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You should take a look at Ahmdal's law. "Every little bit helps" type thinking is a detriment to the fixing of most problems that should be tackled on the bigge
by vasco 5y ago
You should take a look at Ahmdal's law. "Every little bit helps" type thinking is a detriment to the fixing of most problems that should be tackled on the biggest contributing factors first, always. This is a rule of optimisation that can be extended for most other things.
- astockwell 5y agoWhile that is true in the theoretical, it ignores human psychology. For example the Debt Snowball method has been so widely successful for ignoring precisely this black&white pragmatism.
- dahfizz 5y agoAhmdal's law lets you calculate the theoretical speedup of a job given how parallelize-able it is. I don't see how that is applicable here. If the government was spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to try to get people to use their faucet less, but they were not dealing with wasteful farmers, you may have an argument. But to say that people _shouldn't_ conserve resources just because they aren't the largest consumer of the given resource is ridiculous. Me being conscientious of how much water I waste from my faucet doesn't slow progress in dealing with the larger water wasters. There is no reason not to do it. > fixing of most problems that should be tackled on the biggest contributing factors first, always This only applies if you can only fix one factor at a time. That is never the case in real world, complex, societal issues. Society is not a computer science puzzle.
- stormbrew 5y ago> If the government was spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to try to get people to use their faucet less, but they were not dealing with wasteful farmers, you may have an argument. I mean.. that doesn't seem very far off from the truth?