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Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

This isn’t an either/or proposition.

Long term goals (“everyone just needs to do <x>”) can (must) coexist alongside shorter term incentives and PR campaigns.

To your point, hyper fixation on the long term goal makes it seem unachievable.

But conversely, short term incentives must necessarily be informed by long term goals if there’s hope of establishing a useful incentive structure.

Success will require focus on both ends of the spectrum.

Ultimately what we’re talking about is society-scale habit change, and habit change relies on both a belief in a long term outcome and a commitment to daily progress towards it.

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> To your point, hyper fixation on the long term goal makes it seem unachievable.

It's not even a feasible long term goal, though. There are plenty of places where steady progress will lead to achievements in the long term that seem unbelievable now - science may yet reverse climate change, achieve nuclear fusion at scale, cure cancer (and aging), etc.

This isn't one of those things, though. There's no path from where we are now to nobody eating animals that involves us just making incremental progress, a bit at a time. Long-term goals are great, but long-term goals that can't plausibly be achieved are bad.

> There's no path from where we are now to nobody eating animals that involves us just making incremental progress, a bit at a time.

It sounds like you’re imposing a specifically slow set of increments here.

We know that these goals can’t be met overnight, so the only option is some kind of incremental progress.

But the size of those increments certainly isn’t set, and will be increased (voluntarily or not) as our situation becomes more dire.

> Long-term goals are great, but long-term goals that can't plausibly be achieved are bad.

I think it’s problematic to conclude that what we’re discussing can’t be plausibly achieved. Insanely difficult, sure, but at some point these decisions will be made for us, and abandoning hope is one option that seems guaranteed to lead to failure.

Going further and calling these kinds of goals “bad” seems actively harmful.

The comment they were replying to didn’t sound long term. It specified “now” in the first sentence, so at best short-medium term.

The “everyone just needs to do <x>” part wasn’t a reference to a long term idea, it was them replying to somebody expecting that immediately (or, with a more forgiving reading, in a shorter term)

Both comments were essentially endorsing a binary position. My point was that reality must be some combination of both.

I’d read my comment as addressed to both parent comments.

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