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Comment by redroyal | Hacker News Reader

That issue can’t be solved by reusing laptops or sorting cans from cardboard. The argument that every little helps is totally flawed. Fantasy, make believe. The other 8 billion people simply don’t care and why would they? 50 years from now they’ll all be dead. Since when did people care about future generations and the good of humanity? It’s a very recent western fashion. The only thing that truly motivated the vast majority of people is sex and money or objectives closely descended from that tree. To modify mass human behavior you have to incentivize based on that leverage. But - even modification of the behavior of the crowd won’t be sufficient. The only way to fix this is w new technology

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You're falling prey to the fallacy that just because 1 person's actions can't make a world of difference on their own, those actions aren't worth taking. By your logic, you may as well not vote either, because everyone else is voting. Every little bit DOES count, because the more people believe they can make a difference, the more of a difference they will make collectively. You have to lead by example. Rolling over and dying because you dont think you can make a difference makes you part of the problem.

New tech certainly would help, and it isnt/shouldnt be on the shoulders of just individuals to make all the change. But Im not going to use that as an excuse not to change my own behavior for the better.

I mean you’ve got to appreciate the scale of the problem here and be pragmatic. The danger of recycling is it gives the illusion of progress, but I’m not against it otherwise. Philosophically you might be correct but voting blue in a non swing red state is completely meaningless

We need not be locked in a two party system forever. If enough of us demand same day primaries and ranked choice then other parties have a chance.

Only voting in blue strongholds certainly isn't going to break the duopoly.

> By your logic, you may as well not vote either, because everyone else is voting.

Correct. Voting is the worst possible example, because while e.g. individual recycling has a negligible but technically non-zero impact, voting is overwhelmingly* likely to have exactly zero impact.

* unless the voting base is either extremely small, or extremely close. Your vote only matters as much as the likelihood that at least one result is decided by exactly one vote, which is only realistic in something like a local town election. Which are the only elections most people should actually pay attention to.

> Every little bit DOES count, because the more people believe they can make a difference, the more of a difference they will make collectively.

That's pure wishful thinking.

What actually happens is that people believe they are making a difference, even when they actually aren't, but since they feel personally good about having put in an effort, they stop worrying about the actual problem, and stop even thinking (let alone acting) towards solutions that might actually work.

Why do you think the "carbon footprint" idea was actively pushed by BP and other super-polluters? Out of the goodness of their great? Or because it drew attention away from other, less corporate-friendly CO2 reduction measures?

> Your vote only matters as much as the likelihood that at least one result is decided by exactly one vote

This is entirely wrong. The value of your vote is the relative ratio of the fraction of alternate universes in which you vote in the election and your side wins, over the fraction of alternate universes in which you don't vote in the election and your side wins.

The value of your vote, as a result, is emphatically and enormously greater than the likelihood of the election being decided by a single vote. That's because there is an enormous amount of correlation between you not voting and people in the same voting demographic as you not voting. The question of whether you will vote should be seen as largely a consequence of the turnout characteristics of your voting block, not a free choice of the "uncaused cause" variety.

In fact, the real danger of the your argument is that by taking it seriously, you greatly reduce your voting power by making your demographic that of the tiny group of people who decide whether to vote based on meta-arguments about the value of their single vote. And this particular demographic basically never swings elections, so by putting yourself in that demographic, you effectively make the value of your vote zero.

You're basically describing superrationality, which is a model I don't buy.

Defecting still wins the one-shot PD, which in this case maps to "not wasting dozens of hours researching political candidates" and everyone who votes like you is a prisoner.

If you want to be safe against network effects, just lie and tell everyone that you voted when asked.

There's 8 billion people so my actions don't matter. I guess I'll pour all my old paint and paint thinner down the storm drains. Maybe my motor oil and used coolants as well. After all I'm just one person out of 8 billion, my actions don't matter.

I'll just litter all my stuff as well. Single use plastics? Sign me up, I'll just throw it out in the street. I'm only one of a few million in my city, my actions don't really matter.

Or maybe my actions really do matter.

Your actions do not, indeed, matter. Neither does your vote, or your boycotting of $global_evil_corp, precisely because there's millions or billions of people involved. (To be pedantic: while not literally zero, your actions matter several order of magnitude less than would be necessary to be able to perceive their effects.)

But that's a really hard pill to swallow. Your post is a beautiful example of that difficulty: you spell out examples of how your actions don't matter [as much as you would like], and then wildly swing into open denial with "Or maybe my actions do really matter".

My advice - if you focus on the consequences of your actions that you can actually perceive, instead of the ones you only wish you could, you'll be less frustrated. For example, helping your local community will typically give you far better returns than trying to improve any global issue.

So you're saying my neighbors and I should feel fine throwing old car batteries in the lake and switching back to leaded gas?

I'm saying that lakes don't get saved when people virtuously choose to individually stop throwing trash into it: they get saved when the entity in control of the lake forbids throwing trash into them, and enforces that ban.

If leaded gas was still being legally sold alongside unleaded one, people like you would be passionately arguing for decades about why it's everyone's moral duty to pay extra for unleaded gas, and you would feel so proud every time you stopped at the green pump instead of the black one.

And meanwhile we would all be breathing lead.

Japan stays free of litter because residents keep it that way (despite not having many trash cans in public), not because someone's there watching over everyone and enforcing it: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20191006-what-japan-can-t...

Individual actions may not make much of a difference on their own but in aggregate they do.

So your stance is feel free to keep doing things you know is overall bad for society until we bother passing a law and pushing enforcement to eliminate the activity?

I don't know about you, but if pumps had leaded gas and unleaded gas, I'd still be going for the unleaded every time along with trying to lobby for change. I'd absolutely be telling everyone I know not to use the leaded gas and try and change everyone around me to get rid of it. I would not just shrug and say "lots of other people are using leaded gas, I might as well as well, my use doesn't matter!" Meanwhile I guess your stance is to just use the leaded gas despite knowing how bad it is and telling everyone else to keep using it anyways until they finally tear the pumps out of the ground.

It's people thinking "my use doesn't really matter!" that is massive problem. Imagine how much easier things would be if people just did the right thing instead of assuming their actions don't matter.

Each rain drop isn't much water, they don't really matter. Yet floods destroy cities. Where does the flood come from?

This is lazy defeatism and an immediate disqualifier I use in the selection of both friends and employees.

How much climate change do you think has been allayed by sorting garbage into 3 kinds of trash cans and drinking from paper straws?

I agree, all branches of science should invent ways to recycle almost anything. We know we have a waste problem, yet society doesn't demand enough to have ways created to deal with recycling. Forget Mars and looking at the Titanic till we find ways to deal with real world problems.

Burying our heads in the sand will hurt future generations!

The evidence indicates that recycling is burying our heads in the sand.

It is reduce>>>>reuse>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>recycle.

As far as I can tell, very little recycling actually ever happened or does happen. It was always just poorer countries willing to look the other way and trash it and claim it was recycled.

I'm guessing you're assuming I meant throw everything into the landfill? That's the problem with assuming, it's almost always dead wrong. And besides, I didn't say that. Perhaps you though I said "throw away"?

I meant we have to quit adding to landfills and reuse materials from discarded objects, or in other words "recycle".

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