The article seems to be one of the popular "let's shit on a successful person out of envy" articles with little substance behind it.
It primarily raises generic concerns about these kinds of projects, without linking them to these specific projects, after some generic mud-slinging starting with "racist comments made as a teenager" and a very careful wording of "teen grooming allegations" that may leave readers thinking that Donaldson (MrBeast) was accused of grooming a co-host rather than what actually happened (the now-dismissed co-host being accused of grooming).
The well video doesn't mention it but the project site does mention sustainable maintenance of the wells. Of course, this could be either a serious and effective effort or a bit of text on a web site, but the article doesn't try to distinguish that either, it just assumes the worst.
There is a difference between shitting on someone because of hard facts and shitting on someone because of vague rumors and popular opinion. The article is obviously in the latter category.
There’s a heuristic in here somewhere regarding philanthropy & first principles.
I respect the authors commitment to showing how MrBeasts philanthropy can be ineffective if not counter productive.
But, in his stated intentions of getting google admoney and redistributing it to people in need, what else is he supposed to do? We can agree to disagree that this itself is a bad premise.
What I’m really interested in is knowing what the Beast Philanthrophy has to say about these things. Are they aware that 6/10 wells are in disrepair in some parts? Are they willing to invisibly commit funds to future maintenance? How does Beast Philanthropy vet orphanages to ensure they’re not the mentioned “farms”?
On the hierarchy of benevolent individuals in this example we have:
1. Rich People Philanthrophy with the intent of helping the less fortunate
2. Journalists stating 1 is inefficient for X, Y, Z, and working with 1 to improve the efficacy of their philanthropy, with the intent of helping the less fortunate
3. Rich People Philanthrophy with the intent of improving their own self image
4. Journalists writing about 1 or 3 with the intent of making them look bad instead of improving outcomes for those in need.
As someone who has worked in community projects in rural areas, I would like to point out a few things:
1. It is not the donor's fault if the wells are not being maintained properly. Ideally this should be something that the locals are paid and trained to do but honestly, if you can't even be bothered to take care of your primary source of water, you have big problems which cannot be solved by ANYONE's philanthropy.
2. That brings me to the point about local attitudes towards donors and what is done for them: I have seen locals really benefit from things donated to them and they then use the new facilities to build a much better future for themselves and their children. HOWEVER, I have also seen locals who absolutely waste whatever is given to them. They may even loot everything down to the last nut and bolt. I have some theories about why this happens (based on personal experience) but I have noticed very different outcomes in different villages for the EXACT SAME help received from donors.
If a community isn't prepared, willing or able to maintain a well, is building a well in that community a good example of philanthropy? or is it an example of a lazy one-size fits all solution that reflects poorly on the donor, not the community? The donor is responsible for their choice of donation.
It is a complicated problem. A single village may consist of multiple groups who don't get along with each other. Also, there are people who benefit from the status quo in many ways.
Secondly, there is this issue of trust. There are villages where the people simply do not trust each other AT ALL. I have seen villages where each person thinks they ought to steal first before their neighbours do.
What responsibility does the donor have to evaluate the trust issues?
If someone is willing to donate a new facility, but the local people would prefer the "nuts and bolts" which make up the facility, why should they respect the donor's wishes over their own needs?
My point is that EVEN IF the donor gives funds towards a project which is immediately looted by those receiving the donation, it is not the donor's fault. The blame for this would still lie squarely on the shoulders of the locals who looted the project to their own detriment.
One of the issues with the thinking around community projects is the propensity to consider beneficiaries of donations as though they can't possibly do anything wrong - so the thinking goes that if a project fails the blame should never be placed on the beneficiaries - it can be placed on donors, the intermediate agencies, monitoring agencies.. EVERYONE apart from the beneficiary.
I am not supportive of such an approach.
I think it is far more helpful in the long run to make it very clear to the folks in these areas that if the donations made to them are misused that it will impact all donations in the future - that it is contingent upon them to ensure that the donations are well used, that the equipment is protected etc.. and that there are real consequences to not doing that.
That is, treat them as adults - not as infants. Make them accountable. Stop pussyfooting around talking about tough issues. Have people explain why something was allowed to be looted etc.
The nuts and bolts won't be evenly distributed and cause discord among the people. The new facility may too if not everyone benefits from it. And that is probably the reason why some people prefer the nuts and bolts. That is the risk of every charity and it is the responsibility of the donors to evaluate that risk. If the donor's wishes don't align with the peoples needs then the donor is doing something wrong.
Learning about this, and figuring out how to make a positive impact without upsetting some people is what I am trying to do here. I have had people tell me that the mere visit of a foreigner to one family caused envy among the neighbors because they assumed that this family was getting money from that visitor, and then they made up stories about that family and tried to discredit them with their landlord.
How much effort does one need to put into evaluating a community compared to building a well? It could be that a 60% failure rate is more efficient than a 0% failure rate with costly evaluations.
(I'm not familiar with Mr. Beast. I will say that the 2 videos I've seen bordered on psychopathy. But I think the general principle of my statement is still worth exploring.)
This is just an anectote, but I have had the opportunity to visit a village where such a well has been built by a charity. The charity was specifically invited to build the well there because months prior a child had drowned in the waterhole that they used before. I suspect if the villagers would have been able to pool enough resources they would have paid for it by themselves. The things needed to build the well are readily available (I passed a shop in a bigger city in the same country recently that sold them) and it's just a matter of finding some skilled people to do the work.
Many of the philanthropy videos are either manipulated or outright frauds. If you state your aim is to earn a million dollars to spend a million dollars on philanthropy and then after earning the million dollars you spend half a million dollars on philanthropy, the half a million spend is not a great philanthropic gift, it does not justify misappropriating the other half. Philanthropy as a shield is a strategy as old as time. We can forgive people for failing to meet their stated aims if they failed due to naivety following an earnest attempt. Can we forgive people for failing to meet their stated aims wilfully?
The premise of your position is that philanthropy is always a net good, but that isn't true: philanthropy can be harmful. Homelessness is the easiest example to think about, where half-baked philanthropic efforts can have immediate harmful consequences, as we see time and time again.
Is it really Faux Philanthropy what he is doing is using his platform for promotion of different causes he likes. From what I understand and see none of the things he has done are something unique rather charities and organisations were already doing it he just financed/donated to those organisations and charities. The awareness these organisations and charities received from the video are probably actually worth a lot more than what him doing in his video.
If someone listens to him or watches about 30 seconds and doesn't come away with the thought that his charity thing is complete BS, I think that person is probably a very poor judge of character. It's a subjective assessment, and I can't quite put it into words, but he oozes with sliminess and it's quite transparent.
He needs to target an audience of children because they are gullible through inexperience and won't be able to read this from him.
> Is it really Faux Philanthropy what he is doing is using his platform for promotion of different causes he likes.
Kinda? There's a thin line between donating food to a homeless shelter and setting up a camera crew to film a vetted contingent of contestants who have to fight in potentially dangerous conditions where Beast Ltd. cannot be held accountable for injuries. One is selfless - the other is petty exploitation. It feels very clear where "the line" is here.
I guess you could argue that Mr. Beast has an incentive to set up these things to maximize profit so he can "donate more to charity" (cough cough buy cars and houses). But at the end of the day the publicity alone is enough to argue that he's exploiting the people involved - the additional ad revenue and inherent high-performance incentive of his work makes it hard to call the whole thing charity. Maybe gambling or, at the most absolute generous, a "game" show.
That whole line of thought where you can justify immoral acts because you'll donate some of the proceeds is just shitty Effective Altruism with better PR. Really wish we'd stop celebrating that particular line.
No, no, game show is probably right. It's a game show where the contestants are poor and the prize is basic necessities. Staged for the entertainment (and ad revinue) of the less-poor because it makes a number go up slightly in one of the wealthiest companies in history.
If you don't know or are unsure about something, you can simply not comment and leave it for someone else.
I don't understand what compels people to go "I don't know, but let me ask the often-wrong-bullshit-generator" and post it as a reply on a forum. The parent commenter could've done that...
Actually, yes. The summary is plausible enough to believe in the context of the discussion(which it doesn't know about via the prompt), and in fact turns out to be basically true.
I think you can make a very convincing argument ALL philanthropy falls into either category. That doesn't it make it bad either. If someone does something that helps other it doesn't really matter in the end why they did it.
honestly... I didn't put or both because I was lazy to think through if "one of three buckets" was the right way to phrase it, and additionally, too lazy to think of another way to phrase it, so yeah, or both. :P
There's another comment referring to Elon. I'll leave that aside, but I think the same analysis can be done for him.
Clearly the population is split on wether or not intent matters when it comes to philanthropy. Some people say, it is only respectable if you're doing it out of the goodness of your heart, not for some ulterior motive (like repairing/boosting your image). On the other side, you could argue that the majority of philanthropy is done for image improvement, and without that benefit millions of people would be left without help. Hoping for "true altruists" to save us is probably never going to work.
True altruists that can gain enough power and resources to make a difference is a paradox. I need 10 billion dollars before meaningful impact happens (random number, but the point stands _a lot of money_). That's more money that any altruistic person would ever get to, since they'd start donating at the 100million or less mark.
The closest we have to a true altruistic person with power is someone like Mackenzie Bezos. No derision here, but she didn't have "what it takes" to get there, but she does have the desire to help. Which is also why we don't hear much about her donations, compared I Mr. Beast, despite her giving orders of magnitude more money away. And more correctly.
Then, we could look one level higher, how do these people acquire their wealth? Clearly selling garbage food to kids, creating fake giveaway videos, and other things isn't exactly helping the world along the way. Making electric cars cool / hip? That's pretty good. Embrace, extend, extinguish? Terrible.
Holistically, Mr. Beast is earning his money off of children and "legal scams". Then, fixing his reputation by donation pennies on the dollar of that back to the world. Overall, probably not a great person. Couple that with how conscious he is of what he's doing based on various leaks, and is say definitely not someone I'd categorize as deserving of any adulation. Obviously not actively evil, but definitely overall harmful to society in his pursuit of fame and wealth.
Aside: how isn't this titled "MrBeast's Faux-lanthropy"?
I think the split is different one. It is between people who want to live in a world where they can imagine themselves being the generous philantropist and people who would like to live in a world where philantropists aren't needed because the need for them does not arise.
We have halloween coming up. Imagine one kid taking all the candy first and then acting as a "philantropist" by giving out a fraction of what would pass as a fair share to other kids — oh and he is making videos of it — and he selects who gets something and who doesn't. Very "effective", especially compared to all kids just getting their fair share.
As a parent I'd go with my kid to a psychotherapist if it did that, because it is not normal. Now that is of course an analogy and things are more complex in a capitalist world, but being an arsonist working in the firebrigade doesn't turn you into a hero even when you risk your life to extinguish the fire.
that's not what mr.beast is doing. he is taking money from google and advertisers. and yeah, he is not redistributing all of it, pretty much like any other business that donates some of their money for tax reasons. that mr.beast is heavily promoting his philanthropy is simply because it is part of his business model and it earns him more money from ads. he is producing entertainment, no more no less. morally questionable, maybe. but no worse than most entertainment.
You assume it's ineffective but beyond the actual wells drilled and the like it has a big PR effect to make it look cool, if you make money, to use it help people rather than say the Kardashians making money and using it for huge mansions and plastic surgery for themselves.
I watched the well drilling one and thought it was kinda cool, both for helping and also mucking around with cool drilling machines. (https://youtu.be/mwKJfNYwvm8). I'll admit not taking watching the Kardashians for more than about 30 seconds so I could be wrong there.
Let's not forget that the product itself is demonstrably terrible. The man is purposely aiming to lower the bar as low as possible, producing content strictly for its addictive qualities and appeal to teenagers. His business plan not only produces vast wealth for him and showy but ineffective pseudo-philanthropy (also highly clickbait-y, like the content), it fills the media space and the viewers' attention with garbage.
Do you think also part of it is that to amass that amount of wealth is to extract that much money, I wonder how many "true altruists" would even play that game to begin with?
How is value created? Every accumulation of wealth is countered by an equal loss of wealth somewhere else. If you’re in a service industry and devise a process that saves $20 per transaction for a customer, then charge $10 for it, you’re making $10 per transaction in efficiency gains. So that compensates and is still altruistic.
Not all businesses work this way of course, but there are ways of extracting wealth without leaving the other side worse off.
> Every accumulation of wealth is countered by an equal loss of wealth somewhere else.
This fundamentally contradicts mainline capitalist theory.
People only trade / exchange money when they believe the service (or goods or whatever) is worth the money.
IE: someone pays $20 for X because they believe X is worth $30, $40, or $100 to them. If X were only worth $19, then they would reject the deal and walk away.
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Case in point: if gasoline doubled in price, would you still drive? How high would gasoline prices have to get before you stopped driving?
the (paraphrased) quote of "don't expect someone to understand something, if their paycheck depends on them not understanding it" is very much on point here as well.
The accumulation of wealth really does impact the economy negatively - as it's (by definition) not being spend, otherwise it wouldn't accumulate.
The reason why the theory is generally correct is because money that has been spent isn't gone, so it's once again available for the next trade. But in today's economy it's effectively false because the accumulated wealth is instead funneled into property acquisition and similar expenditures, which effectively becomes rent seeking that's ultimately just syphoning wealth from the population/damaging the economy at scale
Accumulation of wealth is simply trading today's money for promises-of-tomorrow's money.
You fight the over-accumulation of wealth by making an inflationary environment (ie: create policies that explicitly make tomorrow's money worth a little bit less than today's money). Or use wealth taxes (or other forms of taxation: promise to take away money in the future if it is not spent today).
> You fight the over-accumulation of wealth by making an inflationary environment
Inflationary environments are actually positive for these people, because it makes it easier to justify ever increasing rents.
The people that are actually harmed by inflation are employed and not particularly rich, so they keep their savings in cash, essentially. (Both their wages and their savings get devalued every year, making large purchases to get out of these toxic spirals ever harder)
For the same reason wealth taxes don't really work either... unless you revamp the entire tax system and somehow found a way to make rent seeking unviable (I.e. exponentially increasing property taxes by quantity owned). I'm honestly not sure how that's gonna be possible however, it's too ingrained into our markets and the consequences of such changes would likely be extremely unpredictable
> Inflationary environments are actually positive for these people, because it makes it easier to justify ever increasing rents.
No. Deflationary is better, because they keep the same price but get more and more wealth anyway.
Its the lack of competition that's the problem in any case. If someone is not contributing well or giving a good deal, shop somewhere else. If you're unable to shop somewhere else, then its a known flaw in capitalism (called Monopolies). You only have a good capitalistic system if competition can be assured.
Deflation is good for people that have most of their net worth in cash and bad for people that ... don't
Think a little about it: if the money gains in value it would mean their property loses value, because it's price would go down (as the money will be worth more).
Rent seekers mostly have their net worth in assets such as properties and shares, and for those people, inflation is good - because these effectively become more valuable - because they're suddenly worth it's purchasing price + inflation. (That's the definition of inflation, you need more cash to purchase the same product vs deflation where you can buy the same product for less cash).
If every wage etc increased at the same rate as inflation, the difference would probably be academic... But it's not, most employees didn't get a total 30% wage increase within the last 4 years after all, which means that the total purchasing power of (for example) the American people has decreased.
This will ultimately reduce their ability to spend money on products, which means less trades that happen... And more accumulation of wealth, because the people that actually captured that value invested it in things that will effectively become rent seeking, ultimately furthering the spiral
> Deflation is good for people that have most of their net worth in cash and bad for people that ... don't
I don't think the poor or middle class have much net worth in anything.
In particular, my mental model is that the middle class will get wrecked by their student loans or car loans if you purposefully deflated the dollar.
The rich have enough money to prepare for all circumstances, be it inflation or deflation. It's a loss if you're trying to prevent them from gaining more money by simple means like this. In times of deflation they will hoard cash (even international trades like the the carry trade: taking advantage of the difference of inflation between national currencies and economies).
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In any case: increasing the cost of everyone's debt burdens is almost obviously the wrong move.
You're right, they don't have a lot of savings - but doesn't that make it even worse for them, because that means their income is basically all their wealth. And this is objectively even more impacted by inflation as I said before, because it keeps getting worse with every year, because most workers do not get raises equivalent to inflation.
And I think you'd agree too that assets become more valuable by inflation (because that's kinda the definition of the term), and that consequently means that if your net worth is mostly assets, as every rent seekers portfolio is - you really do like inflation.
Even if you're right that the people heavily in debt also gain by having it devalued via inflation: I don't think it'd have enough impact to offset their depreciated wage and the additional cost of living though - but that's just my personal expectation
Yes, but the gas money went to someone else. That spending ability is now lost from the consumer and equally gained by the producer. Extracting a valuable resource is adding value out of thin air (literally with gas at times), but you could argue that we’re reaping efficiency’s gains again by making that resource more useable.
If you spend $40 to fill up your car (but you were willing to pay as high as $120 to fill up your car), then $80 of value was created out of nothingness. You got $120 of value (given that you _would have_ filled up your car at a much higher price anyway), but only paid $40 to get it.
This is fundamental to the theory of capitalism. The trade isn't grounded at the paid price (ie: $40 in this case), the trade is grounded in the price _YOU WOULD HAVE PAID FOR_ vs what you actually paid.
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If you are paying above the price what is comfortable for you, then you must stop paying for the system to work.
Now obviously: capitalism stops working in cases where you'd pay any amount of money (because now the opponent would choose any price and force you to pay). This happens in monopolies and health care. (There's no limit to the price you'd pay to stay alive).
However, I still posit that in the vast majority of cases, that capitalism works. Negotiating for a lower price is assumed to happen on both parties.
Philanthropy never works. Philanthropy requires large amounts of money. Only the monetary Ponzi yields that kind of money.
So effectively, philanthropy is funded using the proceeds of theft. It's about diffusing harm to all and concentrating the benefits towards a select few.
Wow, this guy sure hates Mr Beast. I haven’t seen much but I did see the one where he created 100 wells. The author says these wells will fail soon and do not get repaired or maintained.
I think the reasoning is ridiculous. Shame someone for digging a well because it might not be repaired in the future????
There was one video from a disgruntled ex employee, who just noticed that in the video footage some wells are missing/duplicated. That does not prove he didn’t build them. It's only one of the possible reasons. The other possible reason is the footage for these wells might've been damaged or missing so they had to go with what they had.
Now don't get me wrong, some of the stuff he's being accused to has much more merit, for example in one video he showed a dilapidated hospital that he claimed to rebuild from scratch, but other footage revealed that the hospital was in fact in much better condition initially. So he's basically trying to make it look like he's doing more than in reality, and that's definitely something that needs to be called out.
There are many plausible reasons to be sure, but I think in those cases, it would have been much better to do actually explain what happened than effectively lie. (It may have been a lie with no real ill intent, but still a lie.)
I feel like part of the author’s point was that the well-digging thing is a long and tired example of attention-hungry rich outsiders prancing in to “fix things” and not caring about (or considering) the long-term consequences of their ideas. Even the really good development organizations are constantly learning lessons about unintended second- and third-order consequences: it’s particularly cynical, then, to make a spectacle out of doing the naive thing that seems obvious but that we already know doesn’t really work well.
Doing something pointless with your lavish resources is insulting when, with the same resources and the humility to study what works and ask for good advice, you (or the local population) could instead have done something sustainable. It’s putting your ego and your public profile ahead of the very real material needs whose egregiousness you’re profiting from.
It’s bad enough when it’s nonprofits just making their (sometimes lavish) salaries off the pointlessness. In this case, the man has made a career out of directly turning people’s disability and economic disadvantage and suffering into his primary product that he profits from. His $750-million company got that way entirely by exploiting people’s misery for views and profit. By selling the idea that the problems aren’t all that real, that all it takes is a rich dude with a magic wand and some righteousness. “Fixing” 100 people’s problems and pretending you fixed a society’s worth.
And his little treatise that leaked a few weeks back makes his logic explicit: do the minimum to sound flashy.
> He argues that it is far cheaper and funnier to offer a prize of five packs of Doritos a day instead of $20,000. Then one section asks “What is the goal of our content” before replying “the goal of our content is to excite me”.
At least an evil capitalist WellCorp, Inc. would have to dig wells that keep working after the camera crew leaves, if it wanted to stay in business for very long!
> Doing something pointless with your lavish resources is insulting when, with the same resources and the humility to study what works and ask for good advice, you (or the local population) could instead have done something sustainable.
That seems like a false dichotomy no? The article is specifically about MrBeast, who would NOT have "lavish resources" if he did what you propose. The stunt nature of the work IS the income stream.
I think it's more reasonable to ask if he's just creating short term gains, or making things worse. I would guess the former. Which is honestly better than the alternative which is he does cruel prank videos with the same budget.
> His $750-million company got that way entirely by exploiting people’s misery for views and profit
Uh, what? The guy runs big elaborate game shows. The contestants are thrilled for the chance to compete to win money. How could you spin that as exploiting people's misery?
You're conflating different categories of his videos. Competition videos like Squid Game have volunteers who are participating willingly, with a few winners. And charity videos like "cure 1000 cataracts" also have willing participants, who all get surgery for free, no competition involved.
There are no Mr Beast videos where "miserable" people compete to get charity prizes.
It's the same phenomenon as the What Three Words thing. The pitch was that it would solve commerce because in parts of the world they don't have "proper" street addresses.
Or the Three Cups of Tea guy. His foundation had a bunch of schools built in the Himalayas, ostensibly to educate girls, but many of those schools were empty or used to store grain shortly after being built, and less than half of the funds he raised actually went to building "schools".
Just another outsider who thinks they know better.
I remember that video where Mr Beast paid for cataract surgery for a few dozen people and restored their sight. Regardless of intent, that was an immediate and material benefit to many people. It’s fair to question the motives of altruists, especially those who rely on extravagant public shows to pull viewership. But more eyeballs means more ad revenue, which means the altruism experiments can continue. If this is the most efficient, targeted model for altruism, then I’ll take it.
With that weirdos fake ass forced smile- I imagine in years to come there will be many more articles like this one about this boring androids dark side.
"His stunts promote the concept of simplistic solutions to challenging problems, wrapping the munificent American donor in a warm glow of benevolence as he drops in to spread a little of his MrBeast largesse to some lucky recipients."
Half jokingly, MrBeast is a decent source of learning other languages given (1) how children friendly the contents are, and (2) how many dubs/subs the videos have. I particularly like the Takeuchi Junko Japanese dub.
He hacked the YouTube algorithm and went from 0 to a super millionaire. You might not like the guy, but there are plenty of hacker centric lenses through which to view his story
Yes exactly. It reminds me of this video by veritasium, which is in turn inspired by Adrian Tan where he says “Be hated” and describes how in being successful you should seek to be hated by those with poor values. Not that I agree with everything Elon, Mr beast or Veritasum does by any stretch, but they have all seemingly embraced this. I also think it’s inevitable with fame, and perhaps a good check on the actions of those with power.
If I were Mr Beast and I read this I’d shrug it off and think you can’t impress everyone. Again, I don’t agree or even follow what he does but it actually doesn’t matter, if you do good, or bad, or do much of anything notable, you will attract hate.
> Again, I don’t agree or even follow what he does but it actually doesn’t matter, if you do good, or bad, or do much of anything notable, you will attract hate.
Of course, and you need to accept that you will get hate, but it shouldn't become a source of validation. Getting hate from bad people doesn't mean you're doing good - e.g. Stalin was hated by Nazis, that doesn't make him a good guy.
> where he says “Be hated” and describes how in being successful you should seek to be hated by those with poor values
I think that even if you're in fact the good guy doing good things, seeking hate / outrage from the bad people is wrong or at least tactically a bad decision in the sense they will get even more deep-seated in their bad values.
No you’re totally right, and Derek from Veritasium does point out that being hated shouldn’t be a moral compass. I think the point is more that you should know that even when you’re doing something right some people, maybe many people, will hate you for it. Incidentally if you’re doing something wrong you might be quite popular as well. Popularity isn’t a good judge of character.
There is a difference between "extraordinary scrutiny" and "finding reasons, no matter how far fetched, to shit on people just because they're successful". They sometimes overlap, but this seems to be mostly the latter.
I kinda agree on MrBeast. In the big picture he's pretty irrelevant, and I don't even want to invest enough energy to make an opinion.
With Musk, it's quite different. He's the richest person on the planet, exchanging favors with a presidential candidate of the most powerful country on earth, both of them having pretty "flexible" views on democracy and upholding the law. Musk is powerful and dangerous.
Look these guys have become millionaires and billionaires. That money represents other people's labour. That they command the lifetime output of hundreds or thousands of people's work* alone suggests we should examine how they have come to their positions and what they do with it. That is why they peddle philanthropic PR, which in turn necessitates that we examine their philanthropy.
The article seems to be one of the popular "let's shit on a successful person out of envy" articles with little substance behind it.
It primarily raises generic concerns about these kinds of projects, without linking them to these specific projects, after some generic mud-slinging starting with "racist comments made as a teenager" and a very careful wording of "teen grooming allegations" that may leave readers thinking that Donaldson (MrBeast) was accused of grooming a co-host rather than what actually happened (the now-dismissed co-host being accused of grooming).
The well video doesn't mention it but the project site does mention sustainable maintenance of the wells. Of course, this could be either a serious and effective effort or a bit of text on a web site, but the article doesn't try to distinguish that either, it just assumes the worst.
> The article seems to be one of the popular "let's shit on a successful person out of envy" articles with little substance behind it.
How much substance do you think is here? https://news3lv.com/news/local/las-vegas-staff-say-mrbeast-s...
There is a difference between shitting on someone because of hard facts and shitting on someone because of vague rumors and popular opinion. The article is obviously in the latter category.
There’s a heuristic in here somewhere regarding philanthropy & first principles.
I respect the authors commitment to showing how MrBeasts philanthropy can be ineffective if not counter productive.
But, in his stated intentions of getting google admoney and redistributing it to people in need, what else is he supposed to do? We can agree to disagree that this itself is a bad premise.
What I’m really interested in is knowing what the Beast Philanthrophy has to say about these things. Are they aware that 6/10 wells are in disrepair in some parts? Are they willing to invisibly commit funds to future maintenance? How does Beast Philanthropy vet orphanages to ensure they’re not the mentioned “farms”?
On the hierarchy of benevolent individuals in this example we have: 1. Rich People Philanthrophy with the intent of helping the less fortunate 2. Journalists stating 1 is inefficient for X, Y, Z, and working with 1 to improve the efficacy of their philanthropy, with the intent of helping the less fortunate 3. Rich People Philanthrophy with the intent of improving their own self image 4. Journalists writing about 1 or 3 with the intent of making them look bad instead of improving outcomes for those in need.
As someone who has worked in community projects in rural areas, I would like to point out a few things:
1. It is not the donor's fault if the wells are not being maintained properly. Ideally this should be something that the locals are paid and trained to do but honestly, if you can't even be bothered to take care of your primary source of water, you have big problems which cannot be solved by ANYONE's philanthropy.
2. That brings me to the point about local attitudes towards donors and what is done for them: I have seen locals really benefit from things donated to them and they then use the new facilities to build a much better future for themselves and their children. HOWEVER, I have also seen locals who absolutely waste whatever is given to them. They may even loot everything down to the last nut and bolt. I have some theories about why this happens (based on personal experience) but I have noticed very different outcomes in different villages for the EXACT SAME help received from donors.
If a community isn't prepared, willing or able to maintain a well, is building a well in that community a good example of philanthropy? or is it an example of a lazy one-size fits all solution that reflects poorly on the donor, not the community? The donor is responsible for their choice of donation.
It is a complicated problem. A single village may consist of multiple groups who don't get along with each other. Also, there are people who benefit from the status quo in many ways.
Secondly, there is this issue of trust. There are villages where the people simply do not trust each other AT ALL. I have seen villages where each person thinks they ought to steal first before their neighbours do.
What responsibility does the donor have to evaluate the trust issues?
If someone is willing to donate a new facility, but the local people would prefer the "nuts and bolts" which make up the facility, why should they respect the donor's wishes over their own needs?
My point is that EVEN IF the donor gives funds towards a project which is immediately looted by those receiving the donation, it is not the donor's fault. The blame for this would still lie squarely on the shoulders of the locals who looted the project to their own detriment.
One of the issues with the thinking around community projects is the propensity to consider beneficiaries of donations as though they can't possibly do anything wrong - so the thinking goes that if a project fails the blame should never be placed on the beneficiaries - it can be placed on donors, the intermediate agencies, monitoring agencies.. EVERYONE apart from the beneficiary.
I am not supportive of such an approach.
I think it is far more helpful in the long run to make it very clear to the folks in these areas that if the donations made to them are misused that it will impact all donations in the future - that it is contingent upon them to ensure that the donations are well used, that the equipment is protected etc.. and that there are real consequences to not doing that.
That is, treat them as adults - not as infants. Make them accountable. Stop pussyfooting around talking about tough issues. Have people explain why something was allowed to be looted etc.
The nuts and bolts won't be evenly distributed and cause discord among the people. The new facility may too if not everyone benefits from it. And that is probably the reason why some people prefer the nuts and bolts. That is the risk of every charity and it is the responsibility of the donors to evaluate that risk. If the donor's wishes don't align with the peoples needs then the donor is doing something wrong.
Learning about this, and figuring out how to make a positive impact without upsetting some people is what I am trying to do here. I have had people tell me that the mere visit of a foreigner to one family caused envy among the neighbors because they assumed that this family was getting money from that visitor, and then they made up stories about that family and tried to discredit them with their landlord.
How much effort does one need to put into evaluating a community compared to building a well? It could be that a 60% failure rate is more efficient than a 0% failure rate with costly evaluations.
(I'm not familiar with Mr. Beast. I will say that the 2 videos I've seen bordered on psychopathy. But I think the general principle of my statement is still worth exploring.)
This is just an anectote, but I have had the opportunity to visit a village where such a well has been built by a charity. The charity was specifically invited to build the well there because months prior a child had drowned in the waterhole that they used before. I suspect if the villagers would have been able to pool enough resources they would have paid for it by themselves. The things needed to build the well are readily available (I passed a shop in a bigger city in the same country recently that sold them) and it's just a matter of finding some skilled people to do the work.
Many of the philanthropy videos are either manipulated or outright frauds. If you state your aim is to earn a million dollars to spend a million dollars on philanthropy and then after earning the million dollars you spend half a million dollars on philanthropy, the half a million spend is not a great philanthropic gift, it does not justify misappropriating the other half. Philanthropy as a shield is a strategy as old as time. We can forgive people for failing to meet their stated aims if they failed due to naivety following an earnest attempt. Can we forgive people for failing to meet their stated aims wilfully?
The premise of your position is that philanthropy is always a net good, but that isn't true: philanthropy can be harmful. Homelessness is the easiest example to think about, where half-baked philanthropic efforts can have immediate harmful consequences, as we see time and time again.
There's also a heuristic for people whose smile doesn't reach the eyes.
Is it really Faux Philanthropy what he is doing is using his platform for promotion of different causes he likes. From what I understand and see none of the things he has done are something unique rather charities and organisations were already doing it he just financed/donated to those organisations and charities. The awareness these organisations and charities received from the video are probably actually worth a lot more than what him doing in his video.
If someone listens to him or watches about 30 seconds and doesn't come away with the thought that his charity thing is complete BS, I think that person is probably a very poor judge of character. It's a subjective assessment, and I can't quite put it into words, but he oozes with sliminess and it's quite transparent.
He needs to target an audience of children because they are gullible through inexperience and won't be able to read this from him.
> Is it really Faux Philanthropy what he is doing is using his platform for promotion of different causes he likes.
Kinda? There's a thin line between donating food to a homeless shelter and setting up a camera crew to film a vetted contingent of contestants who have to fight in potentially dangerous conditions where Beast Ltd. cannot be held accountable for injuries. One is selfless - the other is petty exploitation. It feels very clear where "the line" is here.
I guess you could argue that Mr. Beast has an incentive to set up these things to maximize profit so he can "donate more to charity" (cough cough buy cars and houses). But at the end of the day the publicity alone is enough to argue that he's exploiting the people involved - the additional ad revenue and inherent high-performance incentive of his work makes it hard to call the whole thing charity. Maybe gambling or, at the most absolute generous, a "game" show.
That whole line of thought where you can justify immoral acts because you'll donate some of the proceeds is just shitty Effective Altruism with better PR. Really wish we'd stop celebrating that particular line.
No, no, game show is probably right. It's a game show where the contestants are poor and the prize is basic necessities. Staged for the entertainment (and ad revinue) of the less-poor because it makes a number go up slightly in one of the wealthiest companies in history.
What has his game show or other videos have anything to do about his philanthropy videos.
I would highly recommend a book that covers the business and motivations behind a lot of philanthropy: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/539747/winners-take...
MrBeast is unfortunately just one part of this. And he's not even the worst offender sadly.
Can you give a summary of what is it about?
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If you don't know or are unsure about something, you can simply not comment and leave it for someone else.
I don't understand what compels people to go "I don't know, but let me ask the often-wrong-bullshit-generator" and post it as a reply on a forum. The parent commenter could've done that...
The parent commenter could have also found a summary themselves. The parent commenter made a lazy post, and so did I in response.
Do you think your lazy response improved things overall?
Actually, yes. The summary is plausible enough to believe in the context of the discussion(which it doesn't know about via the prompt), and in fact turns out to be basically true.
From the rich people I know their philanthropy seems to fall into one of two buckets. allaying guilt, or, make more money.
Not sure how big of a minority we are, but for some of us, philanthropy does actually come from a place of deep gratitude for our community
I don’t care about the idea of community, I just want the people I interact with to suffer less. That’s what the money is for.
I think you can make a very convincing argument ALL philanthropy falls into either category. That doesn't it make it bad either. If someone does something that helps other it doesn't really matter in the end why they did it.
Why not both!
honestly... I didn't put or both because I was lazy to think through if "one of three buckets" was the right way to phrase it, and additionally, too lazy to think of another way to phrase it, so yeah, or both. :P
There's another comment referring to Elon. I'll leave that aside, but I think the same analysis can be done for him.
Clearly the population is split on wether or not intent matters when it comes to philanthropy. Some people say, it is only respectable if you're doing it out of the goodness of your heart, not for some ulterior motive (like repairing/boosting your image). On the other side, you could argue that the majority of philanthropy is done for image improvement, and without that benefit millions of people would be left without help. Hoping for "true altruists" to save us is probably never going to work.
True altruists that can gain enough power and resources to make a difference is a paradox. I need 10 billion dollars before meaningful impact happens (random number, but the point stands _a lot of money_). That's more money that any altruistic person would ever get to, since they'd start donating at the 100million or less mark.
The closest we have to a true altruistic person with power is someone like Mackenzie Bezos. No derision here, but she didn't have "what it takes" to get there, but she does have the desire to help. Which is also why we don't hear much about her donations, compared I Mr. Beast, despite her giving orders of magnitude more money away. And more correctly.
Then, we could look one level higher, how do these people acquire their wealth? Clearly selling garbage food to kids, creating fake giveaway videos, and other things isn't exactly helping the world along the way. Making electric cars cool / hip? That's pretty good. Embrace, extend, extinguish? Terrible.
Holistically, Mr. Beast is earning his money off of children and "legal scams". Then, fixing his reputation by donation pennies on the dollar of that back to the world. Overall, probably not a great person. Couple that with how conscious he is of what he's doing based on various leaks, and is say definitely not someone I'd categorize as deserving of any adulation. Obviously not actively evil, but definitely overall harmful to society in his pursuit of fame and wealth.
Aside: how isn't this titled "MrBeast's Faux-lanthropy"?
The split isn’t on intent. It’s on effectiveness.
In one camp is ineffective philanthropy pretending to be effective. In the other camp is actually effective philanthropy.
What makes is problematic is when the ineffective philanthropist is using the philanthropy to line their own pockets.
I think the split is different one. It is between people who want to live in a world where they can imagine themselves being the generous philantropist and people who would like to live in a world where philantropists aren't needed because the need for them does not arise.
We have halloween coming up. Imagine one kid taking all the candy first and then acting as a "philantropist" by giving out a fraction of what would pass as a fair share to other kids — oh and he is making videos of it — and he selects who gets something and who doesn't. Very "effective", especially compared to all kids just getting their fair share.
As a parent I'd go with my kid to a psychotherapist if it did that, because it is not normal. Now that is of course an analogy and things are more complex in a capitalist world, but being an arsonist working in the firebrigade doesn't turn you into a hero even when you risk your life to extinguish the fire.
that's not what mr.beast is doing. he is taking money from google and advertisers. and yeah, he is not redistributing all of it, pretty much like any other business that donates some of their money for tax reasons. that mr.beast is heavily promoting his philanthropy is simply because it is part of his business model and it earns him more money from ads. he is producing entertainment, no more no less. morally questionable, maybe. but no worse than most entertainment.
> fair share
Fair share doesn't (or shouldn't) mean even share because that's just not possible.
Everyone has the same opportunity to do what Mr Beast is doing (and many try, some pretty successfully).
You assume it's ineffective but beyond the actual wells drilled and the like it has a big PR effect to make it look cool, if you make money, to use it help people rather than say the Kardashians making money and using it for huge mansions and plastic surgery for themselves.
I watched the well drilling one and thought it was kinda cool, both for helping and also mucking around with cool drilling machines. (https://youtu.be/mwKJfNYwvm8). I'll admit not taking watching the Kardashians for more than about 30 seconds so I could be wrong there.
Let's not forget that the product itself is demonstrably terrible. The man is purposely aiming to lower the bar as low as possible, producing content strictly for its addictive qualities and appeal to teenagers. His business plan not only produces vast wealth for him and showy but ineffective pseudo-philanthropy (also highly clickbait-y, like the content), it fills the media space and the viewers' attention with garbage.
Do you think also part of it is that to amass that amount of wealth is to extract that much money, I wonder how many "true altruists" would even play that game to begin with?
How is value created? Every accumulation of wealth is countered by an equal loss of wealth somewhere else. If you’re in a service industry and devise a process that saves $20 per transaction for a customer, then charge $10 for it, you’re making $10 per transaction in efficiency gains. So that compensates and is still altruistic. Not all businesses work this way of course, but there are ways of extracting wealth without leaving the other side worse off.
> Every accumulation of wealth is countered by an equal loss of wealth somewhere else.
This fundamentally contradicts mainline capitalist theory.
People only trade / exchange money when they believe the service (or goods or whatever) is worth the money.
IE: someone pays $20 for X because they believe X is worth $30, $40, or $100 to them. If X were only worth $19, then they would reject the deal and walk away.
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Case in point: if gasoline doubled in price, would you still drive? How high would gasoline prices have to get before you stopped driving?
Wrt the capitalist theory:
the (paraphrased) quote of "don't expect someone to understand something, if their paycheck depends on them not understanding it" is very much on point here as well.
The accumulation of wealth really does impact the economy negatively - as it's (by definition) not being spend, otherwise it wouldn't accumulate.
The reason why the theory is generally correct is because money that has been spent isn't gone, so it's once again available for the next trade. But in today's economy it's effectively false because the accumulated wealth is instead funneled into property acquisition and similar expenditures, which effectively becomes rent seeking that's ultimately just syphoning wealth from the population/damaging the economy at scale
Accumulation of wealth is simply trading today's money for promises-of-tomorrow's money.
You fight the over-accumulation of wealth by making an inflationary environment (ie: create policies that explicitly make tomorrow's money worth a little bit less than today's money). Or use wealth taxes (or other forms of taxation: promise to take away money in the future if it is not spent today).
> You fight the over-accumulation of wealth by making an inflationary environment
Inflationary environments are actually positive for these people, because it makes it easier to justify ever increasing rents.
The people that are actually harmed by inflation are employed and not particularly rich, so they keep their savings in cash, essentially. (Both their wages and their savings get devalued every year, making large purchases to get out of these toxic spirals ever harder)
For the same reason wealth taxes don't really work either... unless you revamp the entire tax system and somehow found a way to make rent seeking unviable (I.e. exponentially increasing property taxes by quantity owned). I'm honestly not sure how that's gonna be possible however, it's too ingrained into our markets and the consequences of such changes would likely be extremely unpredictable
> Inflationary environments are actually positive for these people, because it makes it easier to justify ever increasing rents.
No. Deflationary is better, because they keep the same price but get more and more wealth anyway.
Its the lack of competition that's the problem in any case. If someone is not contributing well or giving a good deal, shop somewhere else. If you're unable to shop somewhere else, then its a known flaw in capitalism (called Monopolies). You only have a good capitalistic system if competition can be assured.
Deflation is good for people that have most of their net worth in cash and bad for people that ... don't
Think a little about it: if the money gains in value it would mean their property loses value, because it's price would go down (as the money will be worth more).
Rent seekers mostly have their net worth in assets such as properties and shares, and for those people, inflation is good - because these effectively become more valuable - because they're suddenly worth it's purchasing price + inflation. (That's the definition of inflation, you need more cash to purchase the same product vs deflation where you can buy the same product for less cash).
If every wage etc increased at the same rate as inflation, the difference would probably be academic... But it's not, most employees didn't get a total 30% wage increase within the last 4 years after all, which means that the total purchasing power of (for example) the American people has decreased.
This will ultimately reduce their ability to spend money on products, which means less trades that happen... And more accumulation of wealth, because the people that actually captured that value invested it in things that will effectively become rent seeking, ultimately furthering the spiral
> Deflation is good for people that have most of their net worth in cash and bad for people that ... don't
I don't think the poor or middle class have much net worth in anything.
In particular, my mental model is that the middle class will get wrecked by their student loans or car loans if you purposefully deflated the dollar.
The rich have enough money to prepare for all circumstances, be it inflation or deflation. It's a loss if you're trying to prevent them from gaining more money by simple means like this. In times of deflation they will hoard cash (even international trades like the the carry trade: taking advantage of the difference of inflation between national currencies and economies).
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In any case: increasing the cost of everyone's debt burdens is almost obviously the wrong move.
You're right, they don't have a lot of savings - but doesn't that make it even worse for them, because that means their income is basically all their wealth. And this is objectively even more impacted by inflation as I said before, because it keeps getting worse with every year, because most workers do not get raises equivalent to inflation.
And I think you'd agree too that assets become more valuable by inflation (because that's kinda the definition of the term), and that consequently means that if your net worth is mostly assets, as every rent seekers portfolio is - you really do like inflation.
Even if you're right that the people heavily in debt also gain by having it devalued via inflation: I don't think it'd have enough impact to offset their depreciated wage and the additional cost of living though - but that's just my personal expectation
Yes, but the gas money went to someone else. That spending ability is now lost from the consumer and equally gained by the producer. Extracting a valuable resource is adding value out of thin air (literally with gas at times), but you could argue that we’re reaping efficiency’s gains again by making that resource more useable.
> Yes, but the gas money went to someone else.
If you spend $40 to fill up your car (but you were willing to pay as high as $120 to fill up your car), then $80 of value was created out of nothingness. You got $120 of value (given that you _would have_ filled up your car at a much higher price anyway), but only paid $40 to get it.
This is fundamental to the theory of capitalism. The trade isn't grounded at the paid price (ie: $40 in this case), the trade is grounded in the price _YOU WOULD HAVE PAID FOR_ vs what you actually paid.
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If you are paying above the price what is comfortable for you, then you must stop paying for the system to work.
Now obviously: capitalism stops working in cases where you'd pay any amount of money (because now the opponent would choose any price and force you to pay). This happens in monopolies and health care. (There's no limit to the price you'd pay to stay alive).
However, I still posit that in the vast majority of cases, that capitalism works. Negotiating for a lower price is assumed to happen on both parties.
if value couldn't be produced but only change hands, how do you explain the wordlwide growth of GDP over the centuries ?
Philanthropy never works. Philanthropy requires large amounts of money. Only the monetary Ponzi yields that kind of money.
So effectively, philanthropy is funded using the proceeds of theft. It's about diffusing harm to all and concentrating the benefits towards a select few.
Wow, this guy sure hates Mr Beast. I haven’t seen much but I did see the one where he created 100 wells. The author says these wells will fail soon and do not get repaired or maintained.
I think the reasoning is ridiculous. Shame someone for digging a well because it might not be repaired in the future????
There's also been a number of analyses that suggest he was lying about the number and location of the wells.
There was one video from a disgruntled ex employee, who just noticed that in the video footage some wells are missing/duplicated. That does not prove he didn’t build them. It's only one of the possible reasons. The other possible reason is the footage for these wells might've been damaged or missing so they had to go with what they had.
Now don't get me wrong, some of the stuff he's being accused to has much more merit, for example in one video he showed a dilapidated hospital that he claimed to rebuild from scratch, but other footage revealed that the hospital was in fact in much better condition initially. So he's basically trying to make it look like he's doing more than in reality, and that's definitely something that needs to be called out.
There are many plausible reasons to be sure, but I think in those cases, it would have been much better to do actually explain what happened than effectively lie. (It may have been a lie with no real ill intent, but still a lie.)
I feel like part of the author’s point was that the well-digging thing is a long and tired example of attention-hungry rich outsiders prancing in to “fix things” and not caring about (or considering) the long-term consequences of their ideas. Even the really good development organizations are constantly learning lessons about unintended second- and third-order consequences: it’s particularly cynical, then, to make a spectacle out of doing the naive thing that seems obvious but that we already know doesn’t really work well.
Doing something pointless with your lavish resources is insulting when, with the same resources and the humility to study what works and ask for good advice, you (or the local population) could instead have done something sustainable. It’s putting your ego and your public profile ahead of the very real material needs whose egregiousness you’re profiting from.
It’s bad enough when it’s nonprofits just making their (sometimes lavish) salaries off the pointlessness. In this case, the man has made a career out of directly turning people’s disability and economic disadvantage and suffering into his primary product that he profits from. His $750-million company got that way entirely by exploiting people’s misery for views and profit. By selling the idea that the problems aren’t all that real, that all it takes is a rich dude with a magic wand and some righteousness. “Fixing” 100 people’s problems and pretending you fixed a society’s worth.
And his little treatise that leaked a few weeks back makes his logic explicit: do the minimum to sound flashy.
> He argues that it is far cheaper and funnier to offer a prize of five packs of Doritos a day instead of $20,000. Then one section asks “What is the goal of our content” before replying “the goal of our content is to excite me”.
At least an evil capitalist WellCorp, Inc. would have to dig wells that keep working after the camera crew leaves, if it wanted to stay in business for very long!
> Doing something pointless with your lavish resources is insulting when, with the same resources and the humility to study what works and ask for good advice, you (or the local population) could instead have done something sustainable.
That seems like a false dichotomy no? The article is specifically about MrBeast, who would NOT have "lavish resources" if he did what you propose. The stunt nature of the work IS the income stream.
I think it's more reasonable to ask if he's just creating short term gains, or making things worse. I would guess the former. Which is honestly better than the alternative which is he does cruel prank videos with the same budget.
> His $750-million company got that way entirely by exploiting people’s misery for views and profit
Uh, what? The guy runs big elaborate game shows. The contestants are thrilled for the chance to compete to win money. How could you spin that as exploiting people's misery?
Because the competitions are, at least in part, about putting human misery on display for entertainment?
You're conflating different categories of his videos. Competition videos like Squid Game have volunteers who are participating willingly, with a few winners. And charity videos like "cure 1000 cataracts" also have willing participants, who all get surgery for free, no competition involved.
There are no Mr Beast videos where "miserable" people compete to get charity prizes.
It's the same phenomenon as the What Three Words thing. The pitch was that it would solve commerce because in parts of the world they don't have "proper" street addresses.
Or the Three Cups of Tea guy. His foundation had a bunch of schools built in the Himalayas, ostensibly to educate girls, but many of those schools were empty or used to store grain shortly after being built, and less than half of the funds he raised actually went to building "schools".
Just another outsider who thinks they know better.
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I remember that video where Mr Beast paid for cataract surgery for a few dozen people and restored their sight. Regardless of intent, that was an immediate and material benefit to many people. It’s fair to question the motives of altruists, especially those who rely on extravagant public shows to pull viewership. But more eyeballs means more ad revenue, which means the altruism experiments can continue. If this is the most efficient, targeted model for altruism, then I’ll take it.
Side note, the Mr Beast handbook is an interesting read https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/how-to-succeed-at-mrbea...
How is it faux if he’s giving away a lot of money for pretty objectively good things?
With that weirdos fake ass forced smile- I imagine in years to come there will be many more articles like this one about this boring androids dark side.
Phauxlantropy. Why pass up that opportunity.
"His stunts promote the concept of simplistic solutions to challenging problems, wrapping the munificent American donor in a warm glow of benevolence as he drops in to spread a little of his MrBeast largesse to some lucky recipients."
A grown adult man really wrote this.
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Half jokingly, MrBeast is a decent source of learning other languages given (1) how children friendly the contents are, and (2) how many dubs/subs the videos have. I particularly like the Takeuchi Junko Japanese dub.
He hacked the YouTube algorithm and went from 0 to a super millionaire. You might not like the guy, but there are plenty of hacker centric lenses through which to view his story
I can’t believe the hate out there for guys like Mr Beast and Elon. The best gets crucified.
People with a lot of power deserve extraordinary scrutiny.
Yes exactly. It reminds me of this video by veritasium, which is in turn inspired by Adrian Tan where he says “Be hated” and describes how in being successful you should seek to be hated by those with poor values. Not that I agree with everything Elon, Mr beast or Veritasum does by any stretch, but they have all seemingly embraced this. I also think it’s inevitable with fame, and perhaps a good check on the actions of those with power.
If I were Mr Beast and I read this I’d shrug it off and think you can’t impress everyone. Again, I don’t agree or even follow what he does but it actually doesn’t matter, if you do good, or bad, or do much of anything notable, you will attract hate.
> Again, I don’t agree or even follow what he does but it actually doesn’t matter, if you do good, or bad, or do much of anything notable, you will attract hate.
Of course, and you need to accept that you will get hate, but it shouldn't become a source of validation. Getting hate from bad people doesn't mean you're doing good - e.g. Stalin was hated by Nazis, that doesn't make him a good guy.
> where he says “Be hated” and describes how in being successful you should seek to be hated by those with poor values
I think that even if you're in fact the good guy doing good things, seeking hate / outrage from the bad people is wrong or at least tactically a bad decision in the sense they will get even more deep-seated in their bad values.
No you’re totally right, and Derek from Veritasium does point out that being hated shouldn’t be a moral compass. I think the point is more that you should know that even when you’re doing something right some people, maybe many people, will hate you for it. Incidentally if you’re doing something wrong you might be quite popular as well. Popularity isn’t a good judge of character.
There is a difference between "extraordinary scrutiny" and "finding reasons, no matter how far fetched, to shit on people just because they're successful". They sometimes overlap, but this seems to be mostly the latter.
I kinda agree on MrBeast. In the big picture he's pretty irrelevant, and I don't even want to invest enough energy to make an opinion.
With Musk, it's quite different. He's the richest person on the planet, exchanging favors with a presidential candidate of the most powerful country on earth, both of them having pretty "flexible" views on democracy and upholding the law. Musk is powerful and dangerous.
So when do we scrutinize politicians next?
Are you suggesting powerful politicians don't get scrutinized?
Not really. Do you see many of them go to prison? Because statistically some should.
Who says we aren't? It is possible to scrutinize more than one thing.
The worst part that there are politicians that do not care if you scrutinize them or not. In a majority of nations on the planet.
Politicians in democratic countries are inevitably hated by roughly half the people, and that’s if they are popular!
Look these guys have become millionaires and billionaires. That money represents other people's labour. That they command the lifetime output of hundreds or thousands of people's work* alone suggests we should examine how they have come to their positions and what they do with it. That is why they peddle philanthropic PR, which in turn necessitates that we examine their philanthropy.
* https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education... shows the average lifetime earning of an american is between 1/2 and 3 million dollars depending on sex and education level.
I mean maybe the reality is far different from the PR spin they spend a lot of money and time creating?
"Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light."
It's beneficial to try to keep the concepts of "can't believe" and "disagree with" separate in your head.