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Bill Gates is an improbable humanitarian. He built a reputation as a nightmare boss at Microsoft, a totalitarian who screeched at employees he thought to be stupid.
He bludgeoned competitors and played hardball with regulators. And he’s a nerd’s nerd: someone who seems perennially uncomfortable around people and only at ease dealing with the intricacies of software code.
And that is precisely why he’s now saving the world.
As you probably know, Gates is aggressively tackling Third World diseases. He has targeted not only high-profile scourges such as AIDS but also maladies such as malaria, diarrhoea and parasitic infections.
These latter illnesses are the important ones to attack, because they kill millions a year and are entirely preventable. For decades, they flew under the radar of philanthropists in the West. So why did Gates become the first to take action? The answer lies in the psychology of how we understand numbers.
I’ve been reading the fascinating work of Paul Slovic, a psychologist who runs the U.S. social-science thinktank Decision Research, in Eugene, Oregon.
He studies a troubling paradox in human empathy: we’ll usually race to help a single stranger in dire straits, while ignoring huge numbers of people in precisely the same plight.
We’ll donate thousands of dollars to bring a single African war orphan to the West for lifesaving surgery, but we don’t offer much money or political pressure to stop widespread genocides in Rwanda or Darfur.
You could argue that we’re simply callous, or hypocrites. But Slovic doesn’t think so. The problem isn’t a moral failing: it’s a cognitive one. We’re very good at processing the plight of tiny groups of people but terrible at conceptualising the suffering of large ones.
In one recent experiment, Slovic presented a number of subjects with a picture of ‘Rokia’, a starving child in Mali, and asked them how much they would be willing to give to help feed her.
Then he showed a different group photos of two Malinese children: ‘Rokia and Moussa’. The group presented with two kids gave 15% less than those shown just one child.
In a related experiment, people were asked to donate money to help a dying child. When a second set of subjects was asked to donate to a group of eight children dying of the same cause, the average donation was 50% lower.
Slovic suspects this stuff is hardwired in our brains. Psychologists have long observed that our ability to discriminate among quantities is finely tuned when dealing with small amounts but quickly degrades as the numbers get much larger.
Our ears work that way, too. When a very quiet sound becomes slightly louder, we detect the difference right away. But once a noise is really loud, it has to increase dramatically for it to seem ‘louder’.
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.
