Two internet celebrities I follow (John and Hank Green) call those two approaches to making the world better "decreasing worldsuck" and "increasing awesome", and I really like that model of thinking. Obviously there are a lot of awesome things we can be doing in the world, but we can't let society leave people behind either.

Did you just translate the grandparent comment into silicon-valley-speak? It means the same thing, but sounds so much more marketable :)

Well one of the brothers lives in Montana and the other in Indiana, so if it's SV-speak it's just because they're both big nerds.

To be sure, it is a combined effort. The part I really like about this is that they are really serious about solving the problem and are thinking outside the box in many situations. If it was a purely government directive, I don't think it would have made much difference.

But yes, it does help immensely when the country's leader declares it as a top priority.

I like to put it this way. Elon Musk is working on the cutting edge (make new tech), Bill Gates on the spine edge (make existing tech available to everyone).

You need both for humanity to progress.

You can't carve away at science fiction without the human capital to do the science. Lifting huge populations out of disease and poverty is going to have a larger effect on scientific progress than spending money on directing the few who can do science right now.

I think you were a bit too negative but I don't agree with your downvotes.

Back to the topic: I agree with you. I think people underestimate, especially in the current Trumpist/Brexitist/etc. climate, the long term impact that lifting ~4 billion people out of poverty will have. By 4 billion people I mean China, India, Africa.

China's probably 20 years away from having 30% of the world's middle class in their country. India will probably follow the same trajectory, only with a 40 year delay. Africa is lagging but even there things seem to be moving and my money's on things accelerating as soon as they get some strong regional poles. Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia seem strong contenders.

I don't see my comment as negative. Both are good, but one is going to have an order of magnitude larger effect on scientific progress than the other.

To say that the effect of Gates's work will be to merely bring more people along for the ride instead of getting left behind as the original commenter stated is not understanding the full effect of his work. Gates is accelerating the ride.

Do you really think we don't have the human capital to do science? From what I can see, it's more that we have a shortage of plain old capital, and there are plenty of would-be scientists who take jobs in Wall St or at Twitter clones because there's no money for the science.

You only need one person if your bar is merely to "do science," but if you want to do more science, you need more people. Do you really think that if we increased the number of people who could be scientists by 10X that scientific advancement wouldn't significantly increase in velocity? Just look at how primitive modern medicine still is.

Where is the money for this 10x increase?

From the GDP lift caused by lifting large populations out of disease and poverty.

Thought experiment: how fast do you think our scientific knowledge would advance if 90% of the US were living in poverty and spent most of their day simply figuring out how to survive?

Sure, but the only way to lift large numbers of people out of poverty is growth. That's not something you can do by fiat.

You can't do it by fiat, but you can do it by redirecting funds to things that have larger impact on solving disease and poverty, which is what Gates is doing. At the end of WW2, ROK was one of the poorest countries in the world with one of the lowest rates of literacy. Now it produces a large portion of the world's consumer electronics and has top quality research centers, in spite of never solving government corruption that whole time. This is mainly due to how well war reparations from Japan and aid from elsewhere were used to develop the country.

I agree with the sentiment and some aspects of science, like medical trials, may scale fairly well.

However the most significant scientific discoveries seem to come from the top of the pile. You need to be in the right place and time with the right background to make the right connections that reveal a previously hidden truth.

Science is about seeing something that's staring you in the face but nobody has even noticed before. That generally can't be farmed out.

So it's a long road from poverty to understanding to discovering something really new.

Even finding many major breakthroughs like the blue LED is ultimately just probability. The more people who are able to find them, the more breakthroughs you will find.

I don't know if you are right or not, and I think it is hard to measure. I certainly think you don't deserve downvotes for your otherwise positive message though.

Who is Narendra Modi?

Edit:- read the article.thanks...

Narendra Modi is the Prime Minister of India. He has a very interesting (and controversial) history. He grew up selling tea at a railway station and now he's Prime Minister of the largest democracy.

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

> He has a very interesting (and controversial) history

Sure does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_riots

From the wikipedia entry you quoted:

>> "In 2012, Modi was cleared of complicity in the violence by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) appointed by the Supreme Court of India. The SIT also rejected claims that the state government had not done enough to prevent the riots."

>> "In April 2014, the Supreme Court expressed satisfaction over the SIT's investigations in nine cases related to the violence, and rejected as "baseless" a plea contesting the SIT report."

India's Prime Minister

Frankly I'd take Steve Jobs over those two.

People who want to do "good" to boost their (and their nations') egos are rather dangerous. When you fight a war for "righteousness" rather than greed, you're one awful enemy to have.

Then again, Steve was a Zen student. No surprises there.

World would not have been much different without appleII and iPods. All Steve did was produce products for rich. Not something like RMS who founded free software movement and changed the direction of software industry for the good of humanity.