Opportunity cost seems to be at least one of the factors it's not accounting for. If you know a strategy that produces a reasonable reward consistently, then tr

Opportunity cost seems to be at least one of the factors it's not accounting for. If you know a strategy that produces a reasonable reward consistently, then trialing a strategy that produces a higher reward less consistently is a risk, and you can't know whether it will pay off in the long term until you've already committed to forgo the consistent rewards for the period of your trial run. This study could have just as easily been about risk aversion. Then you also have the opportunity cost of what you choose to optimize. Perhaps making sub-optimal choices is fine in areas that aren't important to you for whatever reason. You have to make choices all day, you don't have enough time or energy to optimize all of them. If you want to succeed in whatever your highest priority goals are, then I'd suggest that you should only bother to optimize things that are actually going to help you achieve them. Devoting significant effort to optimizing things that don't matter is usually called bike-shedding, and I think a lot of us would have experienced how that can come at the expense of things that actually matter. I'd also suggest that focusing on overly narrow set of factors can skew the results. The author talked about commute routes, and I know that my usual commute route is sub-optimal from a time perspective. I know there are routes that can give me 5-10 minutes in time. But I usually don't choose them, because I'm usually not optimizing for time on my commute. After a days work, I'll usually prefer to take the slow mindless crawl down the freeway, over the 20-left-turn route that gets me home some inconsequential amount of time faster.