“Give me enough time, and I can move the world” – works too
Sebastian S. Cocioba @ATinyGreenCell If I ever make it, would love to just spend my time enabling others. An angel investor in people, not ideas, not ventures. People. Giving someone support and structure, a trellis to lean on, can have incalculable impact and I detest the notion that support makes people lazy.
Replying to @ATinyGreenCell
Sebastian, Do not wait to “make it”. Set your personal goals, and start practicing your end game, middle game and also keep open that you might live forever. In you invest time, skills, connections, methods, resources, finances, advice in someone, be prepared to stick with it for decades. Dabbling is worse than not doing, often. If you are a lot smarter than others, then help improve whole fields, not just individual people. Help individuals as God (or chances) puts them in your path. There is a lot of duplication, if you find people you want to help, it is highly likely there are thousands or millions very similar to them. And even more likely that there are better ones to invest in, that you are never going to meet, or if you meet them, you might be repulsed or disconcerted because they are not the familiar people you know.
My favorite thought is to consider just saying the name of each person now, 8.1 Billion humans, one every 10 seconds (and try to think of their life). That would take you (10*8.1E9/(365.25*86400)) = 2566.73511294 mean solar years. Since you will not live that long (today), your plan to be fair in helping others is not realistic. You can try to list the people, and randomly pick somehow. Are you simply wanting to show others how smart you are? Do you want to broaden your own experiences by tackling problems, and work with certain people, in certain areas?
So do not wait, plan for a long lifetime (at least 100 years), randomly sample within some criteria where you feel you can really contribute, and where you will stay the course and dabble. There are hundreds of thousands of groups who say the help others. Any foundation, that is pretty much the definition. All those micro-finance, startup, cloud funding, crowd funding, incubators. The list is really long in English alone, and there are hundreds of other human languages.
I know the passion you feel to help others. It can sustain you to keep going yourself, when what you are doing is hard and you want to take some “easy problems” just to relax and help others too. For every hundred groups I analyze, I might only contact a few, and those only a very few do I try to suggest things.
It would seem that computers would help, mining the web starts with formalizing and refining your own goals and purposes, what you believe is important, what you think needs to be done and why.
If you take people out of context, and are not careful, it is easy to mistake attraction for “wanting to help”. And there are professionals now who know how to elicit feelings and make use of them.
I spent the last 26 years evaluating and analyzing groups and their methods on the Internet, and I had already been working at that with many organization, usually at global scale or for millions of people, for 25 years before that. I worked in the Bureau for Program and Policy Coordination at USAID and set up systems to design and evaluate projects and programs for all countries. So there are groups who do what you are talking about – full time, and they pretty much all try to leverage their time and effectiveness by finding groups to help. In the time you might invest in one person, you could help “all people associated with teaching and encouraging first graders in the world.” I have looked at thousands of such groups.
I am not trying to change your direction. Just suggesting you pray about it, meditate deeply, gather and ponder lists, interview people who do it for a living, and so forth. You have time to help whole countries, to change the course of the whole world. But one person needs decades. Perhaps you could formalize and clarify what your methods of helping individuals entails, and then help others to learn to do that too. Some of them might be better than you. Humility and openness is extremely important.
Remember Archimedes lever, where he can move the whole world? The same thing is true of time. Also, I found it is possible to work 120 hours a week, which gives you three work year equivalents per year. So in 25 years you can do 75 years of work. Not as good as creating true AIs, but helps on certain kinds of problems.
Filed as (“Give me enough time, and I can move the world” – works too.)
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
