The term "bikeshedding" comes up a lot on HN, when people spend a lot of time spinning wheels in endless debates about the things that are easy to debate while indefinitely deferring the tough conversations, but I think an underappreciated aspect of this meme is that the unimportant conversations quite frequently really are just that; unimportant, to everybody involved. Often (but not always) nobody actually cares. Caring is not necessarily represented by the amount of time or text spewed forth on a topic. A lot of things other than passion or importance factor into how much verbiage comes through and it is a mistake to overinterpret mere volume.
Unfortunately, the flip side of this coin is harder to deal with; sometimes truly important issues or things that people do deeply care about have disproportionately too little verbiage. Finding those can be very difficult.
> Caring is not necessarily represented by the amount of time or text spewed forth on a topic.
The meta says that it is. there are only 81600 seconds most days, and you get to choose them how you want, so choose how you spend them wisely. if that's arguing over tabs or spaces, then that's your choice.
The meta would say that if people were optimally spending their time on things that matter to them. They don't. If they did bikeshedding wouldn't exist. It obviously does.
This is basically the same claim that economics can treat humans as perfectly rational actors perfectly rationally pursuing their perfectly rational goals. It is not a good model of humanity.
It's a revealed preference and there's a ton of economic studies about that vs stated preferences. You can say you don't care about tabs vs spaces all you want, but if you spend hours online talking about it, people are going to think you care, no matter what you say. Bringing economics into this, how do you metricize caring? Can you simplify it to be the time and money you put into a thing?
"All models are wrong, but some are useful."
-G. Box
Unfortunately, the flip side of this coin is harder to deal with; sometimes truly important issues or things that people do deeply care about have disproportionately too little verbiage. Finding those can be very difficult.