[FRIAM] Fundraiser by Christina Z. : Ohoris Staff Relief Fund

Wed Apr 22 17:31:33 EDT 2020

Hi Glen, 

Yeh, in retrospect, the Wikipedia entry just doesn't seem to do jusrtice to the radicalism of Robin Hood's current leader, Wes Moore.  So here's the podcast.  It's Preet Brahara's Stay Tuned, and it's only the first part. https://www.omnycontent.com/d/playlist/aaea4e69-af51-495e-afc9-a9760146922b/0236a31f-71e0-49dd-97f8-aac7015df30b/370e1fbf-45d4-42d9-96fd-aac7015df319/podcast.rss

If you had a few minutes ... . 

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2020 2:36 PM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fundraiser by Christina Z. : Ohoris Staff Relief Fund

Heh, it's funny how something you say can be perfectly inverted by the audience to mean the opposite of what you intended. The Telephone Game is always relevant.

My point to Steve was about "effective altruism", the idea that the philanthropist has any idea whatsoever of the relative optimality of one charity compared to another. My position is one of ignorance and against the (mostly wealthy, tech-savvy, arrogant) person's most likely *mistaken* belief in their own competence, especially in a domain that is fundamentally different from where they operate "professionally". My point to Steve was that meritocracy is a sham and a sibling effect to the Great Man Theory.

Now, to the extent that my reading of von Hayek (not Friedman) argued for market forces because it is *arrogant* to pretend you can design a system more efficient than the one nature relaxes into, then I would argue for such natural, organic solutions over engineered ones. But that's precisely *because* those who think they can singularly, themselves, engineer a reality better than the one that grew, stigmergically, socially, naturally are most likely wrong.

But I have *never* insisted there is such a thing as a *free* market. Everything that seems to be "natural" is constrained by the engineering of the agents in and around it, even if those agents are termites or bacteria. Whatever the Robin Hood foundation might mean by "free market", their very use of the term means I would not support them in any way. The term "free market" is a trigger phrase for this delicate snowflake. >8^D And I've already blown several cherries at billionaire phlanthropists. Ptouie. E.g. Bill Gates' magnanimity comes at the cost of decades of slimy and exploitative practices. It's reputation laundering in the extreme. If Bill Gates really gave a flying fsck about these things, he should have begun working on them *before* (or instead of) exploiting the world to make siphon off and concentrate billions of dollars.

So, I tend to stick with established charities with proven track records including both the united way and the red cross. My tiny personal donations are doled out at the end of the year to organizations like mozilla, MAPS, software in the public interest, etc. with ZERO regard to how "efficient" or "effective" they are. And my real contributions are paying (and voting for) taxes and buying goods and services from the smallest businesses and co-ops I can find.

On 4/22/20 1:04 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> I was listening to a podcast by the guy who runs Robin Hood, an 
> organization dedicated to getting at the institutional roots of poverty.  When asked where we should give money in this crisis, he said, give it where you feel passion, because that is where you are likely to give it again.  I confess I feel passion for these young folks, who in the 60’s would have been  in graduate programs, or art or music schools, teaching, learning, inspiring, but are instead meagerly supporting their passions by making me coffee.  And very good coffee at that.  So that’s where my money goes.  Robin Hood <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_Foundation> might be better for Glen because “According to /Fortune <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(magazine)>/ magazine, "Robin Hood was a pioneer in what is now called venture philanthropy, or charity that embraces free-market forces. An early practitioner of using metrics to measure the effectiveness of grants, it is a place where strategies to alleviate urban poverty are hotly debated, ineffectual plans are coldly discarded, and its staff of 66 hatches radical new ideas."^[ <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_Foundation#cite_note-fm-2> ”

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