imperfect effort is criticized over inaction

imperfect effort is criticized over inaction. If I told you I was opening an incredible free soup kitchen, but I would only give food to people who don't have pit bulls, would you come yell at me? What if I was opening an amazing free soup kitchen, but I only gave out food every once a week or so when I was in a particularly good mood? Would that piss you off? Imperfect effort will always be criticized over inaction. Inaction is seen as neutral. Inaction is hard to pin down. It's, like, epistemically slippery. It poses as invisible. It hides inactive people behind, being boring, common, the default. But inaction is not neutral. Like this: You notice a crisis in the world, a tragedy, a problem. And then in your mind, you draw a circle around it of people who you feel are involved. And then if you don't want to take direct action to solve this problem yourself, which most of the time, we have neither the capability, the energy, nor the know how to directly take action, instead, you're going to capital C, criticize. And who are you gonna criticize? You're gonna criticize the people in the circle you drew, right? People who seem close to the problem, the people who seem responsible for the problem. And if you get really bored, you might spend your time criticizing fellow criticisers who are standing with you at the margins, who you think are like not doing criticism as well as you're doing criticism. But any problem that you are interested in, that you sort of draw in a circle around. My point is, be careful who you deem responsible and who you find most effective to go after, because usually there are a million silent, seemingly inactive beneficiaries of the problem who escape our notice. I think it's very interesting in general to take a minute and consider for the problems that you care most about. And certainly the world is not short of brokenness. For the broken bits you spot, how do you draw that circle? Does that make sense? Who do you consider proximate to the problem to have special responsibility? Because I think oftentimes it's easy to kind of be lazy and just take whoever's talking about that problem the most, or whoever we've heard of the most recently who took action about that problem, and just draw the circle there and say, why did you only raise $1 million when you could have raised $2 million for this charity? Why do you only serve food to people who are hungry on Tuesdays and not Wednesdays and Thursdays? Instead of say drawing your circle based on who might be best equipped to solve that problem, who maybe has the most power or resources to solve that problem. I've mentioned once before the Peter Singer effective altruism thought experiment that says, if you would be willing to ruin your fancy new shoes, which cost $100, um, in order to jump in the water and save a kid that you see in front of you who's drowning, why aren't you willing to take that hundred dollars and instead of buying the new shoes, donate the hundred dollars? A lot of people are very upset by this thought experiment. And I think it's in large part because on a deeply intuitive level, physical proximity to the emergency, to the crisis, to the problem, to the person in need is destiny. If you are the person who happens upon the burning building, you have a special responsibility. If you are the one who happens upon the drowning child, forget a hundred dollar shoes, 200 dollar shoes. That kid's life is specifically on you. And so you, not anybody else, not somebody who maybe is a couple minutes away and could also save the kid, but would have to dash over even if they knew about that kid, right? It's on you. But for most of the things that we hear about and care about and cry over, there is no proximity. There is no physical proximity to dictate the shorthand. There is no obvious destiny in terms of whose problem it is. You have to develop your own moral system for deciding who you are going to hold responsible. Whose special responsibility is this? Whose problem is this? And when is it your problem and when is it your responsibility?