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It's difficult or impossible to tell if you made the right choice though, so you have no way of knowing if you should regret your decision. If I visit the store
by Throwaway823 12y ago
It's difficult or impossible to tell if you made the right choice though, so you have no way of knowing if you should regret your decision. If I visit the store and there are two boxes of cereal, or two deodorants, or two digital cameras, and I buy one of them, I start to feel unsure.
It doesn't matter if the cereal I bought tastes good or bad, I'll always wonder if the other option would have been better. Until I taste the other cereal, I'm left questioning my decision, and being unhappy.
- philwelch 12y agoThe answer is to stop caring and satisfice. Optimizers are never happy.
- Throwaway823 12y agoI don't know if it's that simple, it's only human to question things in life, and it's one of the main reasons we've come so far in the first place. Being unhappy and unsatisfied is the main reason we have the technology that currently exists. If people were satisfied traveling by horse, the automobile wouldn't exist. If people were satisfied with 480p, the HD television would never have been a worthwhile venture. Being continually unsatisfied is what causes us to strive higher.
- philwelch 12y agoIf people were satisfied with horses and 480p, we'd be just as happy with those as we are with cars and 1080p. In fact, these decades and centuries of technological advancement hasn't, empirically, resulted in any enhancement in happiness anyway, because we're trapped on the hedonic treadmill: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
- baddox 12y agoI suppose I can reluctantly agree with that, although self-reported happiness surveys and all other attempts at interpersonal utility comparison are problematic. But even if I agree with that, what's the conclusion? Surely the people with horses become less happy when cars come into existence, at least until they upgrade to a car. So unless you can ban or otherwise prevent any new technology from being created, I don't see what meaningful conclusion or recommendation can be made from this claim.
- Throwaway823 12y agoYes, but we wouldn't have cars or 1080p in the first place. Why would you develop 1080p technology if you were perfectly happy with 480p? Who would support your research and business by purchasing a 1080p tv, if they were already satisfied? I never said any of this technology enhances our level of happiness. I just said as a species, being constantly unhappy could be one of our greatest strengths. Otherwise, we might be sitting in a cave, smiling at each other until an asteroid removed us from existence.
- xorcist 12y agoI think you should read philwelch's post again. You seem to see development as an intrisic good thing, whereas philwelch does not (or at least questions it). There is a world of difference between freezing in a cave and developing 1080p/2160p/4320p.
- Throwaway823 12y agoI think people living in the modern world, with all of our technology are no more happy than a caveman sitting by a fire with his family. However, to survive as a species in the long term, we need to leave this planet. To do that, we need a number of advancements in technology. So, if we can agree the survival of the species is in our benefit, then we can agree development is considered a good thing, even if it doesn't equate to an increase in happiness for the individual.
- mdda 12y agoExcept for medical technology : without it, the cave-man would have far fewer years of expected life-span to enjoy sitting by the fire with his family. And many of those years would be filled with ill-health, etc.
- philwelch 12y agoWhat's the damn point of surviving as a species on other planets? Because at that point, we'd be a different species anyway.
- 12y ago
- baddox 12y agoI've seen the "satisfice rather than optimize" meme a lot recently. I think it's a pretty weak argument. The problem is that there is still a potentially massive amount of calculations and predictions (about costs, opportunity costs, trends, etc.) required to choose a reasonable acceptability threshold. If you take more time to gather this relevant information you can probably choose a better acceptability threshold. The meta-analysis is still an optimization problem with an additional variable to optimize over.
- xorcist 12y agoIt's not one argument. In its simplest form, take the digital camera megapixel race. Who in their right mind does anything useful with 20 megapixels, where most are buried in the noise levels for all common applications? Does that really need to be "optimized" further, even if it means quality and storage both suffers? A lot of real problems worked on in the industry could be described like that.
- baddox 12y agoBut if the satisficer's acceptability threshold is 25 megapixels, they're still not happy, and if their acceptability threshold is 0.5 megapixels, they'll be using a very noticeably poor camera.
- philwelch 12y agoOpportunity cost only exists if you're an optimizer.
- jodrellblank 12y agoSee also: http://justbuythisone.com/ http://justbuythisone.com/
- userbinator 12y agoIt doesn't matter if the cereal I bought tastes good or bad, I'll always wonder if the other option would have been better. Until I taste the other cereal, I'm left questioning my decision, and being unhappy. In this case you would probably be able to try the other option at some time in the future, so why would you be unhappy? I'd definitely do that, and probably alternate between the two if they seem equally good.