Bill Gates Is the Most Interesting Man in the World | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates Is the Most Interesting Man in the World

nytimes.com

38 pointsmhb32 comments

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Oh come on. Here's a five-minute-brainstorm of people still living today who are FAR more interesting than Bill Gates.

* Linus Torvalds

* Bob Dylan

* Paul McCartney

* Terence Tao

* Elon Musk

* Saul Kripke

* Noam Chomsky

And that's just people HN might've heard of. I could quadruple that list in another five minutes if I were going to include people that aren't household names.

For what it's worth, I do find Gates, the person, more "interesting" than these folks, even though I would describe the people in the list as "great", "luminaries", etc. Can you elaborate on your reasoning?

Interestingness is in the eye of the beholder. I, for one, find people very interesting who go "rags to riches". I don't find it all that interesting when people with rich families grow up to be rich. I also find people interesting when they have interesting and unique philosophical, mathematical, scientific, or artistic ideas. I find people interesting who have become extremely skillful at various things through years of practice and who thereby give us a glimpse of the extremes of human capability. I don't find it particularly interesting that a philanthropist with lots of money can throw lots of money at problems (and at PR).

Bill gates thinks every life is worth the same. Perhaps that makes him a better man than I. He has given more to charity than anyone in history (while getting others to do similliar.) He warned everyone about the pandemic risk long before it came knocking. You might be using his software right now. I really don't know what more a man could be to do be "good." Than Bill gates has done.

Beyond just "giving" more money to help people, I think he's given an insane amount of his personal time and effort as well. Basically, if you don't like what this man has been doing lately, I think it says a lot more about you than he. We should all aspire to have even 1/1000th the positive impact he's had.

(Yes, everyone knows he played biz dirty in the past. (Embrace, extend, extinguish, etc.)

> I really don't know what more a man could be to do be "good." Than Bill gates has done.

There are many people throughout history who have sacrificed everything to do the right thing. Bill Gates is not one of them.

He’s really not

> The global lunacy community — anti-vaxxers, science-deniers, Russian agents — has spread so many conspiracy theories regarding Gates that misinformation about him is now among the most widespread of all coronavirus falsehoods.

This is true, but I think this minimizes the size of "the global lunacy community". It is truly baffling to me how Gates has now become a huge boogeyman when it comes to the pandemic, right up there with George Soros.

I don't know how to fix this - crazy is crazy. But the sheer size of this crazy shouldn't be underestimated.

> This is true, but I think this minimizes the size of "the global lunacy community"

I have a friend who's a member of said community, and I don't think she's a lunatic at all. I think she's just struggling to make sense of things, and is a bit susceptible to manipulation. For example, one of the reasons she apparently found the "Plandemic" video convincing was because it was "calm", "rational" and "science based". I guess it superficially matched some heuristics for "reliability" and that was good enough for her. Honestly I think these are the same heuristics most of us use, most of the time. Fact-checking is hard and not many people do it.

That is one of the tactics used. Anger, even righteous, is an "argument lost" if the other person just "wants a rational discussion" even if they are flooding it with falsehoods, misrepresented information, logical fallacies, etc.

It reminds me of this trope: https://www.mumsnet.com/uploads/talk/201802/large-457127-lar...

Don't forget about Psychological Projection...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

It’s terrifying. What I find fascinating about the whole conspiracy theory phenomenon is once you make the leap that “they” are that good at covering up information, it’s easy to then believe all the other conspiracy theories.

While there are many far-out anti-vaxers criticising Gates, it shouldn't serve as an excuse to discount legitimate criticism[0][1][2].

[0]: https://m.soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-45-the-not-...

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-g...

[2]: https://pontiactribune.com/2015/03/bill-gates-could-end-worl...

rich people have immense concentrated power and frankly it is not so obvious that they can wield it correctly, even if they are well-intentioned.

doing too much for the right reasons, unexpected consequences and outcomes abound.

The George Soros thing is equally baffling. People really seem to think he’s running a shadow world government or something. Although in his case obviously anti-semitism is a major factor.

The Rothschilds and Rockefellers fell out of favour as the conspiracy target I guess.

they are still in the running, just no the current flavour of the month. Like fashions that keep coming back around, so do conspiracy's.

> It is truly baffling to me how Gates has now become a huge boogeyman when it comes to the pandemic

For the same reasons why many don't like Donald Trump. Power. People tend to be suspicious of those who have power over them; those who can influence their lives, autonomy, & health.

Plenty of people don’t like Trump but did like Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, etc. on down the line.

“X has power, you don’t like x” is a demonstrably poor hypothesis.

Let me restate, "X has influence to change things & many people don't like the change". Trump & Gates both change things. Plenty of people also do/did not like Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush. Plenty of people also like (& don't like) Trump & Gates...One only needs to look at the approval rating. If any one of these people were universally liked, wouldn't their approval ratings be 90%+?

Anecdotally, I find folks tend to inversely feel for Trump as they do for Gates.

Two sides of the same coin?

Unlikely. 4 more options exist

What's baffling about it? He's the largest funder of the CDC, funded Event 201, and is also supporting projects like ID 2020 at the same time.

What a shame that some people here would rather harp on the bad things a person has done in the past than all the good they have done for the past few decades.

> When Trump snubs the World Health Organization, he hurts American citizens.

The same WHO that mislead the global community about COVID-19 for months and is in the pocket of China?

Trump didn't snub the WHO. The WHO snubbed the WHO.

I like Bill Gates, I really do, but it's fucking tiring that every single snooty journalist has to frequently express their hatred of Trump, even if it means siding with a corrupted organization.

Also, I know several people of less wealth and social status than Bill whom are much more interesting. Just saying.

> The same WHO that mislead the global community about COVID-19 for months and is in the pocket of China?

What misleading are you referring to? WHO declared it an International Health Emergency on Jan 30th. We knew this was a huge global risk and unfortunately were still under-prepared for the full wave a month later. There were certainly some missteps made along the way

Oh my goodness. Now he's a polymath, the most interesting man, the most admired man, what else? How has this happened? This is idolatry at its worst. The man has done an incredible amount of harm to the world but that's all going to be forgotten because so few people understand it?

People are focused on the incredible amount of good he's doing now more than the anti-competivie practices he led decades ago. People change and grow and it seems he did too.

okay, so, yes. under his supervision, microsoft did do a lot of damage to the world of open source software. they set an example that fundamentally changed the relationship between users and software, and that example continues to stand in the way of software freedom today.

but his (and his wife's) post-microsoft health research philanthropy has literally prevented the early death of hundreds of millions of people by funding vaccines, developing sustainable agriculture, etc.

ftr, i agree that the idolatry is harmful.

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