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Comment by madez | Hacker News Reader

It's not just about coordination. Clearly, coordination would make solving the accepted problem relatively easy. Yet, individual action does solve the problem to a small degree. Humans are wired to neclect small changes when they come at a personal cost to them, so they think "it won't change if I stop doing it, so I won't stop doing it". This thinking is arrogant and the cause why many changes in society don't happen, although many people recognize that there is a problem.

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The problem is that often changing your own behavior hurts you more than it works to effect change, unless lots of others also spontaneously jump onboard. Which, more or less certainly, they won't, so you're basically just self-flagellating in a closet, which might make you feel morally pure but isn't doing anything to change the world. This is a pretty well-studied part of political science (and probably is covered in other disciplines like sociology, I'd expect) so there's a ton of both theoretical and practical (case) studies on the topic.

Coordination problems (and very serious problems of information access & distribution) are why things like boycotts are in fact, however much we might wish otherwise, so laughably bad at enforcing community norms on e.g. large companies, and why the market doesn't do a great job of just "sorting out" all kinds of things most people would consider to be problems.

> Which, more or less certainly, they won't, so you're basically just self-flagellating in a closet, which might make you feel morally pure but isn't doing anything to change the world.

I think you are factually wrong and condecending in the way you express it.

One case I can bring is the vegan product market in Germany. For many years, individuals were "self-flagellating in a closet" and simply avoiding animals products and buying the alternatives that were offered. That triggered the production of more of these products, which triggered more consumption of them. Today the market is big and makes a meaningful difference. This the result of individual action without coordination by all market participants.

I don't make a claim about the relative cost of individual change. I rather call the thinking that individual cost will only be accepted if everybody changes arrogant. I've heard more than I'd like to count sentences like "If I/we change, the others still continue, so the problem won't be solved", while in fact it will be solved to the degree that I/we are causing it. Demanding that everybody changes just because you change is arrogant.

I'm not saying individual costs are negligible compared to the influence one can have with individual change. There may be good reasons to not change.

Well, I'm just coming at it from the perspective of observed efficacy in the real world. It's fine in a Kantian moral sense or whatever, if your goal is personal ethical edification. If your goal is to make things better it's a poor tool to rely on.

The problem's not so much that they can fail—any method can—as that they can fail with anything short of overwhelming and sustained support, that is, they can be wildly popular and still have no long-term effect at all. Better to look elsewhere—no amount of "if we'd all just do it, we could fix this!" will change that.

Again, as a personal choice, fine. As an alternative to more-effective means, no. It's not "arrogant", it's an outcome-focussed stance fitting with observed reality and current scholarship.

[EDIT] "They" being "movements mostly based on changes in personal behavior patterns, at some significant personal cost or risk"

I do not advocate individual change as a tool to rely on to solve problems, so this is a straw man. That would disregard other effective and efficient ways to approach problems. I also don't think it's about "personal ethical edification". That is again a rather condescending spin you are giving to it.

My point is about recognizing the individual influence one has. Often that is avoided by the statement I'm criticizing.

> My point is about recognizing the individual influence one has

How is that not essentially zero, in most political circumstances and for non-extraordinary individuals? That's my point.

[EDIT] and further:

> That is again a rather condescending spin you are giving to it.

I think I'm giving it a pretty fair shake by acknowledging there's any laudable purpose to actions of personal behavioral choice on large political problems. There is, but it has little to do with effecting change, if that's the part that's important.

We are one in many. That means we just share the influence. Many issues are not binary, and often the individual contribution to a problem can be canceled out completely by individual change. The influence may be small compared to the sum of all, but still the responsibility for the individual contribution lays completely with the individual. The comparison must be between the individual cost and the individual contribution to the problem and it's solution, not falsely to the complete problem on the scale of the society.

Even when the problem is binary, the argumentative position becomes much stronger by individual change. For example, if Europe became fully carbon neutral, it's stance would be much more powerful when it comes to these questions compared to if it continued to build new coal power plants and told other countries to stop doing that.

Very true, this is precisely the problem. Editors don't leave E's journals' boards because it might hurt their vitae. Referees don't decline to work for E's journals (for free) because it might hurt their relations with editors. And authors often don't have much choice where to send their articles and might hurt their career by picking out-of-stream venues.

> Humans are wired to neclect small changes when they come at a personal cost to them, so they think "it won't change if I stop doing it, so I won't stop doing it". This thinking is arrogant and the cause why many changes in society don't happen, although many people recognize that there is a problem.

To me it sounds like you just described a coordination problem. Can you clarify why you don't think it is?

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