First I’d note that for many people, “care about their problems” might mean something more like “I’d prefer a world where their problems went away”, which is different from “I’d personally put effort into fixing their problems.
I’m dissatisfied with that and probably so are you because it’s kinda sus – if you’re not willing to help at all, it’s a pretty shallow kind of caring that you might not care about.
My response to that is “Something something Loving Hitler.” I can care about someone’s problems (in the “would actually help” sense), but have that be pretty low on my priority queue of things to do, including “stop the person from hurting other people” or, if their problems are caused by decisions they made, still prefer them to have to deal with the consequences of their actions so they don’t do it again.
FTR I think it is quite easy for problems to get low enough on the priority queue that I choose to literally never think about them or try to solve them.
Suppose everyone has maybe 100 problems a day that they deal with (from where to get lunch to long-term relationship conflicts), and can ruminate on and prioritize between maybe 10 problems each hour (to eventually work on 1-3 per hour).
There are ~1010 people alive, each with 102 problems per day, and you are awake for about 16 hours a day, so you can prioritize between about 160 problems in a given day, or 160/1012=0.0000000000016% of total daily problems. So you can’t even thinkabout most problems.
I think it may makes sense to take “I don’t care about X” to mean “X isn’t rising to the level of problem that I’m going to think about prioritizing between”, and for this to be separate from “do I have literally any preferences about X in my preference ordering over world states”.
Sure seems reasonable, but I think that’s not what I expect most people to mean. I expect you’ll run into a bunch of miscommunication if you’re drawing the line there. I definitely think of myself as caring about the problems of random human #4,563,215, even though I will never take any specific actions about it (and, caring a bit more about them if they’re specifically brought to my attention)
First I’d note that for many people, “care about their problems” might mean something more like “I’d prefer a world where their problems went away”, which is different from “I’d personally put effort into fixing their problems.
I’m dissatisfied with that and probably so are you because it’s kinda sus – if you’re not willing to help at all, it’s a pretty shallow kind of caring that you might not care about.
My response to that is “Something something Loving Hitler.” I can care about someone’s problems (in the
“would actually help” sense), but have that be pretty low on my priority queue of things to do, including “stop the person from hurting other people” or, if their problems are caused by decisions they made, still prefer them to have to deal with the consequences of their actions so they don’t do it again.
FTR I think it is quite easy for problems to get low enough on the priority queue that I choose to literally never think about them or try to solve them.
Suppose everyone has maybe 100 problems a day that they deal with (from where to get lunch to long-term relationship conflicts), and can ruminate on and prioritize between maybe 10 problems each hour (to eventually work on 1-3 per hour).
There are ~1010 people alive, each with 102 problems per day, and you are awake for about 16 hours a day, so you can prioritize between about 160 problems in a given day, or 160/1012=0.0000000000016% of total daily problems. So you can’t even think about most problems.
I think it may makes sense to take “I don’t care about X” to mean “X isn’t rising to the level of problem that I’m going to think about prioritizing between”, and for this to be separate from “do I have literally any preferences about X in my preference ordering over world states”.
Sure seems reasonable, but I think that’s not what I expect most people to mean. I expect you’ll run into a bunch of miscommunication if you’re drawing the line there. I definitely think of myself as caring about the problems of random human #4,563,215, even though I will never take any specific actions about it (and, caring a bit more about them if they’re specifically brought to my attention)
Yeah that seems right, there’s a distinction between problems I think about and problems I care about.