The list is an interesting concept, and maybe it can inspire billionaires to donate more. The visuals are good and it is clear.
However, I fear that as a tool it will have limited spread by design. There are the assumptions, of course (though I personally think including animals is great).
But it’s mostly the fact that many people have in mind the terrible harms caused by several of the people on the list (shutting down USAid, developing social networks that favour addictions, making money from tobacco, investing in factory farms).
I don’t know what criteria to use to deal with that, but I think entire segments of the population will be very skeptical of the project because they know that billionaire X did bad stuff and still appears the list as a life saver.
For me, your best shot at using this website is not at getting widespread adoption (which is always super hard), but by getting rich people to see that they are ranked lower than the other ones and wanting to improve their ranking.
Yeah I think the chance of widespread adoption is quite low (< 1%?), but worth a shot. Without adoption I don’t think rich people will care much about the rankings themselves (if ~no one else cares about the rankings, then being higher on the list doesn’t help their status). But even without much adoption there’s a chance for a billionaire to see the list and realize that they weren’t thinking about effectiveness enough or in the right way, and become another Moskovitz-like figure.
I’ve been surprised that three of the commenters so far have had this concern that someone like Musk being ranked 26th/​73 will make people want to dismiss the list as a whole. One thing I mentioned in the post is wanting to eventually include all the effects of a person on the world rather than just donations. I’m not sure if this would help though, or just open up way more surface area for people to want to dismiss the list because some assumption went against a deeply held belief of theirs.
The list is an interesting concept, and maybe it can inspire billionaires to donate more. The visuals are good and it is clear.
However, I fear that as a tool it will have limited spread by design. There are the assumptions, of course (though I personally think including animals is great).
But it’s mostly the fact that many people have in mind the terrible harms caused by several of the people on the list (shutting down USAid, developing social networks that favour addictions, making money from tobacco, investing in factory farms).
I don’t know what criteria to use to deal with that, but I think entire segments of the population will be very skeptical of the project because they know that billionaire X did bad stuff and still appears the list as a life saver.
For me, your best shot at using this website is not at getting widespread adoption (which is always super hard), but by getting rich people to see that they are ranked lower than the other ones and wanting to improve their ranking.
Yeah I think the chance of widespread adoption is quite low (< 1%?), but worth a shot. Without adoption I don’t think rich people will care much about the rankings themselves (if ~no one else cares about the rankings, then being higher on the list doesn’t help their status). But even without much adoption there’s a chance for a billionaire to see the list and realize that they weren’t thinking about effectiveness enough or in the right way, and become another Moskovitz-like figure.
I’ve been surprised that three of the commenters so far have had this concern that someone like Musk being ranked 26th/​73 will make people want to dismiss the list as a whole. One thing I mentioned in the post is wanting to eventually include all the effects of a person on the world rather than just donations. I’m not sure if this would help though, or just open up way more surface area for people to want to dismiss the list because some assumption went against a deeply held belief of theirs.