Once again, an article related to utilitarian altruism that doesn't seem to draw a defensible conclusion from the arguments given. This particular type of article, and the works of the effective altruism movement more broadly, always creep up to the edge of demanding meaningful change but, in their conclusions, shrink away from it.
They make the case that the world has a lot of issues, that a lot of people have bad lives and that those people should have better lives, and that "we need to do what is possible to allow everyone to live a life free of poverty, free of hunger, and free of premature death".
But from there, the path they lay out, and advocate for, is one of continued oligarchy. After saying that we need to eliminate poverty, hunger, and premature death, they advocate for "[continuing] the positive developments of the last decades with more children surviving, more children growing up free of the worst poverty, and more children being better educated than ever before. If I am optimistic about the future of the world and progress against the world’s problems it is because of this."
But what if you don't agree? And how could you? While some thing seem to be getting better (by some indicators only) global inequality continues to increase, and the inequality in developed economies is obscene. The climate and environment are destroyed more rapidly than ever in a continual quest for infinite growth. The solution proposed to the horrors of our present world, of improvement by creating more capitalism, is absurd. Capitalism is functioning as it must. It's not capitalism's fault as an ideology - it was designed to be this way.
The world being advocated by these altruistic technocrats is no better than our own: if we lived in their utopia, we'd be at the mercy of our 'betters' who would still form a separate class above the rest of society. The suggestions for how to give back are also laughable. Donating your time or money individually while doing nothing to challenge the system won't change anything. It is through radical societal change, radical democracy, that a new and better world can be achieved.
Neoliberals like this often feel the need to impress upon everyone that at least the floor is being raised - the amount of people in extreme poverty has gone down (by some metric) or the amount of people dying of disease has been reduced. But the real path to liberation isn't the gradual improvement of the bottom while the top gets fatter and richer and more powerful. The real solution is revolution. Take the table, take the world, break free from this failed system.
What can you do, then, if you're not going to nobly work at a hedge-fund and selflessly donate some of your salary to cure malaria? Advocate for the real change you want to see in the world. If you want to end climate change, start going to the climate strikes. If you want a better life you workers at low incomes, show them solidarity when they strike. If your boss uses your open source library for an ICE contract, delete the code. When the world begins to shift, and everyone looks around and wonders why everything is so wrong, don't use data to insist that everything is good, actually. Embrace the knowledge that something is wrong! Something is wrong! And the world is fucked if it doesn't change. Don't let incrementalists like Max fool you into thinking otherwise.
I only spent ~£30 on all of the supplies to set up my system and have grown lettuce, rocket, spinach, tomatillos, and peppers in my apartment. It's fantastic and simple and will allow me to have a supply of fresh green food after Brexit.
If you’re interested in hoby hydroponics, it’s a great way to start.
Here's a link to the original Kratky paper on the method:
I disagree. They didn’t do anything except open up the grant application part to everyone (no cost to them) and promise everybody that they would get some credits (probably no cost to them). The course was always able to be audited.
What this really does is make clear the desire of the people at ycombinator to open their pre screening program (which is what startup school is, essentially) to more startups. The value to them is clear - they now get more companies that have an initial touchpoint with ycombinator, and they can maybe make money off them or whatever. But they don’t have to scale the thing that was most useful about startup school - that is, the advisors and small groups. For ycombinator this actually is a win win - they can now phase out advisors next round if this is a success and then the course would be very simple to run (and mostly free to create!).
The value that they were really providing (advisors, small groups) doesn’t scale for a free program, and with this new method of acceptance they aren’t offering that value to the newly “accepted” startups. For me personally, If I wanted to independently learn the things they teach in startup school, I already had the ability to watch last years lectures and read last years course material.
If there are credits, that will be valuable I suppose. But, again, I want to emphasize that ycombinator isn’t giving startups anything of real value here that it wasn’t already giving away (except, I guess, the ability to save face if you had already excitedly told friends that you were in this program).