This is investigating the question of why it seems that no one with power can do anything useful, and investigating the person who appears to have power who people thought might be doing useful things, and who looks like he is in a strong position to do useful things, with a stated priority and even explicit commitment of spending his money to do exactly the most useful things.
I also want it to be clear that Gates has far from full control over the actions of his foundation, and for reasons he is unwilling or unable to act outside of the foundation, a pattern that seems to be common among the wealthy.
At some point I’m going to write a post on a generalization of the message here. Roughly speaking: money and status mostly provide the appearance of power, not actual power. They are often necessary conditions for actually being able to change things (because the appearance of power is often exactly what is needed to solve coordination problems), but not sufficient. Once you have enough money/status, the limiting factor becomes understanding things thoroughly enough to engineer ways around the barriers, and that understanding largely cannot be outsourced to people you hire.
To elaborate on your last point: beyond the benefits of appearing to have power, there’s a difference between being in a high-power world state (having billions of dollars) and being able to actually compute (and then follow) policies which exercise your power in order to achieve your goals (see Appendix B.4 of Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power for a formal example of this in reinforcement learning).
At some point I’m going to write a post on a generalization of the message here. Roughly speaking: money and status mostly provide the appearance of power, not actual power. They are often necessary conditions for actually being able to change things (because the appearance of power is often exactly what is needed to solve coordination problems), but not sufficient. Once you have enough money/status, the limiting factor becomes understanding things thoroughly enough to engineer ways around the barriers, and that understanding largely cannot be outsourced to people you hire.
To elaborate on your last point: beyond the benefits of appearing to have power, there’s a difference between being in a high-power world state (having billions of dollars) and being able to actually compute (and then follow) policies which exercise your power in order to achieve your goals (see Appendix B.4 of Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power for a formal example of this in reinforcement learning).