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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