>I'm not sure how you argue against what seems like pretty objective data. I commend you for crystallizing the argument which I think is indeed representative

>I'm not sure how you argue against what seems like pretty objective data. I commend you for crystallizing the argument which I think is indeed representative of what the industry believes about itself and many others reject. Virtually everything in computing, or the real world, for that matter, is solving some sort of optimization problem, explicitly or implicitly. I'd paraphrase your comments as, Facebook solves an optimization problem, they make billions of dollars doing it, so it is objectively the optimum. There are two objections I think that capture most of the opposition. - Real optimizers can't promise a true optimum every time; they sometimes converge on a local optimum. This local optimum may not be within any particular distance from the global optimum either. - "Fewer things you just scroll past" is not necessarily what the *user* wants to optimize. It is not in fact what I want to optimize. I'm not sure if I made it clear, but the *existence* of things that I don't actually read is important contextual information. So is the relative order, the timing, the source... These points are really abstract and general - virtually anything can have these two issues - they're not optimizing the right thing, and they're not finding the global optimum. I think non technical people sometimes get angry because they intuitively feel that people claim objectivity without justification, but I think it's possible to provide a bloodless, abstract, logical, and specific critique more suitable for a software engineer's mentality, and that's what I tried to do above. [One other general issue I thought of - optimizers can have the wrong constraints; everything in life normally has rules and limits on how you can pursue a goal. The ends don't necessarily justify the means. So this is another thing that is not covered by simply saying the optimizer produces the optimum] [This topic makes me think of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands]