Elon Musk challenging the UN to show how they could end world hunger with $6B.
Given what I’m learning about Modern Slavery, whenever more resource is injected into corrupt systems, the bottom is always just exploited for even more. You can give these people money, but if they’re inside a deeply corrupt system, everything they have will be taken almost immediately.
The root cause is human greed and hatred. Without solving these, interventions will always be bandaid solutions.
Prospective funders reported that the bottleneck was a lack of promising projects. As far as we could tell, the lack of good projects is a result of a lack of effective, benevolent, and coordinated people.
It doesn’t seem like there’s a lack of benevolence or altruism—there are plenty of people who want to solve these problems, but either they can’t figure out what to do, or what they try never really works, or they settle for tackling smaller issues that they think they can actually resolve.
There are a few abnormally effective people: Elon Musk is the celebrity poster child of effectiveness—love him or hate him, it’s really impressive what he’s been able to accomplish.
Yeah I just disagree.
I think you should only count as effective if you’re helping the problems of the world. I’m pretty sure he’s only making them worse. There are lots of institutions and organizations that are highly effective… at making things worse. This is not that impressive to me.
I had explored enough career paths at this point to recognize that most of my opportunities to positively affect the world were limited by the organizations or institutions that were already established or by my own ability to affect them from within, and I didn’t like my prospects. Government agencies, nonprofits with limited scope, politicians, think tanks—I couldn’t find any employers that matched my level of ambition while also being self-reflective and self-critical and thus willing and able to adjust and pivot as they proactively learned more about the shape of the problems in the world (there are a lot of constraints out there).
An important paragraph.
I haven’t personally looked around, but it’s not very surprising to me that someone would say this.
And we also had no system for handling the work that people didn’t want to do (I didn’t buy groceries because it was my job; I went to the store because the fridge was empty and I wanted to help) or how to handle people saying that they were going to do something and then not following through.
I feel vaguely frustrated that this is such a common problem.
I find this ironic to compare to the first part you quoted.
People don’t recycle, keep the fridge door open, don’t register to vote… but, you know, from certain perspective this is actually great, because it shows their determination to do the actually important stuff.
The same people then also don’t buy groceries, don’t keep their promises...
Both of these examples signal the lack of Hufflepuff virtues. The first one is easy to rationalize; the second one has a personal impact on the author.
Yeah, it seems like … the rationalization might be sort of a cover-story for certain bad habits or patterns that they don’t want to fix in themselves. shrug. I’m not a huge fan.
We are also the closest we’ve ever been in the history of the world to potentially destroying all life. 😐 I view our current situation as much worse than it has ever been.
I’m in favor of totally resolving human greed and hatred, but this doesn’t seem tractable to me either. (It is literally possible to do it within an individual, through a particular path, but it’s not the path most choose.)
Instead it seems more tractable to create and promote systems and cultures that heavily incentivize moderating greed and hate.
Given what I’m learning about Modern Slavery, whenever more resource is injected into corrupt systems, the bottom is always just exploited for even more. You can give these people money, but if they’re inside a deeply corrupt system, everything they have will be taken almost immediately.
The root cause is human greed and hatred. Without solving these, interventions will always be bandaid solutions.
This is extremely well stated.
Yeah I just disagree.
I think you should only count as effective if you’re helping the problems of the world. I’m pretty sure he’s only making them worse. There are lots of institutions and organizations that are highly effective… at making things worse. This is not that impressive to me.
An important paragraph.
I haven’t personally looked around, but it’s not very surprising to me that someone would say this.
I feel vaguely frustrated that this is such a common problem.
Lack of Hufflepuff virtues. Shakes head.
I find this ironic to compare to the first part you quoted.
People don’t recycle, keep the fridge door open, don’t register to vote… but, you know, from certain perspective this is actually great, because it shows their determination to do the actually important stuff.
The same people then also don’t buy groceries, don’t keep their promises...
Both of these examples signal the lack of Hufflepuff virtues. The first one is easy to rationalize; the second one has a personal impact on the author.
Yeah, it seems like … the rationalization might be sort of a cover-story for certain bad habits or patterns that they don’t want to fix in themselves. shrug. I’m not a huge fan.
We are also the closest we’ve ever been in the history of the world to potentially destroying all life. 😐 I view our current situation as much worse than it has ever been.
I’m in favor of totally resolving human greed and hatred, but this doesn’t seem tractable to me either. (It is literally possible to do it within an individual, through a particular path, but it’s not the path most choose.)
Instead it seems more tractable to create and promote systems and cultures that heavily incentivize moderating greed and hate.