Subtitle: reporter tries and tries to remain mean in the face of the Watsis, but finds he just can't do it.
Reading this article was like watching someone try to break into a really secure system. The reporter tried every trick in the book, and none worked. I went back and counted the number of different avenues along which he tried to attack, and there were no less than 11: Watsi's office, Chase's language, neocolonialism, race, the focus on patient care, Silicon Valley, California idealism, Watsi's investors, how real the connection is between donor and patient, why they don't fund patients in the US, and the realism of Chase's dreams. The dude is like a cynicism machine.
What's interesting about this guy though is that he's not unique in this respect. He merely represents the default/lazy reporter m.o. taken to such an extreme that it becomes a caricature. Controversy generates page views, and it's really easy to create. In his case I'm sure this is not an act, but an instance of someone's personality being naturally well suited to the work he's doing. But those of you who might one day have to deal with the press might want to keep this article in mind as an example.
I read the article having never heard of Watsi. To me it read as proactively addressing concerns I may encounter when considering participation. I came away with a very positive view of Watsi and have visited the website and started doing more research.
Who knows, this is just one person's take, but I found the article beneficial.
Yeah, I agree that the end result is beneficial for Watsi, and I regret hijacking this thread with meta discussion about journalism when it could have been about Watsi instead.
I agree, some of it was a little off-putting, but Andrew Leonard is one of the better writers at Salon and I thought he was just trying to address the stereotype about "Silly Con" valley and speak against it. He wrote: "Watsi must also bear the misfortune of coming of age during a simmering backlash against Silicon Valley" and then goes on to hold Watsi up as a counter example. I'm not aware of this simmering backlash against Silicon Valley, but it must exist somewhere for him to write about it this way.
I see both mcphilip and pg's sides. I did not think the article was written to make a negative point. Like PG said, the author seems to like Chase and Watsi, but had to present some counterarguments people could make against such a company.
PG's comment is more applicable to journalism in general. What's lamentable is that it's the job of journalists to present sides which are wrong or uninformed.
Who says it the job of journalists to "present sides that are wrong or misinformed?" What you meant was that journalist shouldn't have a worldview different from mine. He didn't have to present those views -- those were his concerns or ones he considered valid.
> Reading this article was like watching someone try to break into a really secure system.
Isn't this what good critical journalism is about? There's nothing "default" or "lazy" about digging out uncomfortable facts and telling them. It's difficult to do well.
It is. But it does not follow that any kind of noisy door-rattling indicates serious investigation. Just like how in reality most breakin attempts come from bored teenagers posturing to IRC channels, this article basically namechecks controversies without really reporting on them.
The article is full of little drive-bys, like "what about that neocolonialism?" What neocolonialism? Whose premise are they accepting? How does that premise, applied uniformly to all enterprise, implicate all of western civilization? Are we litigating modern capitalism through the lens of a tiny SF tech healthcare charity? Oh, wait, this is Salon; of course that's what we're doing. Or, "recently controversial investor [Paul Graham]" --- here Salon has literally synthesized a narrative from TechCrunch and Valleywag stories its reporter does not actually understand. Not only that, but it does so pointlessly; Graham's nonexistent controversy isn't relevant to the story even as written.
If this was a Wikipedia article, half of the text in the article would have little blue superscripts; "weasel words", "citation needed", "who?".
> Are we litigating modern capitalism through the lens of a tiny SF tech healthcare charity?
The author completely failed to do any real scrutiny here. Neocolonialism isn't about how awkward one westerner feels looking at pictures of others. Nothing was included about western Capital purchasing labor and resource rights from these countries, which could frame the need for the service in the first place. Namechecked indeed.
However, the rhetoric around start-ups places them as the fixers, leaders and disruptors of the economic order. Those claims invite and deserve critical analysis. It wouldn't be fair to have Watsi be a punching bag stand-in for the Dutch East India Company, but let's please not pretend that Watsi somehow stands outside of the economic order or that we shouldn't be skeptical of claims of disruption.
Tech industry solutionism (to ruefully borrow a term from Evgeny Morozov) concerns me too, but it's a problem when it attaches itself to public policy decision-making, not when it attaches itself to charity.
I've no evidence for it existing as a concept in reality, but I've been thinking of something I'd term 'defensive PR' - ensuring that when your business is mentioned in the press, all of the known attacks that would typically come up over a brief lunch/dinner conversation have associated defences, which would also likely then appear in the same conversation.
I know very little about Watsi, so I don't feel comfortable commenting on it in particular, but there are so many new businesses cropping up, and people are so prone to being critical in the startup world, that it would seem to make sense to try to get your defences out along with your initial publicity.
Paul, as a mostly former journalist, I'm going to say I think you are mostly reacting to the grafs about funding/Silicon Valley greed machine, and being referred to as "recently controversial."
A real write-up of a start-up ought to probe at larger issues, and something more than a facile "but can $X prevail against $insertbigcompanyname here.
Being skeptical of feel-good choose-a-person donation models brought out that all get funded.
Andrew is decidely skeptical of the current zeitgeist in Silicon Valley and that's needed. It's a far different environment from when you started YC.
And if Watsis can win over Leonard, it's surely going to do well, press-coverage wise.
Alright, Ryan. Pick a "controversy", purported criticism, or complication of Watsi's model or tactics that the Salon article raised and actually defend it. Find one trenchant observation this article made that is made about Watsi (in an article that is about Watsi). Do it, and I'll donate $500 to the charity of your choice.
However valuable your time is, it isn't worth more than the $500 I'll be attributing to what should take less than 5 minutes, if Andrew's skepticism was "needed" in this case.
I think Andrew did a good job of exploring the question of asking people to help an individual, when their dollars would be better spent on issue-focussed NGOs/charities (defined as greatest good for greatest number of people/tackling systemic issues).
He quotes a UC Berkeley economist to frame the criticism , invites rebuttal from Watsi Though Andrew's inclination initially resides with the economists's argument, he concludes that Watsi's model isn't likely to siphon off money that would go to a charity like Mercy Corps. He concludes, based on an interview with Watsi, that it appeals in a different way and thus isn't using a cheap fundraising model that hurts more effective charities.
Whether you agree or not with my assessment, there's no need for the donation via bet -- but if you are inclined to find another avenue for your charitable donations, I do like Mercy Corps.
You know, I actually tried. I wanted to help get that $500 into some kind of charity, so I spent a bunch of time enumerating all of the article's arguments and tried to craft some supporting rhetoric.
But there's not a single concern that holds water. They're probably valid questions -- newcomers to Watsi probably think them up on their own as they try to decide whether they want to donate -- but a legitimate concern? An actual, bona-fide "Watsi needs to address X or their trajectory will be at risk" concern? Or "we should be worried, because Watsi's success would have negative consequences for X other group" concern?
Nope. There simply aren't any. So either I'm just not clever enough, or there aren't any arguments that can be made against Watsi which don't simultaneously make the inquisitor sound like a complete douchenozzle.
As far as I can tell, Watsi is the perfect example of (a) technology uplifting quality of life, (b) Silicon Valley making it possible (would Watsi have been possible without SV?), and (c) that it's possible to live life without being forced to be motivated by greed or glory (the Watsi founders just want to help people).
> Man, I can't wait for the Watsi API to roll out.
Now that would be interesting, letting various sites get their members to sponsor people directly. I bet there are a lot of church sites that would be happy to put something like that on their web page.
> Subtitle: reporter tries and tries to remain mean in the face of the Watsis, but finds he just can't do it.
That's meaningful to me. This journalists praise at the tail end of a diligent fault finding effort carries more weight than something closer to a "fluff" piece, IMHO.
My read of it was that Leonard was playing devil's advocate.
Clearly, he has (or was representing) a dim view of Silicon Valley in general¹, but all the issue he brought up about Watsi are things I could imagine a skeptical reader wondering about. And, as you pointed out, the article either debunks or at least presents a counter-argument to each of those points.
To me, the article came across as a generally-positive piece about Watsi, using some lazy appeals to populist memes about Silicon Valley to help make them stand out from the rest of the herd.
¹ A view that, incidentally, I mostly disagree with. But the article wasn't about Silicon Valley; it was about Watsi.
Or, conversely, he's become accustomed to there being a catch with non-profits that accept donations from the general public and Watsi is (fortunately) a unicorn.
There are so many examples of scams operating as a charity that to find a genuine charity could easily be a surprise to a died-in-the-wool reporter.
Are you really comfortable casually indicting the whole enterprise of charity? Was that an uncertainty that really needed to be sown here? You don't think the world would be a better place if people had fewer qualms about parting with tiny amounts of cash now and then?
Well to be fair, the scam charity industry is pretty big. My dad actually considers all calls he gets from firemen association, cancer charity foundations, etc. soliciting donations to be scams... and I think that's a good move on his part. Because he's been had before by a scam that was claiming to be a charity fund for 9/11 victims. Just the other day he asked me about an e-mail he had gotten... about this guy who's wanting a business partner. I saw in the sentbox a heartfelt reply to help him out... and that bothered me very much, that my dad is wasting time on that shit (something that was clearly a scam). I'd rather that he just stop worrying about this, I've told him point-blank to just never donate anything to any entity -- he's old, there are lots of fraudsters out there, and he doesn't have the ability to check which ones are legitimate. I'll do the donating for him with my money.
You're a security professional, you have a very highly developed and sophisticated ability to discern scams from non-scams. Normal people are not like this, scam charities are actually a big problem that they have to watch out for. That is just the sad reality.
Sure, but there's a line between optimizing donations and excuse-making or concern-trolling. I know Jacques isn't a concern troll! I'm just saying, not every "accurate" objection is productive. If the end result is that you're suppressing donation, the world is probably better off with you donating indiscriminately.
Personally, I'd prefer a world with suppressed donations over one with suppressed accurate objections. Or, you know, we could work towards a world where we have neither.
A foundation that I used to collect for turned out to be a scam. Plenty of others that I'm aware of did marginal good still managed to make off with the majority of the take.
The ratio of funds disbursed to goal:funds taken to run the charity is the key indicator. Once you start to look at charities that way a disproportionally large number of them come up wanting. I've lost my appetite for charity long ago and I now use my funds in a different way, I help people directly where and whenever I can without any middle men/women.
Watsi seems to be a very rare thing, I wished that weren't the case but it certainly seems like that to me. Feel free to disagree. Props to this journalist for making doubly sure that he's not going to regret making a recommendation. Like I regret going door to door taking money from not-so-wealthy people to see it all go away to what turned out to be thieves in suits.
Well, feel free to disagree. I've spent enough time on wondering where to make the most impact with donations and I've found it extremely hard to figure out the angles, where the money goes and lack of transparency has made me decide that donations are best spent where I can see exactly what happens with those donations.
Watsi is extremely good in this respect, they're very transparent about what they do with the money. Most other charities do not cross that threshold for me, I'm happy to hear that other charities do cross that threshold for you.
Is a good place to start when considering giving to a charity. And if it isn't listed there then you're probably better off giving it a miss rather than your hard earned money.
> Most of the charities people have heard of actually do a lot of good.
Most charities do all they can to avoid revealing the percentage of their income that goes to the charity's goals. They are under no legal obligation to do this, and there are any number of ways to make administrative costs look like charitable spending.
A typical -- typical -- case history is that of Greg Mortenson, of "Three Cups of Tea" fame, who made off with a million dollars of foundation money for his personal expenses, all justified of course as legitimate expenditures related to the foundation. The only reason this story went south is because some disgruntled insiders blew the whistle on him, and he has been ordered to pay the money back ... eventually.
> Most charities do all they can to avoid revealing the percentage of their income that goes to the charity's goals. They are under no legal obligation to do this, and there are any number of ways to make administrative costs look like charitable spending.
Bona fide administrative costs are part of the money that goes to the charity's goals.
> A typical -- typical -- case history is that of Greg Mortenson, of "Three Cups of Tea" fame, who made off with a million dollars of foundation money for his personal expenses, all justified of course as legitimate expenditures related to the foundation
Repeating and italicizing the claim that the case is typical isn't actually justifying the claim; in any case, there's a pretty big difference between the allegations against Mortenson in Three Cups of Deceit (or the findings of the Montana investigation into Mortenson's use of CAI funds) and bona fide administrative expenses.
Abuse of funds (whether administrative or not) is an issue orthogonal to the share of funds used for administrative purposes.
> Bona fide administrative costs are part of the money that goes to the charity's goals.
Yes, but that requires a definition of "bona fide", something easier said than done. Yo can run a charity with 50 staff, or five staff and terrific computer software, as just one example where there's no wrongdoing, but a big difference in outcome. The problem is that many charities don't think of themselves as businesses with a bottom line.
I speak as a philanthropist with many decades of experience.
> ... there's a pretty big difference between the allegations against Mortenson in Three Cups of Deceit (or the findings of the Montana investigation into Mortenson's use of CAI funds) and bona fide administrative expenses.
You clearly missed the point of the "Three Cups" story. It only came to light because some insiders weren't on board. That problem is easily solved -- feather each nest equally.
> Abuse of funds (whether administrative or not) is an issue orthogonal to the share of funds used for administrative purposes.
That's quite false. In many cases of charity abuse, administrative costs is the exploitable and exploited defect, as it certainly was in the "Three Cups" story. Another is the cost of fundraising, which in some cases undermines the entire charity by paying too much in fundraising costs for each donated dollar.
> You clearly missed the point of the "Three Cups" story. It only came to light because some insiders weren't on board.
I don't agree that that is "the" point of the story, but I didn't miss that fact. So what? Regular independent audits which are published (or at least available to funders) are a means of monitoring to detect and avoid abuse -- whether in administrative expenses or elsewhere -- and also, themselves, an administrative expense. Transparency is the antidote for abuse, but transparency requires spending money tracking things and making it available (and having someone periodically reviewing the practices of those doing the day to day tracking.)
Minimizing administrative expenses is not a means of avoiding abuse.
> In many cases of charity abuse, administrative costs is the exploitable and exploited defect
And in many cases, non-administrative costs nominally serving the charities direct mission that just happen to be used to purchase goods from firms owned by decision-makers in the charity are the exploited defect.
Share of costs that go to administrative purposes is orthogonal to abuse. Whether funds are (administrative or otherwise) are spent in a way that actually serves to advance the goals of the charity rather than the other personal interests of the charity's decision makers is the key issue, and it is neither the case that abuse is specific to administrative costs, or that increasing the share of resources devoted to administrative functions cannot improve the ability of the organization, on the same total expenditures, to advance its goals.
Share of expenditures on administrative costs is a simple metric, but it's not really a good one for either measuring the effectiveness of a charity or the risk of abuse (which aren't the same thing, although abuse is linked to lack of effectiveness.)
> Another is the cost of fundraising, which in some cases undermines the entire charity by paying too much in fundraising costs for each donated dollar.
Fundraising is actually the most common problem; its very rare for a charity with serious abuse in the way it uses other funds (administrative or non-administrative) to not also be spending virtually all of its money on fundraising, often spending it on fundraising firms that have an incestuous relationship with the charities own decision-making (to the extent that probably the single most common charity scam is charities that are essentially set up by fundraising companies with which they immediately forge exclusive contracts and serve basically as a means for funnelling donations into fundraising appeals to raise more donations to feed into more fundraising appeals.)
> Share of costs that go to administrative purposes is orthogonal to abuse.
I already pointed out that the "Three Cups" story falsifies this claim. And that story is by no means uncommon. People of limited commitment to a charitable cause find it very easy to justify personal expenditures as "administrative" costs. Again, this is based on decades of experience inside and outside charities (both as a funding source and as a volunteer).
I can't find anything to object to in your final paragraph -- it's well worth reading.
> I already pointed out that the "Three Cups" story falsifies this claim.
The story of an incident of abuse of administrative costs does not falsify the claim that the share of administrative costs is orthogonal to the level of overall abuse; that incident doesn't demonstrate a positive relation between administrative costs and abuse any more than the many, many stories of self-dealing and other abuse by charity decision-makers in the non-administrative costs of non-profits demonstrates a positive relation between non-administrative costs and abuse.
Lack of accountability measures (which themselves tend to be things that actually involve administrative expenditures) are probably the single biggest risk factor for abuse, since its the one thing that is directly related to being able to get away with abuse.
> that incident doesn't demonstrate a positive relation between administrative costs and abuse ...
Greg Mortenson abused his foundation to the tune of over a million dollars by withdrawing administrative funds for his personal use. That demonstrates a positive relationship between administrative costs and abuse.
> Greg Mortenson abused his foundation to the tune of over a million dollars by withdrawing administrative funds for his personal use. That demonstrates a positive relationship between administrative costs and abuse.
No, it doesn't. A correlation between two variables can't be demonstrated by a single data point.
With the pervasiveness of self-centred "charity" in my high school and university, it's cognitively easier to just disregard all charity altogether.
Students go around asking for thousands of dollars to send local kids to go "build a {house, school, well} in {third-world country}". If you look at the budget breakdowns, something like 80% of it goes to the flights getting the students down to said country in the first place.
I know this is true but find it implausible that those donations are really cannibalizing donations to worthy charities. I think it's more likely that they're donations that wouldn't have been made otherwise.
Let's also be clear that in this case, with Watsi, there's no cannibalization to refer to. Watsi is in many cases working with Partners in Health, which is pretty close to being an unimpeachable charity.
I agree with you, but I am not looking forward to the day when we see high-schoolers run around selling chocolate bars with "100% of profits go to Watsi" as the selling point, and then sending more than half of that money to some overpriced "run-your-own-fundraiser" chocolate middlemen.
For me, however, his main criticism sticks: band-aid solutions may make first-worlders feel good about saving 10-year-olds in Nepal, but they remain band-aid solutions — necessary, but not sufficient.
No one project is ever going to save the world all by itself, so be careful not to extend that argument to rationalize never giving at all.
I just now donated to re-setting a rice farmer's broken arm so she can keep farming and feed her family. That feels like more than a band-aid to me, and presumably to her.
True. But sometimes the opposite occurs: charity replaces justice, band-aid solutions replace systematic change. Having satisfied one's psychological need to feel like a do-gooder, the urgent desire for real change evaporates.
Bearing in mind that you're an abstraction to me and not a real person, so there's a limit to how personally you should be able to take this comment (I don't even know you by reputation on HN):
(a) Have you recently given to something like Watsi and (b) were you already trying to involve yourself in real social change for the rural poor? Or are you like the rest of us, mostly concerned with "first world" problems and in no meaningful way already engaged with the problem? If it's the latter: better that we should get you to cough up some bandaids.
b) . . . rural poverty isn't something I focus on, no . . . but as regards systematic health care reform . . . I do not own health insurance, but belong to a health-sharing plan, somewhat analogous to using a credit union instead of a bank . . . not necessarily a solution to world-wide health coverage (or rural poverty), but perhaps a step in right direction.
Band-aids and system solutions ought to go together, and I'm open to learning more about how to do both better.
And what would the alternative be ? The health problems of these patients seem to be so varied that I don't think a one shot fix it all solution is possible. And what's more, the ratio of suffering eased to amount raised is probably much higher than Cancer or other high profile diseases faced by first world.
It's still a taxonomically better article than the press-release regurgitation from TechCrunch, and I seriously hope you agree that it is important that companies, especially those concerned with charity, are subjected to scrutiny.
Ideally, Skepticism >>> Concern >>> Regurgitation, and at least the article places itself in the middle category.
It's a decent article by normal standards, and a great article by standards of tech writing.
When reading about services like Watsi I often enjoy cynicism from reporters, so long as it does not prevent them from telling the entire story truthfully.
I just wanted to say that you shouldn't necessarily see his cynicism as a bad thing (he's probably just confused good journalistic skepticism with the cynicism that mediocre journalists think will make them "hard-hitting"). IMO, he comes across as so cynical that he actually loses the reader, which just builds a more sympathetic case for Watsi. If you were hoping to win over idealists with this interview, that I'd say you might even be better off with this article rather than one that is overly fawning.
> The whole thing is a crock, an example of trying to be fair/balanced/objective by bending over backwards to find negative things to say about the [subject of article].
To the article's concern about selecting specific patients to donate to: I actually have the same problem, and found myself (irrationally) trying to pick the least photogenic or narratively appealing patients to donate to, and then giving up and spreading donations across the whole pool of patients†.
And my point is: Watsi should have a button that would, at some minimum donation floor, fund every patient equally. Make it a little expensive! I would push that button every time, and you'd be harnessing a broken part of my thought process to make me make better decisions.
Also: man, does Watsi need an API. We're doing more public contests soon! Big ones! It would be freaking awesome if I could plug my analytics stuff directly into Watsi so I could make automatic donations.
† Before you assume this is some kind of humblebrag, know that I'm not donating my own money; we send $20 to Watsi for everyone who finishes our crypto challenges, which are a lot of work, so in a real sense it's the challenge-takers who are doing the funding here.
An API would be awesome. I actually have a specific project kicking around in the back of my mind that I would launch solely around a Watsi API. Here's to hoping they see this thread...
Others wonder whether focusing donations on individuals, no matter how worthy, diverts funding and attention from efforts aimed at tackling the more systemic causes of inadequate healthcare in impoverished parts of the world.
I can only respond with "The Starfish Parable":
One day, an old man was walking along a beach that was littered with thousands of starfish that had been washed ashore by the high tide. As he walked he came upon a young boy who was eagerly throwing the starfish back into the ocean, one by one.
Puzzled, the man looked at the boy and asked what he was doing. Without looking up from his task, the boy simply replied, "I'm saving these starfish, Sir".
The old man chuckled aloud, "Son, there are thousands of starfish and only one of you. What difference can you make?"
The boy picked up a starfish, gently tossed it into the water and turning to the man, said, "It made a difference to that one!"
It's more like "with the same effort you could save thousands of starfish, just not the ones right in front of you" than "what difference can you make". Which is certainly something worth considering.
Can you? If we took the money donated to Watsi, let these people suffer/die instead, and used it all to solve an "underlying problem" - would it help more people?
Without a lot of research that answer seems difficult to get to. I think in the interim, helping these people is a fine use of some people's disposable income.
Also, consider that money going to Watsi does not necessarily stop money going to a different/more effective cause. Many people donating to this may not donate to a different idea, and vice versa.
I'm not necessarily talking about solving underlying problems like lack of good healthcare, I was actually just thinking about the idea that if you have 1000 dollars to give, it's worth considering the trade offs between giving it to one person for a surgery, or buy 200 bed nets to protect people from malaria or protect 200 kids from developmental problems caused by parasitic worms: http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities.
It actually seems to be a fairly close call. It seems that bed nets prevent about 1 death from malaria for every $2000 or so [1], whereas the quality of life of some of the Watsi patients can be significantly improved for $500 to $1000 [see 2]. So the question is what the relative value of each is, and while I think the balance weighs in favor of malaria prevention, it's not a clear-cut decision.
The world's systemic problems are almost entirely political in nature. Unless you want to try mass bribery, your monetary donations aren't going to fix those.
This isn't exactly what I meant, but it's not infeasible either. I have a friend whos working on a charity to help people give conditional donations to political campaigns, like only giving money to a politician on the condition they vote yes on bill x, or having your donation divided equally among people who voted against marijuana prohibitions. In which case, it might be more effective to do something like this than to donate to a defense fund for people accused of weed related crimes.
And it a good parable about the real issue, how most people are selfish and will only 'help' it they get something back IE Get to meet a star fish they 'saved'
Reality is the star fish are all fine come next tide but the boy goes home thinking he's done a good dead, in reality having done nothing but made himself feel better.
The old man is probably wise and realises the issue is bigger than throwing a star fish in the ocean and is probably sad.
He too might do nothing, but I'd like to think ever now and again one or two of these wise old people actually does something that saves millions and has a real effect on the world.
I donated through Watsi for the first time yesterday. A few hours later, I received an email saying that the patient I had funded had raised all the money she needed to get her medical care.
That was a pretty great feeling. I certainly won't miss the $20 I gave, and I got to see how they would make a concrete difference for someone who didn't get as lucky as I in the humanity lottery.
If my memory serves me right, this is the first time I've ever given to a charity (I've donated to Wikileaks when they had server cost issues, that's the only other instance I remember - having been a student for most of my adult life so far, I never really had the disposable income for donations). When people approach me on the street to give money for their organization X, I find it extremely invasive and have no concrete desire to give. How do I know my money is actually going to serve a real purpose?
I love how transparent Watsi is, and how I can trust my donation to have a real meaning.I really hope they're around for a long, long time.
Watsi really stands out as a startup that's really doing some good. Let's be honest, most startups you read about aren't really a measurable positive force in the world.
Only in a "first-world" country would be imaginable the complaint, "people in rich countries deciding who gets treatment in poor countries" shameful! Only an idiot would make that judgement.
The PICTURES make it real. Real human beings. It encourages people to give.
I'm no bleeding heart, but more VCs, entrepreneurs, and (especially) people of means should be using more of their vast resources to start and promote more things like Watsi.
> Only in a "first-world" country would be imaginable the complaint, "people in rich countries deciding who gets treatment in poor countries" shameful! Only an idiot would make that judgement.
That judgement is actually quite accurate. Watsi may do something good, but it does work with existing charities to provide medical services. Why charity is needed and the role charity plays in systemic issues in this and other countries is an important thing to examine.
"the way Watsi works is that we accept every single patient’s profile before the patient receives care. Just like an insurance company. We’re not retroactively approving things. We guarantee funding. We won’t take a profile down until it is fully funded. No other crowd-funding platform that I know of works this way.”
Isn't this exactly how Kiva works? AFAIK, profiles on Kiva have already received funding from their respective microlending institution. Kiva then pays the microlending institution from the funds they raised. That's a reason why repayment rates are so high; the borrowers have already been vetted and given the loan...
Sure... What I meant to point out is that the model is that everyone that appears on the website has already been funded. This is the same model Kiva uses, and the model can be a little misleading for people who think they're actually crowdfunding someone's health/loan. The health coverage or loan has already happened by the time the users see the faces of the beneficiaries on the site.
I have no idea why this level of detail is interesting to donors. Money is fungible, and it is a reasonable and accurate assumption that a donation that you make to a particular Watsi patient is enabling treatment for that person.
Couple things:
- Donors use some criteria to decide which person to give money to. I guess this is more relevant to Kiva than Watsi, where a donor potentially evaluates the project the loan is funding, its potential for success, etc. In reality, your decision doesn't make (that much) difference at that point. The loan is already out.
- More importantly to me, when I found about about this model, I just felt misled. I felt tricked into believing something that wasn't true, and it made me slightly lose trust in the company. Not a big deal, I still fully support them and recognize that the model works, but it can be kind of misleading to donors.
I'm really having a hard time synthesizing misdirection from Watsi's simple promise that they will themselves personally guarantee funding of any selected patient. That promise is the only detail your comment seems to have uncovered, and it's somehow a bad thing?
Watsi wants your credit card number including CVV to simply register for an account. This is before choosing anyone to fund. How about I only provide payment information at "check out" instead?
Sorry if this is unclear, but you don't need to create an account at all to donate. All you have to do is enter an amount and click "Fund Treatment." Creating an account just saves your payment info for quick checkout in the future.
The direct connection between donor and beneficiary is an interesting new business model for the charity sector. In the UK, several large humanitarian aid charities have been put under the spotlight after it was revealed that 30 charity executives are paid over £100,000 (over $150,000)[1].
If a charity can guarantee (and, ideally, show evidence ex post facto) that 100% of my donation will go to the program/activity/whatever I want to support, and that their administration overheads will be covered from other funding sources (e.g. corporate donations), that would eliminate any concern I might have that a large chuck of my donation would end up being spent on swanky offices and fat-cat executives.
There is a big opportunity here for Watsi to build a platform that can be re-purposed for other types of charitable activities.
I wonder what would be the impact on the amount of funding if donors were only shown pictures of patients after choosing to donate? Say donors could still get the rest of the demographics data, just not a picture. Would this lead to "non-photogenic" patients receiving equal care? Or is the "non-photogenic" patient issue not a problem in the first place?
Why not show "popular" photos more often, with a little footer at the bottom "picture might not match the saved person", with the rest of the information be accurate.
For me, the fact that it would save more lives would compensate for the lying to people.
I'm not convinced the the problem you're concerned about actually exists. I just donated to two people, and one of my criteria for deciding who (since it was mostly arbitrary) was "who looks like they need it most?" At least in my mind, the less 'photogenic' they are, the more they seem like they could use some help.
'Brown people' hospitals will just raise prices if they know patients have 'white people' funds. So this has the potential to make medical care inaccessible to those not having 'proper connections' to 'white people'.
Watsi is only used in extraordinary cases. (Otherwise they would have plenty of patients for people to fund.) I doubt that the money they're pouring into 'Brown people' hospitals is even a dent in their total volume of revenue.
IIRC, the patients aren't even told Watsi is an option until a doctor on the ground identifies them as a potential candidate.
>To some critics, there’s something distinctly neocolonialist and off-putting about the spectacle of well-off do-gooders in the U.S. choosing which brown people live and die in the developing world based on who has a cuter picture on Watsi.
Given that they're having trouble keeping up with donor demand, that hardly seems like a problem, at least for now. And just as the pictures and stories are a clever hack to get people to donate and allow them to feel more meaning from their donations, I'm sure that more hacks can be invented to get more money to the less cute patients if that becomes a problem in the future.
Love what Watsi is doing. Do you guys plan on crowdfunding for larger initiatives in the future, like shipping vitamins, drugs, condoms, etc to third-world countries?
No, we're focused on treatment, not prevention. We have funded a few malnutrition cases, and we would like to fund more, but prevention isn't really our thing. There are other orgs, like the Gates Foundation, that are doing a great job at tackling that side of the coin.
When I first heard about Watsi, absolutely none of the author's negative points entered my mind. Now I'm kind of pissed that I'll think about them when I think of Watsi.
It doesn't change my donation behavior, but just makes me angry at this kind of journalism.
When one considers that publications have people whose job it is to try to write link-baity titles, it doesn't always make sense for HN submissions to use the article's title.
Consider: it's not infrequent that writers loathe the cotton-candy bait their articles are given.
"Harry, smiling, had asked Professor Quirrell what level he played at, and Professor Quirrell, also smiling, had responded, One level higher than you."
As soon as the title enters the 'one weird trick' zone, which this title does, the link gets ignored. Though I did bother to read the hackernews comments about the story :).
"But along with the cash, Watsi has also raised eyebrows. To some critics, there’s something distinctly neocolonialist and off-putting about the spectacle of well-off do-gooders in the U.S. choosing which brown people live and die in the developing world based on who has a cuter picture on Watsi. Others wonder whether focusing donations on individuals, no matter how worthy, diverts funding and attention from efforts aimed at tackling the more systemic causes of inadequate healthcare in impoverished parts of the world. Watsi must also bear the misfortune of coming of age during a simmering backlash against Silicon Valley. We’ve gotten tired of hearing the name brand Silicon Valley bigwigs who have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Watsi talk about the merits of “disrupting” existing industries, when all that really seems to end up happening is that a few people get rich while the competitive screws tighten on the many."
You have an urge to save a life? Make a direct donation yourself or to one of the hundreds of charities that exist. Some charities are certainly better than others, but the options are out there. Watsi is a pathetic excuse for a "company" where this sort of pick-and-choose comes across as a form of good when it's really quite creepy and saddening.
Startups don't need to exist in order to do good, and you don't need to hide behind the veil of backing a company in order to seem like a good person. Give someone the money yourself or go visit those countries if you really give a shit, because there's more to their problems than individuals who happen to need medical care. Most of them don't have any at all.
Watsi is simply another avenue to accomplish goals - just because you personally find them "quite creepy and saddening" reflects more upon yourself than Watsi. It's remarkable that you find Watsi "pathetic" simply because you disagree with their means.
I am a homosexual. I donate to the Salvation Army on occasion. The Salvation Army is known for condemning homosexuals along with a litany of other things I truly disagree with. However, having been to Harbor Light/Acres of Hope in Detroit and seeing that they are willing to provide shelter and food to those in need allows me to support them, in some way. The concept of "this isn't ideal - I want NOTHING to do with it" is simplistic and doesn't reflect real-world situations.
I have found that torch-bearing zealotry with regards to ideals only works in the abstract world.
If you're going to be this nasty, you'd better be right, and in this case you're not. If I went in person to Nepal to find people who need help, I still wouldn't do as good a job as Watsi.
The one useful thing about your comment is that it gives us a way to measure the background radiation of mean-spiritedness online. Watsi is about as good as anything ever gets. The founders are as selfless as anyone I've known. And they are not merely unrealistic do-gooders. They know well what things are like in the field. If people wholly focused on doing good and very effective at it still manage to get attacked online, that's therefore the baseline for being attacked online.
From what I've seen, no matter how much of one's life is spent trying to help, people who stick out will have detractors. And there will always be some lazy bum who thinks they know how to do it better... but who isn't actually doing anything at all.
Personally, I think the best response to such is show me. If you can do it better, JUST DO IT instead of telling me how much better your ideas are. Because mostly those people just want to be heard when they have half-baked opinions and no experience whatsoever.
It still doesn't mean that their implementation is right, because it's not.
Here, let me elaborate: Stop trying to tie yourself to the individual and look at the greater problem. It's a west coast elitist mentality that gives you the "hey, look at this person I'm helping out!" Ever see those commercials they've been doing for decades now where you make an generic donation, and the charity sends you photos of people you're helping? That's a much better approach.
You might be genuinely interested in helping others but other people might not. People are not equally determined in overcoming any obstacle in their way to help someone in need. So making it easier for people to help would let more people receive help.
Do you agree this would be helpful to more people?
What striked me as interesting in your comment is how passionate you are about it. It's the kind of comment someone honest and genuinely caring makes after they've been burned. If someone treated you unfairly it can become an impetus for you to do great things.
I also wish HN readers tried to be more understanding.
It sounds like you're living on a different planet. Watsi allows people who are dying to raise money for treatment that will save their lives, which they otherwise couldn't afford. It's a direct intervention - high impact giving. Few charities have such direct impact.
Many religions/philosophies claim lack of compassion comes from lack of knowing. In that regard, if putting pictures and stories and whatnot on this site gets people more knowledge of poor people's plight, then it can invoke compassion that wouldn't have occurred from just looking at a Unicef box. From a clean engineer point of view it seems stupid to have another company when we already have charities, but another company simply means more people and more PR and more stories getting out there to potential donors, so I don't think it is particularly harmful.
>You have an urge to save a life? Make a direct donation yourself or to one of the hundreds of charities that exist. Some charities are certainly better than others, but the options are out there. Watsi is a pathetic excuse for a "company" where this sort of pick-and-choose comes across as a form of good when it's really quite creepy and saddening.
The "pick-and-choose" mechanism Watsi uses is a (pretty brilliant) psychological hack to grab attention and elicit empathic concern [1]. I suspect a lot of Watsi's donors would not have donated to a similar cause otherwise; if so, Watsi isn't competing for their money with traditional charities.
I would love to see the statistics on how many of the people donating to Watsi are first-time donors to any charity.
[1] Phrased this way it might sound like a bad, manipulative thing to do but I don't think it necessarily is one -- at least in this case.
I especially don't think it's a bad thing because it's a hack that provides significant value to the donor. My wife and I made a small donation (we are fairly poor by US standards) a while back, and I teared up when they emailed me to tell me the girl was fully funded a few hours later. I probably would have gone back and donated to another case right then if they'd had any left (it was right after the Boston Marathon bombings, so I think they were seeing a spike in donors).
Reading this article was like watching someone try to break into a really secure system. The reporter tried every trick in the book, and none worked. I went back and counted the number of different avenues along which he tried to attack, and there were no less than 11: Watsi's office, Chase's language, neocolonialism, race, the focus on patient care, Silicon Valley, California idealism, Watsi's investors, how real the connection is between donor and patient, why they don't fund patients in the US, and the realism of Chase's dreams. The dude is like a cynicism machine.
What's interesting about this guy though is that he's not unique in this respect. He merely represents the default/lazy reporter m.o. taken to such an extreme that it becomes a caricature. Controversy generates page views, and it's really easy to create. In his case I'm sure this is not an act, but an instance of someone's personality being naturally well suited to the work he's doing. But those of you who might one day have to deal with the press might want to keep this article in mind as an example.