Wired has an unusually effusive piece of praise for Bill Gates and others like him (meaning geeks like us I suppose):
Which brings me back to Gates. The guy is practically a social cripple, and at times he has seemed to lack human empathy. But he’s also a geek, and geeks are incredibly good at thinking concretely about giant numbers. Their imagination can scale up and down the powers of 10 “mega, giga, tera, peta” because their jobs demand it.
So maybe that’s why he is able to truly understand mass disease in Africa. We look at the huge numbers and go numb. Gates looks at them and runs the moral algorithm: Preventable death = bad; preventable death x 1 million people = 1 million times as bad.
We tend to think that the way to address disease and death is to have more empathy. But maybe that’s precisely wrong. Perhaps we should avoid leaders who “feel your pain,” because their feelings will crap out at, you know, eight people.
Moral algorithms? Hard core utilitarianism? Quantifying the Good? Is this what geeks should be doing with our time? I’m admittedly a proponent of more number crunching in the nonprofit sector, although I think this writer frankly doesn’t have much of a clue as to how service delivery actually works since the best care providers I’ve seen had a skeptical yet loving attitude in the care they provided. I don’t think it’s necessarily an “emotional” vs “nerd” debate but there’s certainly room for a more objective kind of nonprofit management than we’ve seen in our sector in the past.
Your comments would be very much appreciated. Should geeks use their stronger numerical skills to help the nonprofit sector achieve its ends? Please discuss amongst yourselves. There will be blue books handed out and a quiz later.
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Whenever I see the numbers of people with AIDS in Africa my mind immediately starts to quantify volume of drugs, condoms, education material, and basic supplies that would be needed to eradicate the problem. Not just how to hold a telethon and feel good, but how to get rid of it altogether.
It’s weird – my brain just goes that way as I suspect it does for other geeks, particularly those who are involved with emerging tech in support of innovation. We see it as a challenge and it is fun to look at the pure logistics of how to solve it leaving out anything that remotely resembles an “It can’t be done!” statement or sentiment. We have the tools to do it, so let’s go do it.
“Today I woke up and decided to cure AIDS in Africa”.
Well… why not?
It’s true — I’m a bigger fan of Gapminder than I am of your typical Save the Children commercial. There’s a part of me that can’t help it. I’m a postcolonial subject and I demand that people from the industrialized world apply the same intellectual tools to helping my relatives in the Philippines as they do to making money hand over fist every day on Wall Street.
That said, many of the problems aren’t always technical, especially in service delivery. However, when you start scaling upward I find that management practices need to be data-driven and have heavy operations management expertise. This is unfortunately what isn’t taught to professional care providers. They know Maslow but not Six Sigma. I once showed a process flowchart to a nonprofit worker and they were like, “What is that? Chemistry?” Ugh.