The Things You Care About Mostly Don't Matter

What matters most and why no one cares

I’ve recently been following a time-honored internet tradition by joining the feminist wars: arguing with feminists about the existence of patriarchy and whether women are systematically mistreated. Arguing about stuff is entertaining, and I get annoyed by things I perceive as widespread systematic errors. But the overreaches of feminism in the west, while often irritating, don’t matter very much. Most of the things that people spend a lot of time getting outraged about don’t matter very much (note: anything that affects anyone matters a lot to them, but in the grand scheme of things, these are much less important than many much larger issues). These include:

• Trans women in sports (there are around 100 trans women in sports).

• School shootings (they kill about ten people a year).

• Foreign born terror attacks (they’ve killed 44 people since 9/11).

• What is euphemistically called gender affirming care for minors (puberty blockers are given to around 20,000 people, and are mostly reversible. Surgeries affect numbers of people in the low double and triple digits).

• Police shooting unarmed black people (this happens to about 30 people a year).

• Woke people saying incoherent things about gender.

• Neopronouns.

• “Book bans,” in schools (these so-called bans make it so that one who wishes to purchase a few select books have to take the treacherous journey out of school libraries and into regular public libraries. What an injustice).

• Morons throwing soup on paintings and yelling at Matt Yglesias over the environment.

• Particularly galling public cancellations (these are rare—ubiquitous censoriousness is a much bigger problem).

• Vaccine injuries (they are very rare, and the benefits of vaccines are enormous).

In each of these cases, I suspect that the negative reaction to them causes far more harm than the things themselves. Trans people in sports seems to have affected election outcomes, meaning that potentially millions of times more people were indirectly affected by them than are directly affected.

There are other issues that matter a decent amount but that people treat as if they’re the most important thing in the world. For instance, lots of people seem to think that whether to be a Democrat is majorly affected by the Democrats’ positions on how trans people are treated. Very few people are transgender, and even if you’re opposed to Democratic policies regarding them, they probably don’t make a huge difference. Having your party affiliation be determined by one of the parties attitude towards, say, bathroom bills is a form of psychosis so profound it could only be generated by the culture war.

Wokeness is also in this category. Wokeness is a decently bad thing, responsible for widespread censoriousness, misery, self-loathing, and exacerbation of racial tension. It’s caused a sizeable portion of highly-educated elites to go around saying ridiculous things that make them miserable and paint western countries as satanic colonial entities dedicated solely to racism and oppression. But it’s nowhere near the most important political issue. If your political views are determined by wokeness, something has gone badly wrong.

Israel-Palestine is also in this category. Large numbers of people refused to vote for the Democrats over the issue of Palestine. Now, aside from the manifest fact that Trump is significantly more pro-Israel than Biden or Harris, this drastically overrates the importance of the issue. U.S. policy doesn’t majorly affect what Israel does—at most, U.S. policy is responsible for a few thousand extra deaths, perhaps 10,000 at the most.

But the U.S. routinely kills many more people than that. For instance, the war in Yemen, funded almost entirely by U.S. arms, systematically murdered about half a million people, all the while leaving tens of millions of people on the brink of starvation for years. The war on terror displaced almost 20 million people and brought about the deaths of over 4 million people. About 37% of the weapons used in wars around the world are supplied by the U.S. The monomaniacal focus on Israel is thus irrational—having a foreign policy staffed by neocons threatens to cost hundreds of thousands of lives, not just the tens of thousands that have died in Gaza.

Those who are pro-Israel have even less of a basis for making this decisive in determining their vote. What shift in U.S. policy is likely to seriously threaten Israel? What threat does Israel face that any U.S. administration might cause that’s remotely comparable to the hundreds of thousands of people dying of disease, whose lives might be saved by U.S. aid?

These things are all overestimated because they are emotionally salient. Israel is the issue of the day, and the scenes coming out of both Gaza and October 7th are quite upsetting. But unlike with many other issues involving bad things happening, because it’s a salient political issue, you can fight with people about it. People become more invested in a topic when others disagree about it—when the enemy has a face, people react more dramatically.

A final issue that matters a lot but is majorly overestimated is climate change. Climate change likely will kill a few hundreds of thousands of people a year, making it a problem on the level of malaria. However, no reasonable action can prevent most of the warming, so at the margins, action on climate change is unlikely to have a huge effect. Despite this, about half of Americans persist in irrationally believing that climate change will kill every human on earth, and they spend a good amount of time being terrified about it.

So which issues do matter?

Here’s a little secret the media WON’T tell you: other countries have a lot of people. This means that the fact that we routinely kill hundreds of thousands or millions of them and effectively eviscerate entire countries is extremely serious.

What we do matters not just in those we harm, but those we help, and those we fail to help through international aid programs. Efforts to eradicate smallpox and combat AIDS (an international aid program in two senses) both were wildly effective and together saved hundreds of millions of people. Around 13,000 children under five die every day. Doing something about that is much more important than almost every other issue.

To use an analogy I heard somewhere, this is a Boeing 777 worth of deaths of children under five more than once an hour. Imagine if every hour, a plane was filled with 400 five years old, and then it crashed in the middle of the ocean, killing them all. This is how serious the problem of children dying is—and much of it is preventable.

Unfortunately, the American populace is generally opposed to expanding efforts to prevent children from dying overseas. This opposition is fueled by innumeracy—they believe foreign aid takes up about 31% of the federal budget, when in reality it takes up less than 1%. But when has being off by orders of magnitude ever stopped nativists? It’s a hideous blot on our morality as a nation that we fail to avert the millions of easily preventable deaths.

Fortunately, this is something that you can do something about. For just a few thousand dollars, you can prevent a young child from slowly dying in agony and terror. This is much more important than politics, much more important than saying please and thank you, more important than almost anything else you might do.

After the election, apparently large numbers of people were disowning family members for supporting Trump. For example, Jessica Valenti says:

Cutting Trump supporters out of your life is not petty or vengeful- it’s actually a vital social tool. Shaming and shunning have long been ways that a civilization makes clear what we consider acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

Does Valenti cut people out of her life for not giving to the against malaria foundation? Does she give to the against malaria foundation? Of course not. Politics makes people uniquely malevolent and vindictive—while voting for who Valenti perceives to be the wrong candidate is an offense so severe that Valenti will cut you out of her life for doing it, inaction in the face of children dying is something that Valenti not only tolerates from her friends, but almost certainly actively carries out. People make a much bigger deal out of political affiliation than other far more important issues.

What other issues might be extremely morally important? Well, if you’re pro-life, abortion probably ranks way up there, as it involves the systematic murder of tens of millions of babies. I, however, am not pro-life.

One of the biggest issues that is mostly ignored despite its enormity is factory farming. You’ve heard me go on about it before—how it causes, every few years, more suffering than has ever existed in human history, and how by extremely conservative assumptions it’s the worst thing ever. We sentence tens of billions of beings to a ghoulish torture dungeon where they live in filth and agony all the time, constantly mutilated, and then slaughtered.

Many of the self-righteous moralists—many of them woke—who crow on endlessly about the alleged ubiquitous wrongdoing involved in seemingly innocuous sentences that people regularly utter are not concerned about this. While they go on and on about speech and microaggressions, they pay for innocent animals to be sent to the torture dungeon. As

Michael Huemer

says “It’s better to commit a thousand microaggressions than to buy one McDonald’s hamburger!”

So long as one thinks that extreme quantities of pain and suffering are bad, even problems as inconspicuous as shrimp farming—where hundreds of billions of shrimp live in filthy, disease-ridden waters, without adequate oxygen (meaning it feels like they’re suffocating all the time), where their eyes are stabbed out so as to boost fertility, before they’re slowly frozen and suffocated to death—are very serious. The fish farming industry alone is, by quite conservative estimates, significantly worse than all problems that collectively affect humans.

You might ask: what arguments do people give against caring about the problems that affect populations ten or hundreds of times the population of humans, that produce more suffering every few years than has existed in all of human history. Well, primarily people reject these conclusions merely by sneering. One almost never gets anything bordering on a cogent argument against such projects.

Even more important than this is wild animal suffering. As the Wild Animal Initiative notes:

For every human, there are between:

• 10-50 wild birds

• 10-100 wild mammals

• 10-10,000 reptiles & amphibians

• 1,000 - 100,000 fish

• 10,000 - 10⁶ earthworms

• 600,000 - 7*10⁸ insects

I suspect that most animals in nature live bad lives. Most animals are R-strategists, meaning they give birth to enormous numbers of offspring, very few of whom live very long. Thus, the life of nearly every creature that has ever lived is nasty, brutish, and short. Animals face numerous threats—predation, starvation, disease, and much more. And while it’s often claimed that there’s nothing we can do about wild animal suffering, this is simply not true. As Dustin Crummett notes:

The parasitic larvae of the New World screwworm consume the flesh of their living hosts, causing pain which is “utterly excruciating, so much so that infested people often require morphine before doctors can even examine the wound.” At any given time, countless animals suffer this excruciating pain. But not in North America – not anymore. Human beings have eliminated the New World screwworm from North America. This was done to protect livestock herds, but innumerable wild animals also benefit. In fact, eliminating the screwworm from North America has had “no obvious ecological effects.”

Given the incomprehensible numbers of wild animals suffering at any given moment, how we act to address this endless reservoir of suffering may determine the aggregate impact we have as a species.

The most important issue, however, relates to how we guide the long-term future. The future could last many trillions of years if it goes well. With the best sort of technology, these years could go incomprehensibly well—better than we could ever imagine.

Unfortunately, the world faces many grave threats. Artificial intelligence, nuclear war, and biorisk all potentially threaten the future of humanity, and are rated as serious risks by many who study them. Despite this, people generally ignore the way different political decisions affect the far future. Few people are single issue voters on preventing the extinction of humanity. It says something tragic about the prevailing attitudes that whether transgender people can compete in sports is more politically salient than whether cities get vaporized in nuclear war, or whether the impending AI that is being rapidly developed, which may be far more intelligent than us, has optimal values.

The things that people care about are those that are viscerally outrageous. But most of the things that are most important are not viscerally outrageous. When an alien-looking animal slowly starves to death in nature, when animals are boiled alive in factory farms that we will never see, this does not pull on our heartstrings in the right way. We tune out the problems of people in other countries, even as an air-plane worth of children die every hour.

Orwell once remarked “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.” This is exactly backward: it’s a constant battle to focus on what really matters, rather than whatever happens to be in front of you. A problem that affects 10,000 times as many people as another doesn’t emotionally register to us as 10,000 more important, even though it is. While something like the PEPFAR program, which saved about 25 million people, just reads to us like a statistic, for 25 million families, it’s why they didn’t lose a family member. Scott Alexander articulates the sentiment well in one of his articles which remains among my favorites:

I’m not much of an effective altruist – at least, I’ve managed to evade the 80,000 Hours coaches long enough to stay in medicine. But every so often, I can see the world as they have to. Where the very existence of suffering, any suffering at all, is an immense cosmic wrongness, an intolerable gash in the world, distressing and enraging. Where a single human lifetime seems frighteningly inadequate compared to the magnitude of the problem. Where all the normal interpersonal squabbles look trivial in the face of a colossal war against suffering itself, one that requires a soldier’s discipline and a general’s eye for strategy.

All of these Effecting Effective Effectiveness people don’t obsess over efficiency out of bloodlessness. They obsess because the struggle is so desperate, and the resources so few. Their efficiency is military efficiency. Their cooperation is military discipline. Their unity is the unity of people facing a common enemy. And they are winning. Very slowly, WWI trench-warfare-style. But they really are.

When arguing on your blog, you can talk about whatever you want—the more viscerally outrageous the better. But when making important decisions, focus on what genuinely matters, not whatever happens to be the visceral outrage of the day. When all your good and bad deeds are tallied up, what will matter most is what you did about the plane full of children dying every hour, rather than how you responded to the presence of small numbers of transgender people in sports.