Credit: iStockphoto/NASA
The same holds true for our judgments of weight and, of course, less tangible quantities such as money. We’ll break the bank to save baby Rokia, but when half of Africa is dying, we’re busy buying iPhones.
Which brings me back to Gates. He may be practically a social cripple, and may at times seem to lack human empathy. But he’s also a geek, and geeks are incredibly good at thinking in concrete terms about giant numbers. Their imaginations can scale up and down the powers of 10 – mega, giga, tera, peta – because their jobs demand it.
So maybe that’s why he has an accurate understanding of 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 one million people = one 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 dissipate after, say, eight people or thereabouts.
What we need are more Bill Gateses — people with an almost Asperger-like focus, with a direct sensual ability to understand what a million means.
They’ve got to be able to envision every angel on the head of a pin. Because when it comes to stopping the mass tragedies of today’s world, we’re going to need every single one of them.
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Clive Thompson regularly contributes to The New York Times Magazine and is a former Knight Science-Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Authorship?
Though I'm delighted at Bill Gates taking initiative towards problems that have easily staggered others, I feel like the author of this article focuses too strongly on Gates' social abilities and consider what he has written to be outright offensive.
Please consider a higher level of professionalism in your writing and bring us the facts which pertain to the interest. There was no need to balance the article or set a counter-point between Gates' entrepreneurial/creative solutions to significant problems with the reality of his competency (a diplomatic use of the word) as a businessman.
I am aware that it is an opinion article, but as the author values his own credibility, he ought to edit out the ham-handed declarative statements which demean the persons whom he's spotlighting (in this case being Gates).
Bravo, Gates. May your work inspire others and have a significant impact on the suffering world.