Comment by holmesworcester
2 months ago
To me, the above paragraph reads like:
"Having wealth makes you responsible to others, therefore you should do arson."
If you manage to help make a powerful machine and then convert some piece of it into liquid value, you are probably good at stuff and whatever responsibility you have to others includes using that alongside the liquid value.
And worse, it's not just on you to do what people say they want. You're also actually responsible for trying to figure out what they would find most valuable. ("If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”)
You're making a strong implication that the companies that make money are the things that people need. The correlation seems to be growing weaker every year as far as I've seen.
Is your point that the money should go to companies that make things that people need as opposed to want? Or is your point that the money somehow flows to companies that make things that people neither need nor want?
> Or is your point that the money somehow flows to companies that make things that people neither need nor want?
It's this second one.
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Imagine doing something with money that isn't investing in a for profit company.
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This is pure capitalist brainworms.
And I say this as someone who's not even particularly anti-capitalist.
It's an unpopular opinion for sure.
Try to think about it in less capitalist terms. Say you built the world's first bicycle and can now move faster / more efficiently than anyone else.
What is the most likely thing that will happen if you give the bicycle away to the person who appears to need it the most and go do something else? (One broken bicycle.)
On the flip side, isn't the most important thing you can work on something like, "figure out how to make a bicycle—and maintenance supply chain—for everyone who wants one"?
The OP's whole point is that he has money, not ideas. Plus, in your example, you could literally do both. Plus, money is not the same thing as IP or creativity. Plus, the post you were responding to was literally advocating giving the money to the people with ideas of how to do good for the world.
There may or may not be a moral imperative to give away excess wealth, but there damn sure isn't any moral imperative to keep it.
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> If you manage to help make a powerful machine and then convert some piece of it into liquid value, you are probably good at stuff
Not at all. Nobody is "good at stuff" in general. People have particular areas of competence at best. Disasters arise when someone who has achieved success off the back of one particular skill set assumes they have general competence at everything and then makes leadership decisions from a position of blind arrogance.
If you manage to help make a powerful machine, you are probably a good machinist. This does not mean you should become a CEO or a venture capitalist or some other sort of "value decider." Your skill is in making powerful machines. If you want to move into a new field, you have to do so as a beginner.