Marginal Gains Are Still Gains

By Joseph @ 2025-05-19T16:07 (+7)

This is a linkpost to https://dartthrowingchimp.com/2025/05/19/marginal-gains-are-still-gains/

I've followed Jay Ulfelder's blog Dart-Throwing Chimp for several years, but this blog post about doing the right thing and trying to be more ethical seems a bit more relevant to EA folks than his average posts (which are very political science/social scientist style blog posts about political violence, protests, forecasting, and statistics). If you are interested in development more broadly, he isn't a bad person to keep an eye on. Here are the first few paragraphs of the blog post (which is about eight paragraphs in total).

Marginal Gains Are Still Gains

One of my young-adult kids texted me yesterday to ask for the name of the group that lists businesses to boycott over their support for Israel. He was getting together with some friends later, and they were planning to order food from Domino’s, and he thought he remembered that Domino’s was somehow verboten and thought maybe this was why.

Domino’s is on the BDS Movement list as an organic boycott target, and that left him in an awkward spot: push the group at the last minute to order food from somewhere else and risk inconveniencing and irritating his friends, or leave it alone and feel guilty about the meal. He’d also seen that some other businesses on their lists are ones he regularly uses (Google, Amazon), and thought maybe it would be hypocritical of him to make a big deal of this choice with his friends when he wasn’t consistently boycotting all the listed targets himself.

This is a very small moral dilemma, but it’s the kind we all face many times every day. It’s similar to one I’ve confronted regularly over the past several years as my spouse and I have moved in the direction of a vegan diet without fully committing to veganism (we still eat some eggs and cheese). Or, if I’m going to run an errand that involves some cargo and I’m choosing between taking our gas-powered car, which can carry whatever, or our electric moped, which may involve some additional hassle (I need to swap my slides for real shoes, I might need a backpack or bungee cords…).