I don’t think that’s how humans work. We don’t have a fixed pool of caring like in this video from my childhood , we instead have things that we care about. Some people care more, some less. There’s certainly some interaction here, if I start caring about Y a lot I am likely to care about X less, and certainly likely to devote less resources to X, but I think it’s closer to floating sum than zero sum, and you can’t interchange in this way.
Also, note that ‘don’t care about X’ is a much stronger claim than ‘care about non-X more than claimed.’ And that in realistic context they do not mean the same thing. People often try to make this transformation to make people look worse (e.g. ‘I care about the rule of law’ becomes ‘you don’t care about the victims’), and it’s very bad.
I don’t think that’s how humans work. We don’t have a fixed pool of caring like in this video from my childhood , we instead have things that we care about. Some people care more, some less. There’s certainly some interaction here, if I start caring about Y a lot I am likely to care about X less, and certainly likely to devote less resources to X, but I think it’s closer to floating sum than zero sum, and you can’t interchange in this way.
Also, note that ‘don’t care about X’ is a much stronger claim than ‘care about non-X more than claimed.’ And that in realistic context they do not mean the same thing. People often try to make this transformation to make people look worse (e.g. ‘I care about the rule of law’ becomes ‘you don’t care about the victims’), and it’s very bad.