Caring less

If you choose to "care more" about something, and as a result other things get less of your energy, you are socially less liable for the outcome than if you intentionally choose to "care less" about a thing directly. For instance, "I've been really busy" is a common and somewhat socially acceptable excuse for not spending time with someone; "I chose to care less about you" is not. So even if your one and only goal was to spend less time on X, it may be more socially acceptable to do that by adding Y as cover.

Social excusability is often reused as internal excusability.

From my perspective, the simplest and best explanation by far is the Hansonian one: it's just bad signaling to talk about caring less about things as opposed to more. You can't form a social group / movement / alliance around it, it makes you look heartless, etc.

(It's perfectly fine to pair caring less about a thing with caring more about another thing, e.g. the parts of the "manosphere" that combine caring more about having sex with women and caring less about feminism.)

The good news for rationalists is that, as a corollary, there's money on the ground to be picked up deliberately caring less about things, especially things it would be bad signaling to publicly advocate for caring less about. Some plausible candidates off the top of my head:

1. Recycling
2. The news (except these days there's mission-critical stuff like possible increased threat of nuclear war)
3. Formal education, maybe
4. Offending people
5. Infrequent tragic events that kill small numbers of people
6. Answering emails

A lot of the comments so far have said "I agree that telling people to care less is good, but we can't do it for X,Y,Z reasons". Why the hell can't we? If anyone can overcome X,Y,Z reasons for the purpose of doing something good, it should be us.

How about starting a thread with good examples of calls to care less? You don't have to 100% agree or endorse them, just to demonstrate that it can and is being done.

I'll start with some of mine:

1. We should care less about global warming.

2. We should care less about empathizing.

3. We should care less about elections.

Hi, I'm pleased to see that this has been nominated and has made a lasting impact.

Do I have any updates? I think it aged well. I'm not making any particular specific claims here, but I still endorse this and think it's an important concept.

I've done very little further thinking on this. I was quietly hoping that others might pick up the mantle and write more on strategies for caring less, as well as cases where this should be argued. I haven't seen this, but I'd love to see more of it.

I've referred to it myself when talking about values that I think people are over-invested in (see https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2018/05/27/biodiversity-for-heretics/), but not extensively.

Finally, while I'm generally pleased with this post's reception, I think nobody appreciated my "why couldn't we care less" joke enough.

An additional possible reason: to be receptive to "caring less" about a cause, one generally has to engage with the fact that, given scarcity, we have to make trade-offs between the many opportunities to do good in the world. Many would agree this is true if asked, but don't fully internalize this, as discussed in Nate Soares' See the Dark World.

"Caring less" was in the air. People were noticing the phenomenon. People were trying to explain it. In a comment [LW(p) · GW(p)], I realized that I was in effect telling people to care less about things without realizing what I was doing. All we needed was a concise post to crystallize the concept, and eukaryote obliged.

The post, especially the beginning, gets straight to the point. It asks the question of why we don't hear more persuasion in the form of "care less", offers a realistic example and a memorable graphic, and calls to action. This is the part that was most useful to me - it gave me a clear handle on something that I've been thinking about for a while. I'm a big fan of telling people to care less, and once I realized that this is what I was doing I learned to expect more psychological resistance from people. I'm less direct now when encouraging people to care less, and often phrase it in terms of trade-offs by telling people that caring less about something (usually, national politics and culture wars) will free up energy to care more about things they already endorse as more important (usually, communities and relationships).

The post talks about the guilt and anxiety induced by ubiquitous "care more" messaging, and I think it's taking this too much for granted. An alternative explanation is that people who are not scrupulous utilitarian Effective Altruists are quite good at not feeling guilt and anxiety, which leaves room for "care more" messaging to proliferate. I wish the post made more distinction between the narrow world of EA and the broader cultural landscape, I fear that it may be typical-minding somewhat.

Finally, eukaryote throws out some hypotheses that explain the asymmetry. This part seems somewhat rushed and not fully thought out. As a quick brainstorming exercise it could be better as just a series of bullet points, as the 1-2 paragraph explanations don't really add much. As some commenters pointed out and as I wrote in an essay [LW · GW] inspired by this post, eukaryote doesn't quite suggest the "Hansonian" explanation that seems obviously central to me. Namely: "care more about X" is a claim for status on behalf of the speaker, who is usually someone who has strong opinions and status tied up with X. This is more natural and more tolerable to people than "care less about Y", which reads as an attack on someone else's status and identity - often the listener themselves since they presumably care about Y.

Instead of theorizing about the cause of the phenomenon, I think that the most useful follow ups to this post would be figuring out ways to better communicate "care less" messages and observing what actually happens if such messages are received. Even if one does not buy the premise that "care less" messaging is relaxing and therapeutic, it is important to have that in one's repertoire. And the first step towards that is having the concept clearly explained in a public way that one can point to, and that is the value of this post.

If you think about policy recommendations as attempts to move resources, there's a straightforward reason why actors with sufficiently unaligned preferences might prefer to send "care more" messages over "care less" ones.

Let's say you have coalition A, which contains potential "care more" target B, and does not contain potential "care less" target C. Then you have everything in neither C nor A, which we can call D. The resources freed up by a "care less" message about C are divided in some proportion between A and D, while a "care more"message about B benefits A exclusively. This dilution effect means that even if agents are constrained to sending true messages, if they can prioritize selfishly, they're often going to favor "care more" over "care less" at similar levels of effectiveness.

If nearly all careabouting territory is defended, the dynamics are somewhat different, since "care more" mostly stops working. If a dominant coalition owns most of the resources, then the main source of variation is the occasional competing claim, and there's a strong incentive for the large player to shut down smaller ones as they pop up. The very large coalition stands to reap the majority of the gains from "care less" attacks against outsiders. Cf. monotheism. On the other hand, small players have a comparatively strong shared incentive to attack the largest one, since even a fairly small shrinkage of its resource claims in percentage terms may free up what is to them quite a lot, for ensuing "care more" claims.

Somehow, it seems that messages like "prioritise less" resonate more than "care less". Maybe because it sounds more tactical, and less like a change in who you are?

Intuitively seeing things as being like the pie graph is why the birds example for scope insensitivity doesn't feel like a case where I should try to do anything differently. Maybe I only have an ~$80 budget to care about birds because I can't smash a bigger slice into my pie of caring.

How to do it with your brain:

A specific mental movement that can be trained as a habit that I learned in the context of limiting in-flight work: Label non-sanctioned work "bullshit". Internally declare it emphatically and emotively: "That's bullshit!!" This simple, charged internal speech is accessible to both system 2 and system 1 and can flow between them in either direction.

This is an extremely local notion of "bullshit"! It is a judgement of the triple: (you, <work item>, this moment). It is not an overall judgement of the work / cause / etc.. When slicing causes, it is the dedication of others to these obviously important causes that allows them to be bullshit to you in this this moment (emote: gratitude!). When slicing your own time, what is bullshit to you in this moment while you finish composing this email or whatever may become your top priority 30 seconds later after the current task is completed.

Attempting to change the social messaging is unrealistic because of the reasons given by other commentators, but I think it is valuable for you to have noticed this pattern. I am also worried about how it pushes us towards guilt as there are always more things to care about than we can handle. I think the solution is to avoid asking yourself how much you should care about a particular thing in isolation. If you are going to decide that you should care more about a particular thing, then you should ask yourself what thing you think you should do less of instead. And then you should ask yourself if that is realistic (zero time procrastinating is not). Perhaps you decide that you are actually allocating your time well and you shouldn't feel bad or perhaps you realise you ought to make a change. But either way, you avoid feeling bad uselessly.

I think the primary value of this post is in prompting Benquo's response. That's not nothing, but I don't think it's top-shelf, because it doesn't really explore the game theory of "care more" vs. "care less" attempts between two agents whose root values don't necessarily align.

You mentioned self help. I think care less arguments exist, but because "caring less" sounds kind of like "be a shittier person" things get phrased as take care of yourself or "what do we prioritize here". In favor of caring less about some things so we can do more of the things we want to care more about.

"Caring less" singles out one thing in such a way as to indicate that you might actually care zero about it or care in the opposite direction from your audience.

Analogously, I embarrassed myself when watching the last World Cup with coworkers; when asked who I was cheering for (since the USA didn't qualify), I responded "I just hope it's not Russia". This did not sit well at all with the Russian coworker who overheard. They wouldn't have been upset if I'd instead expressed a positive interest in whoever was playing Russia at the time.

Some things are central examples of caring (caring about the homeless), and other things are noncentral examples of caring (caring about sleeping late, caring about leisure activities). Whether a speaker describes something as "you should care more about X" or "you should care less about Y" does communicate information--it depends partly on how central an example of caring he considers X and Y to be.

(It also depends on how broad X and Y are. If you want to tell someone "you should care less about the entire range of activities that includes everything except climate change", you would probably describe it as "you should care more about climate change". So it doesn't follow that any "care more" can be reasonably phrased as a "care less".)

This is probably a near/far thing. "caring" is far-mode, and mostly about intent and image without tradeoffs. I don't think you'll find universal agreement that "one can only care a fixed total amount about things".

If you say "spend more resources on X", whether that's money, time, or or whatnot, I guarantee you'll have the discussion of "what do I not do instead".

In other words, you should care less about caring, and put more energy into doing.

Your picture at the top is great and it nicely hammered in what I felt was the main point (Real caring works like the pie, even if it "should" work like the ideal scenario).

Seconding Habryka.

I think this post summarizes a really key phenomenon when thinking about how collective reasoning works, and the discussion around it provides some good explanations. 

I've explained this observation many times before this post even came out, but with this post I finally had a pretty concrete and concise reference, and have used it a few times for that purpose.