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“I prefer to give to local organizations.” I’ve heard this a lot.
Imagine a high school student who sits down to study for exams. Her chemistry
book is lying closest to her on the desk, so she decides to study chemistry.
Her father points out that since she has an A in chemistry and a D in geometry,
studying geometry might help her grades more. “But that book is all the way
over there in my backpack,” the student points out; “I prefer to study
locally.”
This argument seems common to many debates:
‘Proposal P arrogantly assumes that it is possible to measure X, when really
X is hard to measure and perhaps even changes depending on other factors.
Therefore we shouldn’t do P’.
This could make sense if X wasn’t especially integral to the goal. For
instance if the proposal were to measure short distances by triangulation
with nearby objects, a reasonable criticism would be that the angles are hard
to measure, relative to measuring the distance directly. But this argument is
commonly used in situations where optimizing X is the whole point of the
activity, or a large part of it.