Based on you description of the documentary, I wonder to what extent Gates’ explanations reflect his actual reasoning. He seems very cautious and filtered, and I doubt an explanation of a boring cost-benefit analysis would make for a good documentary.
Not that I think there necessarily was a good cost-benefit analysis, just that I wouldn’t conclude much either way from the documentary.
Good point- but it’s impossible to know if there are hidden reasons for his behavior. However, I find my theory more plausible: he didn’t think much about social impact initially, made a lot of money at Microsoft, then turned towards philanthropy, and then selected a few cause areas (US education, global health, and later clean energy), partially based on cost-effectiveness grounds (being surprised that global health is so much more effective than US healthcare), but it seems unlikely that he systematically commissioned extensive cause prioritization work OpenPhil style and then after lengthy deliberation came down on global health being a robustly good buy that is ‘increasingly hard to beat’.
Based on you description of the documentary, I wonder to what extent Gates’ explanations reflect his actual reasoning. He seems very cautious and filtered, and I doubt an explanation of a boring cost-benefit analysis would make for a good documentary.
Not that I think there necessarily was a good cost-benefit analysis, just that I wouldn’t conclude much either way from the documentary.
Good point- but it’s impossible to know if there are hidden reasons for his behavior. However, I find my theory more plausible: he didn’t think much about social impact initially, made a lot of money at Microsoft, then turned towards philanthropy, and then selected a few cause areas (US education, global health, and later clean energy), partially based on cost-effectiveness grounds (being surprised that global health is so much more effective than US healthcare), but it seems unlikely that he systematically commissioned extensive cause prioritization work OpenPhil style and then after lengthy deliberation came down on global health being a robustly good buy that is ‘increasingly hard to beat’.