Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Charity is to be considered charity when nobody gets to know about it.

Broadcasting it to the entire world charity to show the world how generous or or good one is, is uncharitable. This is just someone getting ego trip after spending 250k that they did not need.




The lives get saved regardless. If writing a blog post makes you more likely to save an estimated 120 lives, you write the damn blog post.

A society in which status seeking individuals are incentivized to publically save lives with their money is a healthy society.

None of us are that impressive in the shadows. We're all a little performative, at our core.

May as well use our instinct for performance for good.


Why?

What’s wrong with someone doing good and taking credit?

Heck, what’s wrong with them doing good solely for the credit? As long as doing good is the side effect, good is done

Is it because you don’t enjoy it as much, knowing who did it? Bit selfish. Or maybe it makes your own anonymous charitable works (or lack thereof) feel not as good? It’s a lot of money but this isn’t a race!


There is nothing wrong with effective charity. The problems start when you're merely creating the appearance of doing something by e.g. doing poverty tourism. Celebrities go to some random poor African town where they take some selfies to make them look sympathetic. They get their twitter likes and followers and then the topic is over for them.

Even the celebs are paying the "tour guides", what they've created is an industry where people pretend to be poor to make a living.

The problem is it's easy to get good publicity even when things get worse instead of getting better.


While the act of charity isn't as pure if theres a huge amount of publicity surrounding it, it doesn't mean that it isn't charity.

Also, it doesn't hurt to have some pride when you do good things.


This is assuming that the motive to post this was to gain publicity......


The assumption, even narrower, is that this is post is for gaining publicity _only for the author_. Regardless of this goal, seeing this post had made me (and likely many others) more likely to donate to charity




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: