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Consider that, in addition to doing nothing yourself, you can also discourage others from doing anything.
Write a nit-picky critique, say something vague like "I don't you should do this" without any further explanation, defer to authority.
We need to ensure that no-one does anything if they're not at least 98% confident that they're the world's most qualified person to do the thing.
me: [reads this comment to my housemate, after showing him the post]
housemate: I don't know, that sounds like doing things to me. they are literally recommending a course of action!
me: you should go say that in the comment thread!
housemate: ....meh.
(clearly my housemate has better internalized the lessons of this post than I)
forgive the self-promotion but here's a related Facebook post I made:
The law of conservation of expected evidence, E(E(X|Y)) = E(X), essentially states that you can't "expect to change your mind", in the sense that, if you already thought that your estimate of (say) some intervention's cost-effectiveness would go up by an average of Z after reading this study, then your EV should already have been Z higher before you read it. You should be balanced (in EV terms) between the possible outcomes that would be positive surprises and negative surprises, otherwise you're just not calculating your EVs correctly.
Anyway, let's take X to be global future welfare, and Y to be the consequences of some action you take. E(E(X|Y)) = E(X) means that the average global well-being given the outcome of your action is exactly the same as the average global well-being without the outcome of your action. So why did you bother doing it?
I think you made a mistake here, let me correct:
> Doing things is not your comparative advantage. Someone else
wouldcould do it better.It doesn't matter if none of the better suited people are actually doing it, just the fact that they could do a better job is sufficient to sit back and relax. If you want to do more, you could write a forum post arguing that 'someone should do this' and let the universe take care of the rest.
That's a great point, thanks Manuel!