Thursday, June 22, 2006
I'm feeling so mellow that I'll say something nice about Bill Gate's exit from Microsoft (aside from being snarky and saying he's picked a good time to step down.
After he got married, and had kids, he became more human.
In a recent interview, Bill Moyers quoted Oscar Wilde and said:
After he got married, and had kids, he became more human.
In a recent interview, Bill Moyers quoted Oscar Wilde and said:
- Oscar Wilde once said, "it's the mark of a truly educated man," and I'm sure he would today say woman, "it's the mark of a truly educated man to be deeply moved by statistics." What is that capacity that enables someone to transform a fact or figure on a page to a human being a long way off?
- I think there is a general difficulty of looking at a number and having it have the same impact as meeting a person. I mean if we said right now, there's somebody in the next room who's dying, let's all go save their life. You know, everybody would just get up immediately and go get involved in that.
When my daughter whose 7 saw this video, you know, showing the kid who's got difficulty walking because of polio, her reaction was: "Who is that? Where are they? Let's go help them. Let's go meet that kid. What if he gets polio in his other leg?"
You know, so she's immediately drawn into that human on the screen.
It's a lot easier to connect to the story of the one person or the five people. It now, you know, because I'm mathematically literate, you know I know that when there's 3 million kids every year dying of things that are completely preventable with the technology we have today. You know I can try and magnify how I feel about that one situation by a factor of 3 million. It's tough. But at least you know it's super important.
