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SaidAchmiz comments on Rationality Quotes July 2013 - Less Wrong
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Well, my real complaint is about both/all of those things. It is possible to have multiple complaints, you know; and also it is possible to improve more than one thing, ever.
But this generalizes. Someone is willing to complain about being mugged while someone else is being violently assaulted. Someone is willing to complain about being violently assaulted while someone else is imprisoned and tortured. And so on...
There's no law that says we have to find The Worst Problem, devote all our resources to fixing it, and totally ignore every other problem that humanity has while The Worst Problem persists. Such a policy would lead to a rather horrifying world.
As always, a relevant xkcd.
Something similar has been seriously argued here for donations to charity: you should donate all your money to the single charity that would do the most good (unless you're a millionaire who can donate so much money that the charity will reduce the size of the problem to below the size of another problem).
http://lesswrong.com/lw/elo/a_mathematical_explanation_of_why_charity/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/gtm/when_should_you_give_to_multiple_charities/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/aid/heuristics_and_biases_in_charity/
Some of the comments have good arguments against this, however.
Quite so, and I agree with this argument in the charity case; I just don't think it generalizes to a strategy for dealing with Problems In General.