why can’t I do both the individual action and the institutional part?
Both avoiding delivery and calling stores to encourage prioritization are ways of turning time into a better world. Yes, you can do your own shopping and call your own grocery store, but you have further options. Do you call other stores you go to less frequently and make similar encouragements? Do you call stores in other areas? Do you sign up as an Instacart shopper so there will be more delivery spots available? You write that you can act on both fronts, but if you start thinking of how you might do good with your time you’ll quickly have so many potential things you can do that you have to prioritize. I’m arguing that you should prioritize based on how much good the action does relative to how much of a sacrifice it is to yourself.
The link at the end ( https://www.jefftk.com/p/effective-altruism-and-everyday-decisions ) gives more details, but overall I see these as very similar to encouragements to use cold water for showering instead of warm. Yes, there’s some benefit to both, but when you compare the benefit to others (the delivery slot has a chance of going to someone else who needs it more than you do, a cold shower means less CO2 emitted) with the cost to yourself (you would prefer grocery delivery and warm showers), most people will have other altruistic options that do more good for less sacrifice.
I think in many cases it makes sense to use the prioritization you describe, but I have two concerns about it:
1) I think it’s possible that with collective action problems, it’s really easy to miscalculate the potential effects of your choice (and talking about your choice) has on the behavior of others, and therefore harder to estimate the true good the individual action produces (and the harm that explicitly discouraging mildly good but ineffective actions might cause).
2) I think it’s likely that “how much of a sacrifice” something is varies a lot, and could depend how many other people are doing the thing and how your community views the thing. So it might be worthwhile to have a community that encourages doing inconvenient things, because that makes it easier to do good things that are inconvenient (ultimately making them less inconvenient).
Finally, I’m also not sure I agree that all things can be directly converted into “time spent” and then directly compared. Yes, if I have a specific amount of time I spend on social media, where I can either advocate for policy change or individual action, I should use that time for policy change. But some kinds of time use are inelastic or not-exchangable at a certain point, and one-off uses of mental time for deciding how to spend that inelastic time in a positive way doesn’t seem wasteful to me. So I think it’s better to be more nuanced than just saying “everything takes time and so everything is a trade-off” and instead evaluate which things genuinely trade off time with each other.
Both avoiding delivery and calling stores to encourage prioritization are ways of turning time into a better world. Yes, you can do your own shopping and call your own grocery store, but you have further options. Do you call other stores you go to less frequently and make similar encouragements? Do you call stores in other areas? Do you sign up as an Instacart shopper so there will be more delivery spots available? You write that you can act on both fronts, but if you start thinking of how you might do good with your time you’ll quickly have so many potential things you can do that you have to prioritize. I’m arguing that you should prioritize based on how much good the action does relative to how much of a sacrifice it is to yourself.
The link at the end ( https://www.jefftk.com/p/effective-altruism-and-everyday-decisions ) gives more details, but overall I see these as very similar to encouragements to use cold water for showering instead of warm. Yes, there’s some benefit to both, but when you compare the benefit to others (the delivery slot has a chance of going to someone else who needs it more than you do, a cold shower means less CO2 emitted) with the cost to yourself (you would prefer grocery delivery and warm showers), most people will have other altruistic options that do more good for less sacrifice.
I think in many cases it makes sense to use the prioritization you describe, but I have two concerns about it:
1) I think it’s possible that with collective action problems, it’s really easy to miscalculate the potential effects of your choice (and talking about your choice) has on the behavior of others, and therefore harder to estimate the true good the individual action produces (and the harm that explicitly discouraging mildly good but ineffective actions might cause).
2) I think it’s likely that “how much of a sacrifice” something is varies a lot, and could depend how many other people are doing the thing and how your community views the thing. So it might be worthwhile to have a community that encourages doing inconvenient things, because that makes it easier to do good things that are inconvenient (ultimately making them less inconvenient).
Finally, I’m also not sure I agree that all things can be directly converted into “time spent” and then directly compared. Yes, if I have a specific amount of time I spend on social media, where I can either advocate for policy change or individual action, I should use that time for policy change. But some kinds of time use are inelastic or not-exchangable at a certain point, and one-off uses of mental time for deciding how to spend that inelastic time in a positive way doesn’t seem wasteful to me. So I think it’s better to be more nuanced than just saying “everything takes time and so everything is a trade-off” and instead evaluate which things genuinely trade off time with each other.