thatguy0900 parent
How kind of him to give his wealth away after intentionally using his company to fracture society as much as he could to earn the money in the first place
I get it, meta has caused a huge amount of societal damage, and we wouldn't need philanthropists if we fairer economies.
But people are complicated, and if Zuckerberg really is giving away 99% of his wealty to causes, that's a positive and worth discussing. Even if it doesn't make up for other harm.
Sigh.
No, Zuckerberg did not set out consciously trying to "fracture society". He started out trying to provide a way to rate women at Harvard by how attractive they were, then by just trying to optimize revenue without any consideration for unintended consequences. Then kept going.
Not understanding the failure mode is going to just lead to repeating the same mistakes at even grander scales, like what's happening now with AI. Nerds obsessed with creating "AGI" without the capability or willingness to think through the potential consequences.
This is like the oil companies that hid the internal climate change studies for as long as they could. Zuck knew what he was doing long before everyone else did. Acting like he was just dumb and uninformed is wrong. When they started he might not have realized how bad optimizing for engagement was but it doesn't take a genius to realize what was happening with the data they have. He's not some starry eyed kid who accidentally made a monster, he found out he could become one of the richest men in the world if he made his monster vicious enough. This is a guy that started buying the land for his survival bunker 10 years ago.