Everything has an opportunity cost. I’d claim that when impact is very small, it is almost always the case that the opportunity cost is not worthwhile. In general, one can have far more impact by focusing on one or two high-impact actions rather than spending the same aggregate time/effort on lots of little things.
Much more detail is in The Epsilon Fallacy; also see the comments on that post for some significant counterarguments.
(I’m definitely not claiming that the psychological mechanism by which people ignore small-impact actions is to think through all of this rationally. But I do think that people have basically-correct instincts in this regard, at least when political signalling is not involved.)
Everything has an opportunity cost. I’d claim that when impact is very small, it is almost always the case that the opportunity cost is not worthwhile. In general, one can have far more impact by focusing on one or two high-impact actions rather than spending the same aggregate time/effort on lots of little things.
Much more detail is in The Epsilon Fallacy; also see the comments on that post for some significant counterarguments.
(I’m definitely not claiming that the psychological mechanism by which people ignore small-impact actions is to think through all of this rationally. But I do think that people have basically-correct instincts in this regard, at least when political signalling is not involved.)