I’ve been a supporter of this theory for a long time. People usually tend to ignore the good they could do to larger number of people when they find themselves confronted with the bad luck of an individual, and in most cases they decide to help the individual. Paradox there, of course. Yet, that’s how people act and it is what they say is noble, too.

In this month’s Wired magazine, columnist Clive Thompson makes a thought-provoking claim: Geeks like Bill Gates are better suited to understand the world’s problems than non-geeks.

I couldn’t agree more. While most people would help a single stranger who has been hit by a bad blow of fate, they’re just as good at ignoring the equally bad or worse situations of millions. People who can think in giant numbers, on the other hand, are more likely to see the misery of the masses in Africa, for example.

“The problem isn’t a moral failing: It’s a cognitive one. We’re very good at processing the plight of tiny groups of people but horrible at conceptualizing the suffering of large ones,” says Thompson. “The guy [Bill Gates] is practically a social cripple, and at times he has seemed to lack human empathy. But he’s also a geek, and geeks are incredibly good at thinking concretely about giant numbers. Their imagination can scale up and down the powers of 10 — mega, giga, tera, peta — because their jobs demand it. So maybe that’s why he is able to truly understand mass disease in Africa. We look at the huge numbers and go numb. Gates looks at them and runs the moral algorithm: Preventable death = bad; preventable death x 1 million people = 1 million times as bad.“