Then lets not try anything. That's the alternative right?
If you see trying and failing is seen as a worse alternative to doing nothing and poisoning the environment we all live in then you need to take a step back, be less critical, and be okay with partial or incomplete solutions.
"Doing nothing is not an option" is a very dangerous principle. Doing nothing is always an option worth considering and something that needs to be realistically compared about the proposed alternatives. The cure can easily be worse than the disease, and we have many historical examples of well-intended changes turning out more horrible than the problems they tried to fix. Quite often it happens that you are in (at least) a local optimum, and every change will be immediately worse in the short-term; and if you don't have a good reason to presume how exactly you'll get to an actually better scenario then simply "doing something" for the sake of doing something is outright evil and destructive and having good ill-informed intent is not a sufficient justification for harming people with the attempt to fix something. As the Hippocratic oath says, "first, do no harm" - it also isn't an absolute principle, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, but at the very least you have a very strong ethical responsibility to be sure that the outcome is really worth the harm.
The current system has many drawbacks, but it can easily be much worse, and most (all?) attempts of "tear everything down and rebuild" will be much worse at least for a non-trivial time - and there needs to be a very good, reliable argument the expected long-term result is really going to work in order to justify that certain harm in the face of uncertainty that there's going to be any improvement and quite some evidence that the long-term result often is not only not better, but clearly worse. "Doing nothing is not an option" is not an ethical justification if your "doing" harms someone, and making random radical changes to status quo without properly evaluating the realistically expected consequences (without wishful thinking and unrealistically optimistic assumptions) is simply irresponsible and unethical even if the current system has severe flaws.
I understand the worry, but what's the alternative? Doing nothing? Every day, we are confronted with the facts, and we have to make a decision. Doing nothing could be one of them. I am highly convinced doing something is better than nothing, and the somethings I've found (not all the things, but some things) are Effective altruism.
If you have better proposals, name them, let us discuss and maybe we can do even better!
(the movement is really open about this -- which is one of the reasons some people have seemingly weird beliefs -- simply because some people said 'You should be instead doing X!!', where X was saving humanity from existential risks; maybe you should be shouting at us 'You should be instead doing Y!!', where Y is your idea, and if you're right we sincerely, truly hope you can change our minds)
> Any time you see someone say the phrase "doing nothing is not an option", you know that they are making excuses for doing something that has proven, time and again, to be just as effective as doing nothing at all.
No, you're going to far. "Doing nothing is not an option", means "don't wait for a perfect solution." "Doing nothing at all" is rarely "just as effective" as an imperfect solution, at least when it comes to the problem under discussion.
It's also worth noting there are frequently people who benefit from certain problems or who are otherwise uninterested in solving them for selfish reasons. Those people really like to push the "do nothing" option.
If you see trying and failing is seen as a worse alternative to doing nothing and poisoning the environment we all live in then you need to take a step back, be less critical, and be okay with partial or incomplete solutions.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
reply