generation or two, and that's it.

Kitchen table physics is done. We already have universities brimming with underemployed PhDs producing many more exotic theories than we have the equipment to test in their lifetimes (assuming we can ever do so near Earth). More brains are no longer very useful when each requires a huge commitment of resources that we aren't providing.

It's important to note that people struck by polio tend to be from the lower socioeconomic strata of developing countries. Not only is preventing polio important for saving individuals but it's also important from exacerbating the already terrible level of inequality across the world. It's an investment in both the present and the future.

Would you rather give your money to fix a symptom of the problems we face currently as humans, or to help build a self-sustaining machine with the economic incentive to improve lives for as long as we vote with our dollars that the machine's contribution to mankind is worthwhile?

One is a practical choice, and the other is driven by a long-term ideal and belief that capitalism drives innovation better than handouts. Both have merit.

let's thinking about this from humanity's point of view in a thousand years. if someone stopped polio now, his name would be in history. if someone colonized mars, his name would be in history, and probably of bigger importance. because it is a more audacious goal and having higher impact to the future generation.

if you ask me to donate to stopping polio vs spacex, i would probably donating to stopping polio. however, that is because i'm a little bit short-sighted on goals. (incidentally, i guess this is why i'm creating an internet business rather than a space exploration program.) however, that does not mean i should not let other people try the more audacious venture.

Imagine for a moment you could colonize space. What problem would that solve, really? The thinking and systems that are causing us to destroy / consume our planet will simply be exported. It will only delay the inevitable.

The line must be drawn here, on Earth. We must overcome our primate programming here in our own nest, or else become a menace to all the universe. Fix it here, my friend. Now. For time is not on our side. That is the battle.

We would be able to transfer heavy industry and resource extraction to space, using robotic factories! That would solve all the problems, starting with scarcity!

Pollution is bad in a biosphere, but why shouldn't we strip-mine the asteroid belt with von-neumann machines?

"Imagine for a moment you could colonize space. What problem would that solve, really? "

Very interesting. Do you realize that people said exactly those same words about the microscope?

They said : What problem would seeing the same things that we already see bigger are going to solve?

It was called a "toy" with no real use. If you have a microscope you know how hard is to see something.

The fact is that we don't know what we don't know.

Just traveling to the moon changed everything. We discovered isotopes on moon surface that are not created on earth because of earth atmosphere. The same materials where not eroded by fluids behave very different.

Restating a problem (in a larger context) is not solving it.

A kindred spirit. I wonder, how many on HN share this sentiment? Man's greatest problem is man itself, particularly our primate instincts to which most are obliviously enthralled.

Understanding ourselves from a scientific perspective is the first step in a long journey to overcome our destructive natures. But as it stands, I do not see any successful attempts at such. Investment in and respect for science in the western world is declining, and most people are without any guiding principles other than the profit motive.

Ironically, this is the best situation we've ever found ourselves in, historically speaking.

Don't get me wrong, Bill is awesome, but still:

(1) Exploration of space today will some day save everybody's lives.

(2) Driving Teslas with energy from Solar city will postpone that day.

It's an interesting collision of values. One is "every life has equal value", which implies optimizing for existing, present-day lives. Which is honorable in its own way. The other is optimizing for best chance of future life. Those two values will have a lot of implications in common, but they can also conflict. I don't think there's a wrong answer here, it's just a matter of what value each person chooses to optimize for.

Which do you think will have a bigger impact on humanity, and deserve more chapters in history books?

a). Prolonged a few more lives by eradicating some viruses. b). Set up a colony on MARS

The people loving Bill Gates "second act" seem to forget how he made all those billions in the first place - by being evil, crushing better competitors, monopolistic practices, etc etc etc. And by basically creating terrible software, holding back the computer industry for years.

History is written by the winners (or survivors), so if a colony on "MARS" would survive humanity, certainly option b) will deserve most of the chapters.

It's pretty sad to see though that many users are only seeing two options:

1) give away money to charities to solve symptomatic problems 2) invest money in technologies who try to solve, again, symptomatic problems

A more effective approach would be to work out the causes; first of all, education would be the key.

But this is the hard way of approaching problems.

It's all about prioritization, e.g. the big rock-small rock MBA parable, so any argument about which one (e.g. saving polio or to create a backup population on Mars) is better is pointless. The real argument is how to allocate resources among these things that must all be done.

Humanity needs to be saved but only if we don't lose our humanity, everybody needs to be given a fair chance, even if it's one in a million. Some of the kids I sometimes deal with operate with slightly above this chance, some I read about get much, much lower.

I suggest you do this: While browsing, whenever you encounter a story like this (http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1wsybd/til_in...) or this (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/07/world/middleeast/07photo.h...) or see a photo like this famous one (http://www.mukto-mona.com/Articles/kevin_carter/sudan_child....), save it to an out of the way folder on your laptop. Whenever you get too cocky, take 15 mins to look at that folder and think how far we have to go. Great way to degauss your perspective.

"Everybody needs to be given a fair chance, even if it's one in a million."

Ain't been true for thousands of years.

The question is whether we prioritize the species, at large, or an individual. If the answer is species at large, off-site backups make a great deal more sense.

Well said.

Sorry, but it is pretty pointless to stomp out Polio if 90% of life is stomped out by an asteroid. It's great to have a Bill Gates, but it's even better to have an Elon Musk, IMHO.

it's also pointless to wipe out polio if the asteroid is going to stomp us the next day.

You know what else will wipe out polio? An extinction-level asteroid strike that wipes out all of mankind if we don't manage to colonize another planet before then.

you don't need billions to eradicate polio. How much money has Bill Gates actually spent on polio?

There are at most a few thousand workers in Pakistan, india and nigeria going around with polio vaccine oral drops that cost cents per dose. They don't cost billions, not even hundreds of millions.

Frankly, I'd rather he splits, half to Gates and another to Musk. The world needs more than just one brilliant guy to know where money can be best spent.

I don't think it's necessarily important for everyone to attempt to maximize the direct life benefit of their incomes and activities.

I say this because you say, "makes millions of lives better" as if that'd be the end of the discussion. I don't think it is.

Elon Musk is also trying to save humanity from climate change with a solar company, battery factory and electric cars. Climate change is a much greater threat to humanity than polio.

What's the difference between giving your money to Gates vs Musk?

Here's one way to look at it: When you give your money to Gates you generally know what you're going to get - stamping up diseases, immunisation and lots of other great stuff.

When you give your money to Musk, you don't. It's much less clear. You don't know what problems he's going to tackle. You don't know how he's going to tackle them. And you don't know if he'll succeed.

1. Giving your money to Bill is like investing in a tried-and-tested branch of science or technology with measurable possible outcomes.

2. Giving your money to Elon is like investing in an absolutely cutting-edge branch of science. At the absolute bleeding-edge. Maybe even beyond the bleeding-edge.

Both are important. Here's a story to show you why.

One day back in the 1930s, before the war, all the academics in the USA found an unusual survey in their pigeonholes. It asked them to rank all the various academic departments in the USA by importance. Most important at the top. Least important at the bottom. They were asked to use their intuitions - what did they feel were the most and least relevant to the future of humanity.

After the academics filled in these surveys, their responses were gathered up and collated into a league table with the 'most important' disciplines at the top, and the least at the bottom. What was at the top? All the usual suspects like branches of physics, chemistry and biology.

What was at the bottom? Right at the bottom was Medieval History. The very least important academic subject. So far, so unexpected. But second to bottom was Nuclear Physics. Before the war it was considered a useless, hypo-theoretical branch of science only studied by nuts and eccentrics.

Of course, not much longer later the US dropped 2 bombs on Japan ending the nuclear war.

If we'd only funnelled our money in those things with obvious tangible, well-defined outputs, we'd have shut down our nuclear physics departments and the world would have been a very different place.

What I'm saying is that investing in long-sighted, ill-defined, radical, impractical projects is not only valuable but essential.

Dropping money to people like Bill is important. But so is dropping money to Elon.

One of them ensures that we continue to make sustainable progress - that we continue down the road that we're already walking. The other ensures that we have the opportunity to find new roads, new paths and new routes.

>If we'd only funnelled our money in those things with tangible, well-defined outputs, we'd have shut down our nuclear physics Departments and the world would have been a very different place.

What? Are you suggesting that the US wouldn't have researched Nuclear weapons if we had started sooner?

I think ekpyrotic is suggesting that pre-WW2 Nuclear Physics would not have fallen under the category of "things with tangible, well-defined outputs." So the suggestion is that the US would not have researched Nuclear Weapons if they had decided not to fund Nuclear Physics research.

Actually US did not founded atomic research. It was kick started by French, English and to some extend Germans. Manhattan was mostly developed by immigrants from Europe.

No, the point being made is that we wouldn't have been as far along as we were had we cut funding to such an impractical field.

A lot of engineering and basic research seems quite pointless until it, well, isn't.

Can you give a citation for this 1930s survey?

I'm not sure whether the survey is real or OP made it up, but I don't think it matters. The point is that "...investing in long-sighted, ill-defined, radical, impractical projects is not only valuable but essential."

If its real, a citation would be great. Its a fantastic story worthy of sharing, (presuming its not a fabrication).

It absolutely matters. It's a completely open question under which circumstances and to what extent we should trust expert opinion in planning the future. "...investing in long-sighted, ill-defined, radical, impractical projects is not only valuable but essential" is a rather useless platitude without further data--as in actual facts--because such long-range projects run the gamat from promising to useless to actively negative.

Besides which, we weren't providing that much funding to nuclear physics before the War.

We only funded the Manhattan Project after the War had already started, and after nuclear fission had already been demonstrated in the lab. In Germany, mind you.

In other words, we didn't get the atomic bomb by lavishly funding the second least useful field of science. We got it by funding what was already known at the time to be the most promising weapon of mass destruction.

People had been writing about the possibilities of atomic energy since Rutherford. In fact, H. G. Wells even wrote a book, prior to the First World War, on how nuclear weapons would make it possible to destroy human civilization. (He got the details wrong about how the weapon worked, but he appreciated the enormous energies involved.)

A bunch of medieval historians may not have appreciated nuclear physics, but the real experts already knew of its potential. It was, after all, Albert Einstein who helped get the ball rolling on the Manhattan Project, by signing that letter and lending his celebrity to the cause.

The scientist who conducted the survey? Albert Einstein.

Consider also how much money was invested during WWII in mystics and parapsychologists and look at how well all that turned out. I don't think that you can really say that with confidence, that Elon's money is as well-deserved or well-invested as Bill's.

How is Elon Musk comparable to mysticism and parapsychology? A physics-major working on engineering challenges like space travel, electric cars, and renewable energy... Elon Musk's pursuits are at least based in science, its the business viability that is unknown at the beginning

Elon Musk's work is based on our best guesses about how the world works. "Crazy" stuff in the past was based on our ancestor's best guesses about how stuff works.

The only difference is hindsight. Bullshit artists distort things as much today as they did in the past.

There's a key difference: Elon Musk is delivering results.

The scientific method enables one to deliver results because its models are predictive, not merely explanatory. The engineering and science we do today is also predictive because it relies on models cultivated within this methodology.

Equating today's "best guesses" with those in medieval or ancient times is absolutely inane.

Medieval History is important for Christians to study to protect them from making the same mistakes (i.e., The Crusades).

Disclaimer: I'm a Christian.

That's true of all history. As in the George Santayana adage: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

It is also important so that Christians realize they'd be Muslims now, if it wasn't for those "mistakes". Disclaimer: I'm an Atheist.

This assumes that no other events would have changed history.

How did sacking Constantinople prevent Christians from becoming muslims?

That also assumes that Islam would have gone unchanged, as well.

I think it is much simpler than you described.

Investing in Musk would drive technology up. Technology is great multiplier, if you have infrastructure to multiply it with.

Investing in Gates would drive up quality of life and help to build infrastructure in the first place.

It is obvious that investing in both is optimal strategy as investment in one increases eventual value of other investment.

I agree that investing in both is optimal. I'm unclear, however, how quality of life builds infrastructure?

When you're no longer stressing about where you're going to get food for the next day, researching big ideas seems a lot more reachable

People who aren't struggling to survive have the luxury to spend time working on other things, like infrastructure. There's no guarantee that will happen, though.

How much cheaper or more accessible will the future version of the connected tablet be in 1-2 generations (25-50 years)? 20 years ago mobile phones were rare, expensive and not very good. What if the availability of energy takes a huge leap.

Those things can have a profound effect on the productive capacity of a people born into it. Can the third world brands of 'education as a major challenge' be solved to the point where most kids have a decent chance by our standards? If those kinds of changes happen, part of that increase in productive capacity almost certainly will go into building infrastructure.

Honestly I think that part of investing on a horizon like this and betting on either ambitious charities, companies or even in scientific research is that it's hard to know. Some people leave their endowments to Art and I'm not sure you can really coherently argue against it.

Is Musk capital constrained? Does he have projects out there that he'd like to do but can't get investors for? This seems doubtful to me. Whereas stamping out malaria is always capital constrained.

I'm sure if given enough capital he'd love to immediately switch into deploying a Manned mission to Mars, the Hyperloop, mass producing the economy electric sedan at 300 MPC for like $25k. All his businesses have capital constraints, but that just means they are healthy businesses. We should all know what happens when you give a startup too much money too fast.

You're kidding, right? He only had enough money to type up a PDF and cannot even afford to host it on its own site, he has to use his companies' sites.

http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-201...

http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/h...

It is on its face obviously severely capital-constrained.

>2. Giving your money to Elon is like investing in an absolutely cutting-edge branch of science. At the absolute bleeding-edge. Maybe even beyond the bleeding-edge.

Elon Musk runs engineering companies. They are certainly not at "the absolute bleeding edge" of science though.

If you want to fund science, then fund science. Scientists and their graduate students actually do work at the bleeding edge of science and routinely push beyond it with only a small, small, fraction of what these billionaires make.

The issue is the tangible results. You could put a lot of money in science and end up with a lot of dead ends. I think it would be better to think of it as investing in the cutting edge of science that has already been researched being implemented.

Precisely this. Elon is a genius, and absolutely one of the greatest men alive. But we must understand that he is an engineer, not a scientist. The fact that he had to put his own money into an ambitious engineering project just goes to show how ridiculously conservative most investors are. Is it any surprise then, that basic science funding from profit driven investors is so abysmal?

We need the NIH, we need the NSF, we need CERN, now more than ever. Basic science is the only way to get significantly more return from a dollar invested, but nobody wants to pay upfront. That is why we need taxpayer funding in basic science. Scientific breakthroughs will yield such massive dividends in the long run, that citizens would literally be spending on their own well being in a way that would otherwise be impossible. Discoveries such as vaccines, antibiotics, surgery, genetics and others have allowed humans to enjoy a standard of living unfathomable even a hundred years ago.

If politicians had any vision whatsoever, they would have instigated a New Deal with massive investment in scientific and engineering research projects. Yet what did they do? Feed banks infinite loans at prime to keep them afloat, so that banks can choose to continue lending on a profit driven schedule.

Guess who gets loans at prime from banks? Not the NIH, that's for sure.

Precisely this? When is this not precise?

  this

  1.  Used  to identify  a specific  person or  thing close  at hand  or being
      indicated or experienced
  1.1 Used to introduce someone or something
  1.2 Referring to the  nearer of two things close to  the speaker (the other,
      if specified, being identified by ‘that’)
  2.  Referring to a specific thing just mentioned
  3.  Used  to identify  a specific  person or  thing close  at hand  or being
      indicated or experienced:

More: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/this?q=...

"This" on its own as a word indicating agreement is a fairly recent usage.

Notably, the very definition you posted makes no mention of that usage. From that definition there is no way to tell if "This" on its own means "This predeceeding comment is completely wrong" or "This predeceeding comment is completely right".

Also, "precisely" indicates degree rather than the generalist term "this". For example, "I'll meet you at this time tomorrow" and "I'll meet you at precisely this time tomorrow" have different connotations for how accurate you are expecting to be.

>Elon ... is an engineer

Oh really? Where did he study engineering? When did he take the FE exam?

That's not a term that you can throw around all willy-nilly, especially in the context of hardware. Next, are you about to tell me that the CEO of Ford is also an engineer?

Alan Mulally (CEO of FORD) is a former Boeing engineer.

Musk describes himself as an engineer. I'd say his demonstrated ability to lead major engineering projects qualifies him to use that title.

http://elonmusk.com/

The term "engineer" does not imply chartered/professional status in current popular usage.

Given that some people go around calling themselves Happiness Engineer or Growth Engineer I highly doubt that people in SV care enough about the difference. Also you can major in Financial Engineering at Princeton so I don't really think people take the FE exam before calling themselves an engineer.

Although I do take issue with the above (happiness & growth) usage of the term, I'm completely fine with Elon calling himself an engineer because he actually did study engineering (albeit informally) via books, etc.

I just looked it up. The CEO of Ford (Alan Mulally) holds a masters degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering (among others). If you only allow for the term "engineer" to be used to refer to someone who has en engineering educational background, then yes, he is.

Musk, on the other hand, holds a degree in physics. He started a PhD program on applied physics, but quit to pursue his entrepreneurial interests. If you judge engineers purely from an educational perspective, then yes, Musk is not an engineer.

Nonetheless, if we look at wikipedia's description of what "Engineer" means, we get:

> An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics, and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical problems.

So, by this definition, Musk is an engineer...

Yes, but how do we "fund science"? We used to do that through the government, but now government funding of science is so broken primarily due to large segments of the US population being "anti-science" and voting that way thus those who control the purse strings don't see the value anymore. Maybe we need to start crowdsourcing scientific research?

Maybe we need to start crowdsourcing scientific research?

Like this?

https://experiment.com/

Perhaps it's fair to say that they're at the absolute bleeding edge of /applied science/?

After all, SpaceX's plans for a reusable rocket are certainly more ambitious than anything governments have been doing for the last several decades.

The internet, heaps of computing technology advances, several trips to the moon, space stations, and a shuttle program all have been done by the government "for the last several decades."

It is undeniably government funded, backed, and run research that has fostered the technological "magic" we see today. I wrote "undeniable" because it is a fact--not a conjecture, opinion, or item subject to debate. Government funded and government run research programs created our space-age technology (literally) and the internet, and fueled a great percentage of the other developments that have advanced our technology so rapidly in the last several decades.

Private companies (whether held privately or publicly traded) are mainly creatures of fear and risk aversion--even the ones that are relatively less so than others. There's nothing especially "bleeding edge" about SpaceX or Tesla, or just about anything else Musk has been involved with. Historically, it has usually taken a great thrust by the government to make big advances, whether through subsidies (i.e. corporate welfare) or direct involvement (NASA/DARPA).

And yet the US government was never able -- nor did they try -- to develop a fully-reusable rocket, which is something SpaceX is currently doing.

Saying that corporations are risk-averse followers is inane. Governments broadly fund a great deal of seed-level research. Sometimes they develop applications based upon it. Sometimes corporations get there first.

We're seeing an instance of the latter with SpaceX, I think.

What is inane about the statement regarding corporations? Generally speaking, unless there is a significant level of government backing or subsidy for the research, corporations just don't engage in it. There are of course exceptions here and there, but most of even that research is hardly bleeding edge. It's mostly very conservative iterations on the original research done by the government (or with government backing). This is true in medicine, space, computer, and just about any other human endeavor one can think of.

Aside from that, your statement about a fully-reusable rocket may technically be true (I suspect that NASA actually has investigated a 100%-reusable rocket, but don't know for sure), but it is trivial and unsupportive of your point, since the concept isn't ground-breaking (the shuttle was completely reusable, even if the delivery system was only partially reusable) or even very risky, given the decades of research and engineering that the government has put into space rocket technology. That was, in fact my point. "Being conservative and risk-averse" is not synonymous with "never does anything new."

I'm not sure about the US, but USSR developed one, the Energia II. It was AFAIK never built, it shared the destiny of the rest of the Energia/Buran programme, but they were certainly able and did try. I can't find any references ATM, but I'm pretty sure the US also had plans for a fully reusable Shuttle complex, before the whole thing got ridiculous in planning stages.

EDIT: And what's with the fixation on reusable rockets? It might lower some cost but it's hardly an amazing feat of science and engineering.

This presupposes that engineering companies don't (can't?) do bleeding edge research.

saw this stat today on twitter (from TED 2014): "gutenberg invented the printing press when only 8% of europeans knew how to read"

Having recently finished Black Swan and Antifragile I would argue for Taleb's investment advice: 80% to Gates earning you a stable and guaranteed, if not boring, improvement. 20% to Musk to provide you the maximum exposure to risk and therefore potentially unlimited upside.

The 80% is pretty much guaranteed to be put to good use. And even at the worst case for the rest, you only lose 20%.

very nice write-up, thanks for writing this.

Edit: just so you are not our own little Malcolm Gladwell though, a [1] would have been nice.

Either that story is not true or it is beside the point. Nuclear fission was the huge topic of physics research in the 30's and the potential to weaponize it was widely understood by physicists, and the government aggressively funded it (the government mind you, not private companies). To say that nuclear physics was considered an irrelevant field by the scientific community in the 30's is just not true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_nuclear_weapons#Phys...

Agree with the overall text of your comment but I think this part was not what you meant to write:

> Of course, not much longer later the US dropped 2 bombs on Japan ending the nuclear war.

Although I get the thinking behind it if all wealthy people did this it would just lead to the privileged having better lives and no progress for the poor. A larger inequality gap.

I think Bill Gates has the best plan for the wealthy. Targeting specific problems (Polio, Malaria etc.), solving them, and vastly (and quickly) improving people's lives with the aim of bringing people out of poverty.

I don't deny Musk could do fantastic things with that money that would benefit some of humanity but it seems more important to me that we get those in poverty out of it. That's more important for humanity than building the hyperloop or going to Mars. For even the middle classes life is pretty good. Get everyone up to that level.

Well you got Buffett backing up Bill Gates so that's good.

Solving poverty can also help improve world peace. When your economy is doing well, you are less likely to let your leaders drag your country into war.

Hell, giving the poorest even an extra dollar a day can double their income and make a vast difference in their standard of living.

that does not make them suddenly rich. Changing their (and everyone's) living conditions does. China is a great example. If we had just given them donation for the last 30 years, I am pretty sure they'd still be riding their bikes to work and dream of "finally getting out of poverty)

I see what you're getting at, but I don't see why you think direct cash donations to people has no impact on someone's enterprise. The studies by Give Directly show that a lot of poor people will use direct monetary donations to invest in themselves in sustainable ways, such as starting a new business or buying infrastructure for their home or village. Besides, if you have a bike and ride it to a job, you are not the kind of poor I'm talking about.

The poor I'm talking about are people who have insufficient food and fresh water. You can't expect people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps when they're dying of malnutrition and disease in the middle of a country with a dysfunctional government.

So let's see: dysfunctional government > disease > malnutrition > lack of education > dysfunctional government. How did China, Thailand (or any other developing nation) break out of that vicious cycle? What would the main arbiter of positive change be? If you had limited resources but wanted to effect the most positive change possible, what would you do? My argument was that simply handing money out (indiscriminately - we might be of the same opinion there) is not the most effective way.

Arguably, a world with less poverty would be a world more capable of focusing on space exploration. Poverty drags everyone down in so many ways.

Indeed. So many people seem to ignore the fact that the more people have, the more they consume. It's why the eroding of the power of the middle class seems so shortsighted - unless you're already a plutocrat.

A summary of this thread:

   - Larry Page bad
   - Rich people heartless
   - Capitalism bad
   - Investing in innovation and progress not important
   - Profit bad
   - Charity universally effective and good

You forgot

- trite summaries good

Did you really read the whole thread? I see both sides are being defended here.

how are we supposed to know what to do if we don't take a survey?

Mars bad.

You forgot:

- Bill Gates is awesome because he saves lives.

Sure, cause paving the way for an electric future won't be saving millions of lives.

I certainly have opinions about Bill Gates. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

As someone who actually lives in Africa, Larry Page is spot on. The only people who think charities are good for anything are the ones that have no contact with them - they are a black hole of good intentions that simply do not accomplish anything on the ground. If charities like the Gates Foundation just gave that money away to the poor they would actually do some good. As it stands, they do more harm in the form of destroying local industry and media blitzes than actual good.

Citation needed?

I'd take his argument more seriously if he were talking about doing something about climate change. Risk to the species from climate change in the next 100 years dwarfs the risk of an astroid in the next million.

A small colony on Mars won't survive without Earth any more than the Vikings survived in Greenland without trade from Europe. Read Jarad Diamond's COLLAPSE if you want to understand what destroys civilizations.

You don't think that aiming to reduce fossil fuel usage in favor of solar power counts as "doing something about climate change"?

I have seen no reports implying any threat whatsoever to our survival from climate change. The worst case expectations involve what exactly? Water levels rising that flood many of our coastal cities? Large parts of our arable land becoming unfarmable? That's bad, but that's not a risk to our survival. None of the climate change estimates predict earth becoming uninhabitable, they simply warn that we'd need to do things such as migrate millions of people and possibly reduce our population due to reduced food supplies.

Even if the vast majority of us die in the process and we're left with a global population of just 1B or 500M, then that is still enough for a decent civilization capable of supporting space flight; on the other hand, a risk that threatens to destroy us permanently is far more important than a risk that'd simply harm us, and from which we'd be able to recover in time.

The goal is not a small colony of Mars - such a colony is simply an investment & testground to become a multi-planet species, which also is the only way how we can mitigate all risks that may cause Earth to become uninhabitable - including climate change, nuclear/biological/whatever war, asteroid strikes etc.

> Even if the vast majority of us die in the process and we're left with a global population of just 1B or 500M, then that is still enough for a decent civilization capable of supporting space flight

This is a side note, but I was actually just looking at population growth over time, and it kinda blew my mind that the estimated global population was only 310m 1000 years ago, and 879m 200 years ago. The idea of losing ~93% of the world's population sounds catastrophic, but given our current medical technology (and a post-apocalyptic "mandate" to reproduce and repopulate the earth) I don't think it would take us very long (relatively speaking) to recover. Kinda crazy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

Worst case is that we hit a feedback loop after at +5C and spike to +10C or more and we get a repeat of the Permian extinction.

No responsible scientist can come out and predict this because it is unknown territory. But if you want to go to Mars based on a meteor-driven event at the P-T transition, you damn well better worry that we recreating the events that lead to the 'Great Dying' at the end of the Permian that took out 90% of all _species_ at the time.

Considering that the technologies Musk's companies are developing may be literally what's needed to save humanity from catastrophic collapse (batteries, solar, electric), it might on the long be the better choice.

Yeah. I think his decision is hard to really discuss or weigh out, at this point.

When Larry Page announced on Google+ that he had donated money for flu shots for children in San Francisco,[1] he was decried by many people who commented below his post, for example,

"The flu shot is bad for you. It is poison. +Larry Page kids don't need that."

"That's right give them a flu shot to get rid of what the government poisons us"

"Awesomely bad. I think I'd research what's in those year old vaccines before injecting them."

"Injecting viruses - to attack the immune system - and hope that it activates antibodies which attack these and (hopefully) future viruses, ... makes no sense to me. Do not harm your kids please."

and so on. (Some really stupid comments that I remember from that time seem to have been deleted later, judging by the gaps in the comment thread.) If Page is getting this kind of grief from donating to charitable causes, maybe he really would rather give money to for-profit businesses.

[1] https://plus.google.com/+LarryPage/posts/32xY3Z1zckL

I don't have many businessmen I respect because I think most CEO's are sociopaths, but Elon Musk is probably the greatest businessman/engineer of the past 100 years.

I absolutely don't see a problem with Larry Page giving his money to Musk.

Edit: Watch the next thing I read is about how much of an asshole Musk is. And how he stomped on a bunch of good people to get to the top.

I guess Larry is like Carlos slim, doesn't think charity works: http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2010/10/15/worlds-richest-man-ch...

I don't agree but I wouldn't mind Elon Musk getting money for big projects that the gov't might have done in the past. Like Eisenhower's interstates/highway to something like Elon's electric highways. If there is more industry/market/inroads more people can make money and subsequently give to charity, not a select few. Rising tide lifts all boats, so that answer is both.

To me it seems he has basically ranked Larry Page > Elon Musk (or he'd have given the money away already) and Elon Musk > Bill Gates.

I don't agree, but it is his money.

Sounds like people are starting to take Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth" to heart (although I guess Page would only be going half way). It's kind of exciting actually - I think this is the first time in history where enough wealthy people are going that route that we can observe how well things work under that framework.

Well, Page is arguing that private companies should be beneficiaries of charity. In the transcript, he says Google employees should donate money to the company.

There are two issues at hand

1) Value of life vs. value of species/society

2) Leverage

While I think what Bill Gates does is absolutely a noble cause and will improve the lives of millions (if not billions), it is not necessarily the most effective way to fix humanity.

I say this because of #2, leverage. Levers as in force multipliers, as in things that have a meaningful impact on the world. Currently, the largest levers on the planet seem to be corporations and most of the corporations have very selfish, short term goals. This is nothing short of a tragedy and if we can apply a few multi-billion dollar levers appropriately then our world will almost immediately become a much better place.

You can argue that the hyper loop is a first world problem and doesn't help the majority of the impoverished world. Here's a counter point for you: One of the main reasons we don't ship off all the food wasted in the US is because transportation sucks, if we had a hyper efficient means of transportation then all sorts of options open up for moving food and other goods (water?) to areas in need.

The fact is, cheaper and more efficient transportation/communication breaks down barriers and has a stabilizing effect on humanity. Cheaper and more abundant power results in higher quality of life. New medical tools and techniques eliminate suffering. Anything you can do altruistically, you can do far more efficiently (and more sustainably) with a proper technological solution.

Luckily this is not an either/or and approaching the problem from both ends is obviously ideal.

This is exactly why the inequality gap will grow, not shrink, and not for any good reason, like "meritocracy" (read: "mirrortocracy")

Remember Peter Norvig's proof that increasing inequality is not the result of virtue or fitness of the winners, but merely a statistical phenomenon:

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Economics...

While Norvig's argument is interesting and convincing, it has to be pointed out that it is far from a proof.

OK, you're right on that. It still reveals a lot about inequality. I meant it not as a mathematical proof, but as evidence.

If you look into what the actual outcomes of "charity" and development aid are in the third world, this makes perfect sense.

Does anyone still wonder why regular people in the bay area hate the idea of Google and hot tech companies in general?

The technological advances that would come out of learning how to get to Mars would be incredible for life here on Mars. Imagine if we discover ways to grow healthy food from pure waste? What if we learn to eradicate common diseases? All these aren't out of the range of possibilities for a mission to Mars. The people who say this a waste of money are the same people saying NASA is a waste of money: http://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2011/ps_5.html

Hmmm, Larry better think twice about updating the firmware in his Tesla now. Suddenly his brakes don't work very well...

I think you misread the article.

No he didn't, he's joking about how Elon Musk wants to cash in those billions NOW if he can somehow take Larry out of the picture...

Personally, I would donate it all to Aubrey de Grey.

Aging is the leading cause of death.

good point. something we ought to focus on.

Elon Musk sure must be flattered, what with being considered a modern day messiah and all.

Maybe he is disappointed with charity and non-profit companies… they are supposed to be fill of good feelings but maybe their owners are not. A lot of people think that people who work for charity or non-profit companies work for free, just to feel good or develop as a person but that would not be true. People who set up this kind of companies can get the wage they think they deserve (normally a lot) so a lot of money for “the charity” finish in their pockets after doing nothing very special or smart to help the poors, and when people find out that, they feel really disappointed (as me). I have volunteered several times and I saw things I didn't like.

I think some people may think that if you work 100% for a non-profit company you should get something. Well, I agree on that but not crazy wages of 6 numbers for doing not very much… I think non-profit companies should have transparent money accounts to every member so that every person can see what they do with their money, they are fill of good and nice feelings, aren't they?why don’t they show us all the good things they do with the money?

And in an alternate reality the one destined to invent the warp drive gets killed by malaria on safari. The impact on human progress due to preventable death is incalculable. I believe we have an obligation to explore space, but there has to be balance, and fortunately there is. Page is welcome to leave his money to Musk if that's what he wants, charity will continue regardless.

> And in an alternate reality the one destined to invent the warp drive gets killed by malaria on safari.

The thing about scientifc breakthroughs is that they are almost never dependent on a particular "brilliant mind"; they are the product of accumulated knowledge and technology reaching a critical mass. Notice how many things in maths and physics were (and are) co-invented by many people within short timespans. Even if our fictional warp field theorist got shot, someone else somewhere else in the world would build the drive five minutes later.

I don't this is so much anti-charity as it is pro-Musk and his incredible knack for changing the World in big ways.

Many charities have a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of money evaporates on it's way down the pipe. But with people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, you end up getting a lot of bang for your buck because they're so efficient at going straight to the problem and solving it.

Isn't this entire discussion a false dichotomy? It seems from this thread the only two options for everyone is to donate to things that Gates does vs. things that Musk does.

The same thing happened when India launched its Mars mission, with people saying they should take care of their poverty first. But, the discussion around that time on HN was in favor of India exploring space.

Perhaps I am insufficiently familiar with the ventures of Elon Musk, but doesn't he mostly make advanced technology for rich people?

Improved energy and transportation tech will do all of is a service. Right now he's making tech for rich people because the margins can be high enough to fund extensive R&D which will then be used for more universal needs. Tesla is basically a battery tech research company that makes cars to fund itself. This will be clear in the coming years as every other company has to rely on Tesla's batteries because no one spent as much money researching them.

This could be more accurately phrased as "I believe Elon Musk will do more good for mankind with my money than any organization that would qualify as 'charity.'"

NOTE: He may actually not mean that, but that is how I understood what he said, assuming by context that he is speaking about what will do the most good.

If you really believe capitalism has the most power to affect positive change for humanity above philanthropic or charitable giving, shouldn't it stand to reason that markets will allocate the necessary capital to people like Musk for a return on investment anyway?

Indeed. But that's already happening, see for instance: www.marscoin.org

Helping poor people is extremely hard. I am pretty confident that going to Mars is solvable by just throwing enough money at it. Solving poverty for more than a very breve period is much harder. There was an episode about the problems the Millenium Villages project was encountering (http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/01/nina_munk_on_po.htm...) and it just made clear how many problems there are to overcome that you just don't consider. I am not saying it's unsolvable, but it's harder than traveling to Mars or making a self driving car. So Elon is the safer bet.

I probably would too, or at least a sizable proportion to people like him and targeted, proven philanthropies like Gates.

But a question Ive been pondering is, why didn't he give Elon a few chips while he was alive back in 2008 and both SpaceX and Tesla were only the ropes and almost dustbin material? Why didn't anyone back him then? And Page was/is a personal friend of his. ISV had no problem during the same period throwing 40 million at Color and other shit like it, but were indifferent to Musk's struggles.

Glad to see he prevailed to make people think bigger, in any event.

Most of the thread so far.

A bunch of commentary by 1%ers (Which 90% of HN'ers are) commenting on the morals of people a little bit richer than they are.

Except most people in this thread will give nothing on death to charity.

Why are there not more Elon Musks? Is someone with engineering skill, motivation, clarity of thinking, and execution ability that rare? Is it that rare in the circles of the very wealthy?

Because you missed one thing - caring about something else than your own (and your family's), short-term profit. Musk has all the things you mentioned, but he also has a strong imperative to do something for the betterment of mankind. Not - like 99% of businesses seem to work - how to earn money pretending to care about something valuable. And, sadly, that kind of thinking seems to be rare and discouraged in the society.

Gates doesn't do charity in the traditional sense. He focuses on very specific areas and measures the success well. Page was probably talking about traditional charities.

Immediately reminded me of an Ayn Rand quote:

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started."

If her point is that we should clamp down on intergenerational transfers of larges amounts of wealth, I agree! There's a first for everything, I suppose.

Although, I could extend that argument. If these ubermen are so good so repeatably, they shouldn't worry so much about progressive taxation. After all, they can remake their fortunes even if you whittle them away, right?

Question is he really going to give Billions to Elon Musk? or is it just another attempt to grab attention. Reading through the comments, I guess there is nothing wrong in investing projects that are too much futuristics, another point Larry seemed to be making was, there are plenty of people donating already to our current serious problems, while there are a few who actually do for projects that belong to far future.

Will you give Billions to Hank Rearden to make "Rearden Steel" or to Center for Iron & Steelmaking Research at Carnegie Mellon University?

Depends on the charity. That's why Bill Gates has devoted most of his productivity towards building and running charities that work.

I think he is saying "charitable organizations only help poor people and I would rather help build the future seen in elysium"

While big projects that change humanity are worth it, it's also sad that things that don't directly make money (humanities) are thus seemingly not worthy of money.

I wish more of these guys were benefactors recognizing that innovation can happen to culture and arts, not just science. That philosophy seems to have been a relic of the steel/railroad era.

Page could also invest some of his money in www.marscoin.org and let cryptocurrencies take us to Mars. That seems to be a very efficient way. There might even be a MedicalCoin that does the same thing for Polio. Now that would be a very smart way to leave your money behind - maybe a DAC trust-fund living on the etherum blockchain...

Why wait until death? I'm sure Elon could use the money sooner, putting it towards a cause LP would be pleased about.

He better hope he doesn't have stock in Musk's companies already. If it turns out he owns a bunch of Tesla stock he could get accused of a pump and dump scheme. ;)

He does not have to hope, he can simply sell that stock ahead of time.

Perhaps it is because Google is doing good, nobel things as well.

Then why make the claim in the first place? Does he assume Google will stop doing meaningful things once he dies?

I have to say I agree with him.

Charities get billions in donations while revolutionary and ambitious pursuits get none of that encouragement.

Charities are great but how about we focus on helping others do some awesome shit too.

Specially people who have proven to have the determination to stick with it and try everything possible until it works.

That's great news. He can start now so that next time Elon needs half a billion the taxpayers won't need to provide a risky low interest loan.

I question why any one person should have billions of dollars left to their whims in the first place. It's not simply the "natural way" of things. Our system is built to reward financiers, founders, and executives at vast disproportion to employees. Don't get me wrong, those first three groups are really important. I just think that when we talk about individuals having 11-figure sums of wealth, maybe something is kind of out of whack.

And some of them simply inherited that wealth, which is a whole other level of absurd.

To put it simply, the problem is that any possible cure is worse than the disease itself. Stopping people from having that much money creates at least as many problems as it solves.

Interesting. How so?

I mean, I suppose you could be right, but my point is that we take it for granted that the way things work in our society is just the natural state. It isn't. There are all sorts of policies in place that lead to compensation for various actors being what it is.

Because the devil is in the details. Let's say a guy gets rich. Do you put him in jail? If yes, for what crime? If not, you'll probably want to confiscate his wealth. What if it's not cash, but assets: cars, houses, gold bars. You (or the government) confiscate all of them, now you have to sell them; the simple act of selling them devalues them (depending on how many there are of them). So now the government either owns a bunch of useless (to them) assets, or a pile of cash that will be quickly spent.

Also, a much simpler explanation is: moving wealth from rich people to government just makes government rich. This doesn't change the underlying problem, it just shifts power into different hands.

Then there's the prevention approach. How do you even prevent people from owning stuff/having money? You'd have to completely discourage savings, and force people to spend everything they make.

I don't advocate criminalizing wealth. I'm not sure how you got that from my posts.

What I question is whether the method by which our system allocates wealth is optimal in any way. Yes, I think there are things we could do from a taxation standpoint to reallocate or put to public use, but that doesn't address the root issue, and it also gives people the impression that their gross earnings are naturally theirs in the first place.

Imagine for a Fake America with the same number of dollars, each with the same purchasing power as in the real America. Now imagine that the wealthiest American had, say, $250M, due to the norms of compensation in Fake America. What would society look like? Would anyone whose wealth in this Fake America is 1% of their wealth in Real America even know the difference?

Is this scenario possible? Who knows. Perhaps the specific scale of inequality in Real America is exactly optimal. Of course, we don't know whether this flatter distribution would reproduce the same level of enterprise we see in Real America. But I don't see why not. The 0.01% would have less resources to wield, but we'd also have way more people with resources far beyond their needs. If I never thought it would be conceivable to be a billionaire, the allure of the possibility of being a hundred-millionaire would still tempt me.

The tacit counterargument is that the only things that can possibly promote private enterprise on the scale that it exists in Real America are the ability to be at least ten thousand times richer than a person who'd already be considered quite rich, as well as the ability to establish dynasties that privilege your progeny long after your contributions to private enterprise. That could very well be true, but I'm not cynical enough to accept that without very strong argument.

I wish people would engage my argument instead of punishing it silently with a down vote...

This makes me think of Buffett giving his money the Gates foundation: The 2nd richest guy in the world giving it to the richest.

This one is easy. I agree with him.

You can so tell who his mentor was :)

Hint: Apple

And how many people would choose to give their money to Larry Page?

Well then he should do it right now, why wait until he's dead?

... says some random guy posting authoritatively and indignantly to HN.

The level of judgement and arm-chair quarterbacking in this thread is hilarious in a sad, "I can't believe I'm wasting my time reading and responding way".

I'm sorry my answer wasn't up to your standards. Please disregards my comments and continue with your surely Nobel-award research, Dr. crusso.

Meh, just try harder next time. ;)

good for him. 90% of charities are shams using over half the funds on "administration costs". Elon Musk is actually changing the world

i think we have time to address the billion people on earth suffering from extreme poverty and human rights violations before worrying about mars.

can all the rich people buy all the telcos and make internet more neutral?

Why not both?

the heads of google are solipsistic jerks.

Ya'll just need to chill. It's just an opinion that the man has...why don't we try to change the world IN THE PRESENT FOR GOOD the way we see it fit? whether it is charity or huge ass project with capitalistic gain...RESPECT.

The human race is quite a large and diverse organism. In terms of development, it's parts are stratified. At the extremes are the front, and the rear. The front is fulfilling our current best potential - space travel, computing, great individual wealth, even opulence. The rear is living by default, mainly just because reproduction is a major defining characteristic of life itself, in terrible conditions, because there's no overarching principle to ensure resources are distributed evenly or at all.

It isn't surprising that those representing the front and those pulling up the rear would conflict when they meet.

Fuck you Larry Page you evil Bond-villainesque bastard.

I think you are confusing him with the other Larry who actually looks like and embodies Bond-villainesque

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/nevius/article/Oracle-s-cheati...

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732479890...

I just can't get over feeling conflicted about what Musk is trying to accomplish vs. what a misogynistic creep he seems to be in his personal life. Is this really the person who should be lauded as the savior of humanity?

I always had similar feelings about Lance Armstrong too.

Sadly, history is full of "saviors of humanity" with undesirable local-sphere characteristics. These are pretty orthogonal elements, it seems.

You can certainly restrict your lauding to people who succeeded in both the world-changing and good-local-interaction spheres. Your laud-space will be commensurately smaller, but I don't think it's zero.

Why does Elon Musk strike you as a misogynistic creep? It seems like that kind of claim warrants some justification.

misogyny may be a bit speculative, but from reading the following:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/29/divorce-wars-justin...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-belkin/elon-musk-parentin...

http://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/relationship-issues/mill...

he definitely falls into the creep class in my book. I hope neither of my daughters ever gets into a relationship with someone who shares his worldview and says stuff like "if you were my employee I would fire you" to them. Or asking where he can find a new girlfriend that can fit into a 10 hour per week time budget. What a cad.

Then there are the kids. The kids he admits he doesn't spend enough time with (and even then says he can be a great dad spending time with them while simultaneously working. Multitasking for the win!) and who have been through the divorce. Again, just my own biases and take on the world that I am sure aren't shared by all, but I can categorically say that every single person I know whose parents divorced when they were young has resulting damage they carry to this day, into their own marriages and parenting.

To be fair, two of those links are told from the point of view of his ex-wife. The world is full of people that have rather harsh things to say about their exes. Some of it is true.

Choosing a demanding career and suffering a divorce - what a misogynistic cad.

The problem is that you probably have some sort of unrealistic godlike caricature of who he is. He's an extremely idealistic, prolific and successful startup founder. Whether he is the "savior of humanity" is a different topic, although plenty do tend to exaggerate. It's largely because ambitious founders project their hopes and dreams onto him and revere him. Which is a normal psychological occurrence, but also emotionally driven.

Musk is a fallible human like anyone else. Why should his misogyny (can you back that up by the way, I'm not aware?) deflect from his business endeavors?

The thing is you'll always disagree with people on certain things. It seems to me like you're trying too hard to find something to get offended over. I enjoy the works of plenty of people whom I ideologically disagree with, but it poses no grievance to me. Separate the actor from the act.

I like his work and his ideas and what he is accomplishing. And I am certain my approval or disapproval for his character matters not a bit to anything external to myself. Given how he expresses himself and his pattern of prioritizing those nominally closest to himself, I just don't like the idea of Musk attaining a role model status, a direction his celebrity seems to point towards.

Oh please. I'm really sure this is completely based in fact, and doesn't involve anybody being oversensitive, judgmental, or self-righteous.

I think many would say that about Steve Jobs. You don't have to be a good person to do good things.

s/do good things/be rich and successful/

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