I’m sorry you don’t find it valuable. It’s an argument that bugged me—I first heard it only a couple of years ago on a podcast completely unrelated to EA, accepted is as valid, but felt that something was off. I worked through my confusion and this is the result. Maybe everyone who hears it immediately thinks of all the criticism you listed, but I doubt it.
Who benefits from the last sentence? I guess people like me, or whoever hears the analogy and accepts it without first analyzing it a bit.
It’s not criticism of Singer in general either. Chris says that this analogy is only the beginning of his argument, and I totally agree (and I happen to agree with almost all of Singer’s conclusions, at least those that I’ve read afterwards).
Time-slack isn’t rewarded with status that much, I think. Whenever someone can say “yeah, whenever’s fine” in response to somebody that can only make it for exactly 4.32 minutes every second full Moon but only in January, I rarely find that this person is awarded status, even implicitly. It’s basically taken for granted. Which reinforces your point that high-slack people don’t capture the upside that much.
And which, in turn, leads me to ask: is the status payoff enough even for a rough selection? I think not. To reliably select for high-slack people (and therefore create high-slack groups), even roughly, I think you need to explicitly require some X amount of slack (easy for time, difficult for emotions).
And, of course, to make the implicit explicit—which seems to be the point of your post.