A friend misunderstood my post on bike-shedding and bottomless pits. This is my fault, I should have realized anything so short and seemingly concise would be inadequate to communicate what I really meant. Remind me to write on epistemic distance sometime.
Allow me to present a clearer example of the difference: environmentalism.
Bike-shedding, for the environmentalist, would be the sort of things most of us were subjected to in kindergarten, about recycling small scraps of paper, turning off the faucet, and walking instead of driving short distances.
To be clear, these are generally of direct self-interest or useful for signalling that you're a good neighbor, but have little impact on the environment as a whole. Your individually not recycling will have a negligible impact on the global biosphere, even compounded over the course of your entire life.
(In fact, it might actually make things worse, considering the energy costs to melt down and reuse certain materials. Metals are generally a good bargain, plastics and glass, less so. A good heuristic to use is whether manufacturers would pay for the materials, even before the government started subsidizing recycling out the wazoo.)
The environmentalist bottomless pit looks more like this:
This was the sort of thing I had in mind when writing about "increasingly impractical demands". These sorts of requests can not be met, except through extreme privation or, more plausibly, voluntary human extinction. Neither of those are realistic nor desirable goals.
When I read such things, my take away is that the speaker has no actionable agenda short of completely solving the problem permanently. As someone who knows a thing or two about interminable projects and the depression they introduce, let me assure you that that is not the approach you want to take.
Or rather, it's the approach you don't want to take assuming that your goal is to solve the problem. As I said before, for many movements, it really isn't. And I can't help but wonder if that's true for deep ecology folks as well.
If your goal is to see legitimate improvements in the world, then avoiding these twin failure modes is very important. In many ways they are not dichotomies: many movements play one off the other. The feminist movement, for instance, will often fight for trivial changes, barely even symbolic ones, in the name of "dismantling the patriarchy". Don't even get me started on the libertarians again.
This is an area where the effective altruist movement deserves some praise for trying to find the best ways to improve a given situation and then doing it. I would like to see some expansion into long term issues, but as we know there's reason to be wary of that.
This is an area where the effective altruist movement deserves some praise for trying to find the best ways to improve a given situation and then doing it. I would like to see some expansion into long term issues, but as we know there's reason to be wary of that.
