Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

Re:Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media by ipsum2 on Sunday August 09, 2020 @05:23PM (#24103030)

If your full time job is to lead corporate accountants / head a large corporate accountancy firm and you've done it for several years, I'd consider you an accountancy expert.

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Re:Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media by sukilot on Sunday August 09, 2020 @07:19PM (#24103776)

It's not corporate in the sense of a successful business. It's a self-funded personal project with nothing to hold it accountable for competency. This is one of the major criticism of Gates in the NGO world.

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Re:Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media by darawk on Sunday August 09, 2020 @08:54PM (#24104347)

Sure, but that doesn't make him not an expert. Accountability != expertise. People believe Bill Gates is credible because he has a long track record of being credible.

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Re:Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media by AmericanChopper on Sunday August 09, 2020 @05:45PM (#24103191)

I guess that makes the guy who manages my software engineering team a software engineering expert too?

As far as I can tell, the person who actually leads the Gates Foundation health division is Trevor Mundel. Even then, the work of the Gates Foundation has been in funding projects lead by other organisations, rather than in implementing those projects themselves.

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Re:Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media by ipsum2 on Sunday August 09, 2020 @06:53PM (#24103640)

> I guess that makes the guy who manages my software engineering team a software engineering expert too?

If they do it very well and can point to measurable results of success, I would think so!

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Re:Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media by AmericanChopper on Sunday August 09, 2020 @07:02PM (#24103692)

So if an engineering team is successful, then their manager is necessarily an engineering expert? You’re really not providing any rationale to support this rather extreme position. Bill Gates experience in the field of public health is choosing projects to finance, and even then he is not the primary person responsible for that in his foundation. Bill Gates has no credentials you could point to, and has done no work you could point to, that would support an assertion of him being a public health expert. It is frankly a ridiculous proposition.

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Re:Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media by TheOperator on Sunday August 09, 2020 @08:50PM (#24104327)

>He has done no work you could point to

His work in eradicating Polio. Choosing which projects to finance is a skill in itself, something he's likely more capable of than a traditionally credentialed expert. I can't help but think that you have an arbitrarily narrow definition of expertise.

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Re:Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media by AmericanChopper on Sunday August 09, 2020 @09:05PM (#24104429)

What public health expertise do you believe Bill Gates personally contributed to the The Global Polio Eradication Initiative? As far as I can tell, Bill Gates contributed $110 million USD to The Global Polio Eradication Initiative in funding, but personally contributed no polio eradication expertise at all to that project.

There is no basis at all for claiming he’s a public health expert. He might be an effective philanthropist, but that’s a completely different topic.

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