Re: Nestle in particular, I get the spirit of what you’re saying, although see my recent long comment where I try to think through the chocolate issue in more detail. As far as I can tell, the labor-exploitation problems are common to the entire industry, so switching from Nestle to another brand wouldn’t do anything to help??
That could be correct. But I think the flip side of my individual chocolate purchasing decisions aren’t very impactful is that maybe we should defer under some circumstances to the people who have thought a lot about these kinds of issues, even if we think their modeling isn’t particularly good. Weak modeling is probably better, in expectancy, than no modeling at all—and developing our own models may not be an impactful use of our time. Or stated differently, I would expect the boycott targets identified by weak modeling to be more problematic actors in expectancy than if we chose our chocolate brands by picking a brand out of a hat.[1] (This doesn’t necessarily apply to boycotts that are not premised on each additional unit of production causing marginal harms.)
That could be correct. But I think the flip side of my individual chocolate purchasing decisions aren’t very impactful is that maybe we should defer under some circumstances to the people who have thought a lot about these kinds of issues, even if we think their modeling isn’t particularly good. Weak modeling is probably better, in expectancy, than no modeling at all—and developing our own models may not be an impactful use of our time. Or stated differently, I would expect the boycott targets identified by weak modeling to be more problematic actors in expectancy than if we chose our chocolate brands by picking a brand out of a hat.[1] (This doesn’t necessarily apply to boycotts that are not premised on each additional unit of production causing marginal harms.)
Of course, we may not be picking a brand at random—we may be responding to price and quality differences.