Just a little too soon after, only a couple hours, combined with confusion over for-profit status makes it look tone deaf but it is really not. People are suffering - help suffering people.
I don't see how this is a bad thing - related to YC or not.
It's a practical way to have people go from feeling helpless to actually helping people who need it (whether they'll be covered by the lastest media cycle or not).
As pg tries to explain, it's not a YC company but a charity he supports (and therefore knows about) and it's also one that he thinks can help people get (afford) medical treatment.
I think this is one of those things where utilitarianism can appear tasteless. If something like this dissuades someone from spending ten minutes creating another "pray for boston" twitter graphic in favor of learning about a service where someone can directly contribute to saving a life, then which ten minutes has a higher probability of leading to assistance in saving a life? But on the other hand, it looks like changing the subject when we all should be demonstratively supportive of Boston because something horrible happened and that's what we're supposed to do when something horrible happens.
I completely disagree, and I'd be interested in hearing a defense of your beliefs.
People are suffering the world over. Some suffering is less shocking and unique than other suffering (and therefore less newsworthy), but suffering is suffering just the same. Widely-covered events such as this one should serve as a reminder to us all of the constant suffering going on the world over that is not covered. For any moral person, the thought of living in a world in which less than 1% of human suffering garners more than 99% of the attention should be unbearable.
I have no idea how you can say that helping people in one area "has nothing to do with" helping people in another.
> I have no idea how you can say that helping people in one area "has nothing to do with" helping people in another.
That one's easy: what tangible benefit will people suffering from the events of the Boston Marathon get from a donation to Watsi? None? Then it has nothing to do with it.
People are indeed suffering the world over. Objectively it would be better if people who want to do something donated to Watsi instead of wringing their hands, praying/sending thoughts, and reloading cnn.com. But people are not objective and trying to steal this kind of attention for your own cause is highly insensitive.
Also, it comes off as crass and tasteless and generally won't work. Except on people who can keep their objectivity in this situation, which categorically aren't the ones pg is trying to reach. So this is crass, tasteless, highly insensitive, and ineffective.
> That one's easy: what tangible benefit will people suffering from the events of the Boston Marathon get from a donation to Watsi? None? Then it has nothing to do with it.
This is becoming pure wordplay now. Sure, if you take the vague phrase "something to do with" and redefine it more specifically as "provides tangible benefits to", then you'd be right. But who gives you the authority to redefine it so? PG made the relation clear in his tweet: "When terrible things happen to people I can't help, I ... help people I can." In other words, he uses tragedies as a reminder to donate to the less fortunate.
Seems pretty simple to me.
As for the rest of your post, it seems that your argument rests on the belief that PG's tweet didn't cause anyone to donate. If so, your argument fails, because some people did donate as a result of PG's tweet (or at least claimed to).
But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and believe that, instead, your argument rests on the belief that getting a few people to donate is not worth causing offense to others. In that case, I would denounce your argument is immature, selfish, and immoral. I would gladly give offense to 10 or 20 people (and tell them to get over themselves) if it caused 1 person to donate to Watsi.
Lastly, you haven't provided any evidence why people should be offended. I completely disagree that anything PG did was crass, insensitive, or tasteless. Au contraire, I think you are the one mistaken for interpreting it that way. You've misappropriated an arbitrary societal rule for reasons you likely cannot defend.
My argument rests on the belief that attempting to exploit a tragedy to grab attention for your unrelated interests is socially offensive. I cannot conceive of how you gleaned the interpretation you did, but that you did suggests that actual meaningful conversation here is fundamentally impossible.
This has been pure wordplay for quite a while. My mistake was engaging the hive in defense mode.
> attempting to exploit a tragedy to grab attention for your unrelated interests
"exploit": False. PG does not benefit from people donating to Watsi. What he's doing is quite literally the opposite of exploitation: persuading people to give money to others.
"unrelated interests": I've already debunked this, as did PG in his tweet. A terrible event occurred. This has caused people to become abnormally empathetic toward their fellow man. PG is encouraging people to channel that empathy into a good cause however they can.
The belief your argument rests on consists entirely of falsehoods.
See, even more wordplay. You're picking the definitions of my words that make it easiest to argue with them, then knocking down the straw man you've constructed. That in any given response only a fraction of my statements are cited supports this.
Hurray, you've successfully countered an argument I wasn't making! I suppose congratulations are in order, though I'm at a loss as to why.
And you're intentionally keeping your arguments vague, which makes it impossible for me attack them, then refusing to clarify in your response. "Exploit" and "unrelated" are very common words, and the definitions I took were the most common ones. If you're going to use obscure definitions to prove your point, the onus is on you to clarify. Until you do, the fact the remains that PG was not "exploiting" the event, nor was his recommendation "unrelated", and you have no justifiable reason for taking offense.
Because people forget about the horrors occurring every day all around the world. People don't realize what is happening else where until it's in their own backyard, and even then, they will go back to sipping their lattes and living their lives in no time.
I find the fact that there is is an argument over this far more tasteless and rude.
I like the practicalness of the advice. It might actually lead to some good in this world.
It's times like this when people stop to think about other human beings and might actually act on something. Unfortunately during normal times we are really bad at that.
I also like the practicalness of the advice, but it feels rather crass coming from someone deeply involved in Watsi. Good intentions or not, using a horrible event to promote something else altogether while the event is still happening is in terribly bad taste.
...the obvious conclusion being that it would be appropriate for me to tell people to stop talking about the boston marathon so we could discuss the Mariners game that happened on Sunday.
Its 'tasteless and rude' because those people aren't on CNN?
Orders of magnitude more people will die or be injured today from gun violence, car accidents or disease but 99.9% of them will not make the news, a reminder of this is anything but tasteless and rude.
He only called attention to those who were not directly involved with the event. Nobody injured or within range to have a traumatic experience from the event was reading pg's twitter feed and getting offended. Only you were.
Do not forget that live media organisations, which promise yet another update of the "event" in a few minutes, are effectively promoting themselves, and profiting from it.
