Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of what he says, he’s obviously a smart guy and done a lot of good for the world via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and has done a lot of good work to try and help alleviate the current Coronavirus crisis. And thumbs down to the idiots out there that are ripping into him on social media because he won’t tow the Donald Trump line.
But here he is on CNN commenting alongside Dr. Sanjay Gupta, one of the most respected medical media pundits in the country, and being portrayed as an equal expert on the COVID-19 crisis.
To me he is a computer genius who also got into a lot of trouble with the Federal Government for what may have been some rather ruthless business tactics 20 years ago. He is not to the best of my knowledge a medical doctor, nor is he a biologist. So other than he is worth $110 billion what exactly qualifies Bill Gates as an expert on the same level as lets say Dr. Fauci, Sanjay Gupta or any other virologist or medical professional? When did Bill Gates suddenly become Alexander Fleming???
It is less a matter of Bill Gates’ expertise on epidemiology and public health (although he does appear to be quite well read on that topic as well as many others, which is a privilege you get to enjoy when you’ve build a multibillion dollar company and have the time to devote your intellect to more interesting things) than the fact that he is a very well known figure by the general public who has been a philanthropist in the domain of global public health initiatives for going on a couple of decades. It doesn’t hurt that he is also reasonably good at making public health and combatting infectious disease comprehensible to the general public.
There are, of course, professions actually working in the field of public health and infectious disease research whose knowledge and experience far eclipses dilettantes such as Gates, but despite the recent meteoric celebrity of Dr. Anthony Fauci, as of six months ago you’d be hard pressed to find one person in a hundred who had actually heard of him despite the fact that he’s been the Captain America of the infectious disease world for thirty-odd years and has been involved in addressing nearly every disease epidemic in the Western Hemisphere, not only directing NIAID but working in the field with patients, publishing papers, and co-editing a widely read series of handbooks on the topics of allergies and infectious disease. Fauci has appeared on countless news programs and public briefings warning about the possibility of a global pandemic outbreak and people forget ten minutes after the episode of 60 Minutes is over, but Bill Gates does one twenty minute on the global threat of infectious disease and it becomes one of the most widely viewed TED Talks in history. There is something to be said for celebrity when it is used to bring attention to a crucial issue.
I don’t personally care for Gates’ legacy as a businessman or the mediocre products his company has spawned upon the world (did anyone ask for Microsoft Teams?) but as a philanthropist he’s certainly committed his fortune to improving conditions for the billions living in extreme poverty and lacking basic necessities. As for the publicity he receives from news heads, he does not appear to use it to try to hawk products or stoke his own ego, and I have yet to hear him say anything incorrect or materially misleading on the topic of infectious disease
Bill Gates was directly responsible for the creation of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations in 2017 to help global leaders become ready for the next pandemic. He’s not just some random billionaire spouting his mouth off, this is an area he’s been actively involved in for years and a core part of what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation does as a mission.
Isn’t one of the goals of the Bill & Melinda Foundation stated to be the eradication of malaria?
If so, the guy who runs the joint (or at least, whose name is on the sign out front) can likely be expected to know a thing or three about infectious diseases and the eradication efforts thereof.
I don’t think anyone is calling him an expert on this topic, just a person who might have some interesting insights due to what his foundation is doing, and performance in past interviews . As you say yourself, they had the medical expert there too. It’s not like they’re interviewing Gates *instead of *a medical expert.
He’s not an expert on the virus. He’s an expert on spending money to fight the virus. The actual fighting is being done by the people he’s giving the money to. But that part, he’s really good at.
BTW, the expression in your last sentence is “toe the line”. And Gates gets some credit for a five-year-old TED Talk in which he described what’s needed to be ready. He wasn’t the only one to see this coming, of course. George W Bush, for example, also saw the need for greater preparation after reading a book about the 1918 pandemic.
I am not going to claim that Gates is a true expert, but I don’t think he just throws money at the organization and walks away. He is known for wanting to completely understand the technical nature of what he is involved in. I would be willing to bet he knows more about combating widespread diseases than 99.5% of people out there (probably more than your family doctor) because that has what has driven him for the past 15 years. And of course, being famous gets you on TV. No debate there.
I read that was what he was like when he was running Microsoft; there would be a meeting, someone would present what they were working on and he would ask extremely detailed and specific questions about the work.
I would expect that any general poll of rational adults would select anything—including a pet rock—has having a more trustworthy opinion on anything over Donald Trump.
If you say so. Somebody got a wild bug the other day that we should use Microsoft Teams for a two hour briefing instead of the usual WebEx because of some unspecified functionality, and it was the least productive and most frustrating two hours of my week including the power outage we had earlier. From the system randomly booting people off to the herky-jerky audio and video, it was like stabbing myself in the eardrums with bamboo skewers while pouring sriracha in my eyes.
Teams just seems like another in a long line of efforts by Microsoft to reproduce other existing technologies in a half-assed, poorly tested, badly supported way that nobody was asking for. 2007 just called and they want their Microsoft Zune back, only they called on a Windows Phone so the call was dropped.
That tactic is going to get you to listen only to people you already agree with. Credentials matter: expertise matters.
Bill Gates appears to have some expertise in pandemics. As said upthread, not in the medical science aspect—he’s not a virologist or any sort of M.D. or PhD as far as I know—but in the public policy aspect. So what he has to say is, in fact, informed, and matters, especially in collaboration with the scientists.
It surprised me, too, because I just thought of him as “that Windows guy,” but there you go.
No, bad advice. If you do this, you end up judging the information on how confident they sound, or how self-consistent it is, or worse, whether it agrees with what you think you already know. Experts tend to have a more guarded, nuanced view which often comes across as lack of confidence. Whereas people with ulterior motives, or people who are simply ill-informed, will sound absolutely confident about what they are saying. (Read one paper on a subject and you feel like you know everything; read 99 more papers and you feel like nobody knows anything for sure.)