Eric Schmidt: belief

Transcript context

…Early Picasso fan. Effective altruism as a movement, that people should give away their money using quite rational standards, which can be derived by reason, using economics and philosophy? So what happens here — this is when economists think they actually understand how humans work. [laughter] And of course, you’ve done a great deal of work on this question of whether humans are rational or irrational, so my answer is different. You cannot take it with you as much as you want. We have a subsidiary called Calico, and one of the things they work on is aging, and they put up a chart of how long people live and what they die from, and it’s stunningly sobering. Everyone here is alive today — figure it out and make sure you use that opportunity to your best and serve the world with it. With respect to economic reason and rationalism, most of the stuff that’s not business is not very well managed. So as a general rule, broadly speaking, health care, education, governments, philanthropies — they’re not well run compared to businesses. Surely, systems that include measurement criteria, objectives, Google uses something called OKRs. The ability to measure things and outcomes is now so much better. Give your money and give your time to groups that actually can have an impact, and that measurable impact. People are constantly asking me to do something for them, and the problem that I have is, show me what the outcome is. And it’s an emotional pitch, it’s a marketing pitch, and everybody, including me, is subject to marketing, and I would say that’s a marketing pitch. Tell me what you’re going to accomplish, tell me the probability, and tell me how you’re going to get there, and then I’ll participate. Yellowstone Park, overrated or underrated?…

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