4 ms·

It's not a fallacy at all, it's a concept called opportunity cost. Resources are not infinite, so we should spend them where they can have the most and best imp

by imgabe 5y ago

It's not a fallacy at all, it's a concept called opportunity cost. Resources are not infinite, so we should spend them where they can have the most and best impact. If five houses are on fire, and you decide to go organize your sock drawer... Hey, you're doing something. An organized sock drawer is surely better than a disorganized one. But you could still be rightly criticized for wasting time on something unimportant when there are bigger problems you could be attending to.

wander_homer 5y ago
> It's not a fallacy at all, it's a concept called opportunity cost. Resources are not infinite, so we should spend them where they can have the most and best impact. By this logic we should for example stop most of the medical treatment in highly developed countries, where only a minority of humanity lives. For every dollar we spend there on helping a single cancer patient etc. we could probably safe dozens of people elsewhere from dying or suffering due to lack of clean water, food, shelter, drugs, ... So I wonder, what's the list of issues you think should be tackled exclusively to get the most out of our limited resources?
- imgabe 5y ago
  > By this logic we should for example stop most of the medical treatment in highly developed countries, where only a minority of humanity lives. Let's think for a second about what would happen if we did this. Massive amounts of people start dying in the developed world because they get no medical treatment. Most of the productive capacity of the world in terms of creating modern goods is located there, so that plummets. Societies there collapse as people revolt at being denied medical care. The developing countries that were depending on this aid are even worse off than before. Hmm, does that sound like the best way to help the most people? I think not. I'm sure there's an optimal split between keeping prosperous countries prosperous and advancing the current frontiers of human knowledge vs. sending aid to less prosperous countries. I doubt we are at the optimum. I'm also certain the optimum is not "loot absolutely everything from prosperous places and send it to less prosperous ones". > So I wonder, what's the list of issues you think should be tackled exclusively to get the most out of our limited resources? Oh you got me. I don't have a comprehensive list of all the important priorities. Whatever it is "lobster suffering" is way, way down on it.
  - wander_homer 5y ago
    > Let's think for a second about what would happen if we did this. Massive amounts of people start dying in the developed world because they get no medical treatment. Most of the productive capacity of the world in terms of creating modern goods is located there, so that plummets. Societies there collapse as people revolt at being denied medical care. The developing countries that were depending on this aid are even worse off than before. Hmm, does that sound like the best way to help the most people? I think not. And that's exactly the reason why I asked you the follow up question: What is the list of things we should put our resources into then? Because I can guarantee you, that such a list would either lead to chaos, because it can't possibly consider every dependency chain and it wouldn't work with free democracies (like you'd had to forbid parties which care about seemingly less important things), or by the time you or some team of experts found the perfect solution, we could have already solved so many small and big issues. > Oh you got me. I don't have a comprehensive list of all the important priorities. Whatever it is "lobster suffering" is way, way down on it. You're acting like a whole country put everything to a side for a year, to figure out how lobsters won't get boiled alive, and due to it more important things got neglected. But if you can't imagine such list yourself, then what is your solution for a society, which always works for the greater good in the most efficient way possible and who should decide what's the greater good even? Like how would it even work? I mean people care about seemingly unimportant things, people also like to spend their time how they see fit and vote for the stuff they care about and I can't imagine a system where my local town is not allowed to care about the position of a park bench, because there's slavery going on elsewhere or the same town also has a virus outbreak in a school.
    - imgabe 5y ago
      Wait, so unless I can come up with an exactly perfect list that flawlessly prioritizes every possible action that humanity could ever undertake, then I'm not allowed to have any opinion whatsoever about whether any given action is more or less important than anything else? By that logic, we should never choose to prioritize anything over anything else, and we should just select all actions by pure random chance. > You're acting like a whole country put everything to a side for a year, to figure out how lobsters won't get boiled alive, and due to it more important things got neglected. Clearly they didn't drop everything, but they are introducing a new regulation which is going to require resources to implement and enforce. Is preventing 2 seconds of lobster suffering the best use of those resource? I guess if we just have to randomly choose actions and we can't say one action is better or worse than another unless we can list the relative priority of all possible actions, then it doesn't matter. > But if you can't imagine such list yourself, then what is your solution for a society, which always works for the greater good in the most efficient way possible and who should decide what's the greater good even? Like how would it even work? We already have a system. We engage in reasoned debate where people observe what costs an action will have, and demonstrate how many people will be helped by it and they argue for why those benefits outweigh the costs. If your best defense of a given course of action is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ people want weird stuff sometimes! Well, maybe that's not very convincing.
jacquesm 5y ago
Sure, but 'lobster or no lobster' and 'boiling the lobster alive or not' is an ethical question that stands on its own, there is no need to point out that there are bigger problems than that to be able to arrive at the right answer. Usually when people make the arguments that you make it is because they are trying to justify something in their lives, not because they are so busy to solve things that are more important. In other words: unless you are working on a plan to solve world hunger/disease/whatever you probably have no excuse to also spend some cycles on the decision of whether you want your food killed in the most cruel way that you can think of or something at least a little bit more humane.
- imgabe 5y ago
  And if you're talking about an individual making a decision to eat a lobster or not, or to kill it by jabbing a knife in its brain instead of boiling it alive sure. The cost of doing one of the other is virtually nothing, so why not do the one that involves less suffering. But when you're talking about directing government agencies to police an entire country and inspect places to make sure they aren't boiling lobsters alive and levying and collecting fines if they are, now maybe there's something better we could be doing with that effort.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Food and safety inspections as well as animal well-being are already a thing, this would be a minor item added to a list and issuing the edict and making the public aware of it should be enough to curb the bulk of it immediately.

by imgabe 5y ago

wander_homer 5y ago

> It's not a fallacy at all, it's a concept called opportunity cost. Resources are not infinite, so we should spend them where they can have the most and best impact. By this logic we should for example stop most of the medical treatment in highly developed countries, where only a minority of humanity lives. For every dollar we spend there on helping a single cancer patient etc. we could probably safe dozens of people elsewhere from dying or suffering due to lack of clean water, food, shelter, drugs, ... So I wonder, what's the list of issues you think should be tackled exclusively to get the most out of our limited resources?

imgabe 5y ago
> By this logic we should for example stop most of the medical treatment in highly developed countries, where only a minority of humanity lives. Let's think for a second about what would happen if we did this. Massive amounts of people start dying in the developed world because they get no medical treatment. Most of the productive capacity of the world in terms of creating modern goods is located there, so that plummets. Societies there collapse as people revolt at being denied medical care. The developing countries that were depending on this aid are even worse off than before. Hmm, does that sound like the best way to help the most people? I think not. I'm sure there's an optimal split between keeping prosperous countries prosperous and advancing the current frontiers of human knowledge vs. sending aid to less prosperous countries. I doubt we are at the optimum. I'm also certain the optimum is not "loot absolutely everything from prosperous places and send it to less prosperous ones". > So I wonder, what's the list of issues you think should be tackled exclusively to get the most out of our limited resources? Oh you got me. I don't have a comprehensive list of all the important priorities. Whatever it is "lobster suffering" is way, way down on it.
- wander_homer 5y ago
  > Let's think for a second about what would happen if we did this. Massive amounts of people start dying in the developed world because they get no medical treatment. Most of the productive capacity of the world in terms of creating modern goods is located there, so that plummets. Societies there collapse as people revolt at being denied medical care. The developing countries that were depending on this aid are even worse off than before. Hmm, does that sound like the best way to help the most people? I think not. And that's exactly the reason why I asked you the follow up question: What is the list of things we should put our resources into then? Because I can guarantee you, that such a list would either lead to chaos, because it can't possibly consider every dependency chain and it wouldn't work with free democracies (like you'd had to forbid parties which care about seemingly less important things), or by the time you or some team of experts found the perfect solution, we could have already solved so many small and big issues. > Oh you got me. I don't have a comprehensive list of all the important priorities. Whatever it is "lobster suffering" is way, way down on it. You're acting like a whole country put everything to a side for a year, to figure out how lobsters won't get boiled alive, and due to it more important things got neglected. But if you can't imagine such list yourself, then what is your solution for a society, which always works for the greater good in the most efficient way possible and who should decide what's the greater good even? Like how would it even work? I mean people care about seemingly unimportant things, people also like to spend their time how they see fit and vote for the stuff they care about and I can't imagine a system where my local town is not allowed to care about the position of a park bench, because there's slavery going on elsewhere or the same town also has a virus outbreak in a school.
  - imgabe 5y ago
    Wait, so unless I can come up with an exactly perfect list that flawlessly prioritizes every possible action that humanity could ever undertake, then I'm not allowed to have any opinion whatsoever about whether any given action is more or less important than anything else? By that logic, we should never choose to prioritize anything over anything else, and we should just select all actions by pure random chance. > You're acting like a whole country put everything to a side for a year, to figure out how lobsters won't get boiled alive, and due to it more important things got neglected. Clearly they didn't drop everything, but they are introducing a new regulation which is going to require resources to implement and enforce. Is preventing 2 seconds of lobster suffering the best use of those resource? I guess if we just have to randomly choose actions and we can't say one action is better or worse than another unless we can list the relative priority of all possible actions, then it doesn't matter. > But if you can't imagine such list yourself, then what is your solution for a society, which always works for the greater good in the most efficient way possible and who should decide what's the greater good even? Like how would it even work? We already have a system. We engage in reasoned debate where people observe what costs an action will have, and demonstrate how many people will be helped by it and they argue for why those benefits outweigh the costs. If your best defense of a given course of action is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ people want weird stuff sometimes! Well, maybe that's not very convincing.

jacquesm 5y ago

Sure, but 'lobster or no lobster' and 'boiling the lobster alive or not' is an ethical question that stands on its own, there is no need to point out that there are bigger problems than that to be able to arrive at the right answer. Usually when people make the arguments that you make it is because they are trying to justify something in their lives, not because they are so busy to solve things that are more important. In other words: unless you are working on a plan to solve world hunger/disease/whatever you probably have no excuse to also spend some cycles on the decision of whether you want your food killed in the most cruel way that you can think of or something at least a little bit more humane.

imgabe 5y ago
And if you're talking about an individual making a decision to eat a lobster or not, or to kill it by jabbing a knife in its brain instead of boiling it alive sure. The cost of doing one of the other is virtually nothing, so why not do the one that involves less suffering. But when you're talking about directing government agencies to police an entire country and inspect places to make sure they aren't boiling lobsters alive and levying and collecting fines if they are, now maybe there's something better we could be doing with that effort.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Food and safety inspections as well as animal well-being are already a thing, this would be a minor item added to a list and issuing the edict and making the public aware of it should be enough to curb the bulk of it immediately.