ON A NEW WAY TO THINK ABOUT GEEK PHILANTHROPY

GOOD OF THE MANY

This Wired magazine piece by Clive Thompason, has an interesting way to look at philanthropy by Bill Gates:

"As you probably know, Gates is aggressively tackling third world diseases. He has targeted not only high-profile scourges like AIDS but also maladies like malaria, diarrhea, and parasitic infections.

These latter illnesses are the really important ones to attack, because they kill millions a year and are entirely preventable. For decades, they flew under the radar of philanthropists in the West. So why did Gates become the first major humanitarian to take action?

The answer lies in the psychology of numeracy — how we understand numbers.

I've been reading the fascinating work of Paul Slovic, a psychologist who runs the social-science think tank Decision Research. He studies a troubling paradox in human empathy: We'll usually race to help a single stranger in dire straits, while ignoring huge numbers of people in precisely the same plight.

We'll donate thousands of dollars to bring a single African war orphan to the US for lifesaving surgery, but we don't offer much money or political pressure to stop widespread genocides in Rwanda or Darfur."

The piece goes onto explain Paul Slovic's work in more detail.  And why geeks may be better programmed mentally to empathize with the suffering of millions than most people.

Of course most Trekkies, (many of whom are also geeks), already understand this, and not just because Spock said it so clearly in one of the most riveting end-scenes in "Star Trek 2:  The Wrath of Khan":

"the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one..."

In a post last year, I commented on the need to think about philanthropy in a different way.  The Wired article potentially points to an interesting alternative.