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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Bold words from someone standing in life-saving range.

If spending that kind of money on saving lives doesn’t demonstrate it, what does?

Spending his money demonstrates that he wants to spend his money on something. I think that something is control and power. The "saving lives" is to stroke his own ego, but I don't believe it and neither should you.

Neither you nor @jeroboam answered my actual question, though. I understand how spending money buys him things aside from lives saved, and I understand that on priors, you (and I!) expect people to care more about power/status than lives saved.

But I’m asking what Gates would do differently if he really did care more about the latter. What could convince you?

This has always be a conundrum for me as well. If Gates, Soros, Musk, WEF are so evil...what should they do instead to prove they are pro-social?

There is nothing that can convince me, since the spectacle of a man "donating" billions of dollars to his own company then calling himself a philanthropist tells me all I need to know about his character. There is nothing he can do now. If he was a different man, he'd have done different things, and I might believe he means well. Now it is too late, and there is very little that he can do to change my mind.

If you knew someone had secretly swapped bodies with Bill Gates overnight (with access to all his passwords etc.), what actions would the New Gates have to take to convince you he was a good person?

Retire to the countryside, and resign from the foundation.

Interesting. Why do you expect whoever is next in line to run it (presumably picked by the real Gates) to run it more ethically than Fake Gates?

You asked what would it take for me to believe he's changed. That's what it would take. The successor has nothing to do with the answer to the question.

You asked what would it take for me to believe he's changed

No I didn't. I asked what it would take for you to believe that the new person (whom you know to be a new person) in charge of Bill Gates's body was a good person. I suppose another way to ask the same question is, assuming you regard yourself as a good person, what you would do if you woke up to find yourself in Bill Gates's body with access to all his passwords/etc.

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To be fair the difference between having 200 billion and 300 billion rounds to zero. So there was no personal sacrifice.

And he got a lot of good PR and political power too.

This was not altruism more like enlightened self interest. Which is fine and good but fully consistent with him not actually caring.