Good morning, John.

There's a little section of sidewalk that I walk down pretty frequently, and I think that what happened is there's a convenience store nearby. People pick up like a bag of chips or a drink and then when they're walking home, sometimes, they drop the thing on the ground after they're done with it.

I do not like this. It makes me upset, it makes me feel like I'm surrounded by people who do not respect the space that we share. And that is irrational. It takes one person walking back and forth the store every day, and dropping a piece of trash on the ground for there to be 30 pieces of trash after a month. That's a lot of trash. It changes the way that it looks. But it also might be one person of the hundreds of people who go to that convenience store every day.

So like, almost no one litters, but the street is covered with trash, and here's the way of thinking about this that really changed my mind: It only takes one person every day picking up 2 pieces of trash for there to be no trash after 2 weeks. One of the best tools that I have ever been taught for how to understand our world is that: We often, like our minds imagine the world as like set quantities, but actually set quantities are made up of input and outputs.

A street with no litter is not a street that never gets littered on. It's a street where the rate of people dropping trash is lower than the rate of people picking up trash. It's a flow, in and out. Litter goes down, litter goes up, and the person who dropped the trash is only half of the reason that the trash is there. The other half of the reason is that I didn't pick it up. I'm not like equally morally responsible for the trash on the ground, but I don't really care about morality here. I care about the trash that's on the ground.

Removing responsibility and ethics from the conversation, the trash wouldn't be there if someone had picked it up, right? And so I do pick it up. I pick it up like every time, and Katherine's like, "Oh my God. Where are you going now?" "Just across the street to get that half-empty malt liquor bottle. I'm not doing this because I think that leaving litter on the ground is like, equally morally problematic to dropping the litter in the first place. But I think that we can all sort of vaguely agree that like dropping some trash on the ground is an amount, some amount, of disrespectful to the space, and if that is the case, picking it back and not having it be there anymore, it's like an equal and opposite of respectful.

Now, litter on the street, in my neighborhood, is not something that I'm actually that concerned about. Like not one of the world's biggest problems. And pretty much every problem that isn't a bag of Doritos in your neighbor's hedge is more difficult to solve than like bending over and bending back up, but I find this a useful model when thinking about problems generally, cause it tells me three things.

First, one person can drop a lot of trash, just because there's a lot of trash doesn't mean that all people are dropping trash.

Second, bad things are not static. They are a result of inflows and outflows, and we cannot stop all bad things from happening. But we can focus on decreasing the rate of problem formation and on increasing the rate of problem-solving.

And finally, it is almost always easier to get mad about something than to do something about it, even if the doing of the something is very small, and that is the instinct in me that I need to fight against. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.

I just finished editing the video and discovered that there is a full minute of time that I have, which never happens to me. But since I have extra time, I'd like to encourage you to go to youtube.com/scishowtangents to watch the video version of SciShow Tangents. If you wanna subscribe there, that would be wonderful.

Tangents is like a comedy game show science podcast that I do with a couple of other people, Ceri Riley and Sam Schultz, where we try to like surprise each other with science facts. It's a very good time. You can listen to it as a podcast wherever you get podcasts, but also now as of this week, we're starting to put it on Youtube. Since I have extra time, I figured I'd let you know about something I'm excited about.

John, again, I will see you on Tuesday.