There's a lot of human trafficking in Oakland, a short BART ride away from SF. With so much problem-solving ability in nearby SF, why is this still a problem?
So are homelessness, childhood hunger, etc
And why do we crowd around in the Bay Area, pushing out artists and other people? Why don't we spread out across the U.S., spreading ideas and doing good?
I think you are stereotyping Stanford grads, particularly older ones. There are plenty of Stanford grads outside the US as well as on East Coast, etc. There are also plenty of Stanford grads in medical and science careers.
By the time he's done, Bill Gates will have done more to impact disease and save lives in the world than probably thousands of your volunteers, yet he was a techie that built a start-up and sounds like the people you deride. Not everyone has to walk the paths you've set out as the proper way to do good in the world. And sometimes it comes later in life.
The problem with the article to me is that the author makes a lot of assumptions, maybe because of his upbringing and his lack of social intelligence. Not every one looks down on people of different social or wealth classes, particularly students who come from lower income or homes with less educated parents.
And more and more often, it does not come at all. The effective noblesse oblige of, say, the New England rich is by-and-large dead outside of New England in favor of a very exploitative, plantation-society-esque Southern "liberty".
There are enclaves where this isn't the case. It's hard to call San Francisco one, because the city and its very, very rich residents have done all they could to chase the poors away. (It is one of many reasons I refuse to consider living there.)
Humans are bad at multiplying utilities. Building a service that gives $100 of utility to ten million people is probably better for society than improving the nutrition of a few hundred children in SF. People tend to over-value charitable endeavors that fall into certain categories, like helping the homeless or feeding the children. I suspect it's a societal mechanism for encouraging practical charity that was a lot more effective before our current age of plenty.
Humans also have a bad habit of double counting contributions. Facebook is "connecting the world" but how many of those connections would've happened over the phone or in person without them? I'm not saying Facebook is net negative, just that a lot of those $100 contributions you are adding up are just shifted from another business that went under.
I can't imagine a single person whose life would be better in any significant way with an extra $100. Not even a homeless person would find this quantity helpful over the long-term.
> It's a shame to waste an elite education on people who do not serve society.
Have you considered that you may not be as good as you think at predicting the needs of society? Based on past experiments, it seems that the market does a pretty good job of predicting what society actually wants and needs, whereas enlightened do-gooders aren't as good as they think.
The upside is that there is lots of cheap soviet surplus technology available even today, because the englightened folks in charge of soviet production focused a bit too much on the first-order "needs" of soviet society like Mosin Nagants and Nixie Tubes, whereas those foolish and vain Americans were wasting their time and elite educations following market demands for frivolous things that didn't serve society, like Color TV and food production beyond subsistence.
> Based on past experiments, it seems that the market does a pretty good job of predicting what society actually wants and needs, whereas enlightened do-gooders aren't as good as they think.
I would love to see those studies! I'm struggling to imagine how you'd even find a random sample of do-gooders, let alone measure their effect on their communities.
Here is another possibility for something to work on. We are deploying IoT at scale without much concern for security. Effectively, we are building a massive weapon for our enemies to use against us -- one that is distributed, fault-tolerant, and built into our infrastructure. We would not be able to escape the consequences of such a weapon.
In addition to serving society, this would also be self-serving. I have to imagine someone working on this would become fairly wealthy or at least very eminent.
As far as I know, something close to nothing is being done about this problem.
There's a lot of human trafficking in Oakland, a short BART ride away from SF. With so much problem-solving ability in nearby SF, why is this still a problem?
So are homelessness, childhood hunger, etc
And why do we crowd around in the Bay Area, pushing out artists and other people? Why don't we spread out across the U.S., spreading ideas and doing good?
I think you are stereotyping Stanford grads, particularly older ones. There are plenty of Stanford grads outside the US as well as on East Coast, etc. There are also plenty of Stanford grads in medical and science careers.
By the time he's done, Bill Gates will have done more to impact disease and save lives in the world than probably thousands of your volunteers, yet he was a techie that built a start-up and sounds like the people you deride. Not everyone has to walk the paths you've set out as the proper way to do good in the world. And sometimes it comes later in life.
The problem with the article to me is that the author makes a lot of assumptions, maybe because of his upbringing and his lack of social intelligence. Not every one looks down on people of different social or wealth classes, particularly students who come from lower income or homes with less educated parents.
> And sometimes it comes later in life.
And more and more often, it does not come at all. The effective noblesse oblige of, say, the New England rich is by-and-large dead outside of New England in favor of a very exploitative, plantation-society-esque Southern "liberty".
There are enclaves where this isn't the case. It's hard to call San Francisco one, because the city and its very, very rich residents have done all they could to chase the poors away. (It is one of many reasons I refuse to consider living there.)
Humans are bad at multiplying utilities. Building a service that gives $100 of utility to ten million people is probably better for society than improving the nutrition of a few hundred children in SF. People tend to over-value charitable endeavors that fall into certain categories, like helping the homeless or feeding the children. I suspect it's a societal mechanism for encouraging practical charity that was a lot more effective before our current age of plenty.
Humans also have a bad habit of double counting contributions. Facebook is "connecting the world" but how many of those connections would've happened over the phone or in person without them? I'm not saying Facebook is net negative, just that a lot of those $100 contributions you are adding up are just shifted from another business that went under.
Humans are also bad at prioritizing and good at rationalizing, and conveniently forgetting huge problems that happen just out of sight.
I can't imagine a single person whose life would be better in any significant way with an extra $100. Not even a homeless person would find this quantity helpful over the long-term.
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It's a shame to waste an elite education on people who do not serve society.
> It's a shame to waste an elite education on people who do not serve society.
Have you considered that you may not be as good as you think at predicting the needs of society? Based on past experiments, it seems that the market does a pretty good job of predicting what society actually wants and needs, whereas enlightened do-gooders aren't as good as they think.
The upside is that there is lots of cheap soviet surplus technology available even today, because the englightened folks in charge of soviet production focused a bit too much on the first-order "needs" of soviet society like Mosin Nagants and Nixie Tubes, whereas those foolish and vain Americans were wasting their time and elite educations following market demands for frivolous things that didn't serve society, like Color TV and food production beyond subsistence.
> Based on past experiments, it seems that the market does a pretty good job of predicting what society actually wants and needs, whereas enlightened do-gooders aren't as good as they think.
I would love to see those studies! I'm struggling to imagine how you'd even find a random sample of do-gooders, let alone measure their effect on their communities.
3 replies →
People don't exist to serve society.
Here is another possibility for something to work on. We are deploying IoT at scale without much concern for security. Effectively, we are building a massive weapon for our enemies to use against us -- one that is distributed, fault-tolerant, and built into our infrastructure. We would not be able to escape the consequences of such a weapon.
In addition to serving society, this would also be self-serving. I have to imagine someone working on this would become fairly wealthy or at least very eminent.
As far as I know, something close to nothing is being done about this problem.