What You See Isn’t All There Is

The push to optimize is omnipresent: we need productivity tools to manage productivity tools, our health data streams from wrists to clouds, SEO-friendly words preside over online content.

However, some domains are better served by optimizing than others.

Optimize in simple domains.
Be wary in complex ones.

Optimizing something presupposes that you know everything about the system, and it’s a lot easier to know everything about a simple system than a complex one. Optimizing a system about which you have insufficient information can be called, or will be by me for the purpose of this post, over-optimization.

It’s linked to the general mental bias which Danny Kahneman calls What You See Is All There Is.

Buying shit

Over-optimizing would lead us to calculate that possessions provide better return than experiences. However, what those calculations wouldn’t take into account is the psychological fact that most of us have a pretty intense capacity for tolerance, called hedonic adaptation, where we stop appreciating the good things to which we’re constantly exposed.

Therefore, our enjoyment of a thing becomes dulled incredibly quickly. An experience not only provides the enjoyment of anticipation but also helps expand our minds.

Change is the only constant and experiences allow us to direct some of that change. The great thinker Heraclitus said it best:

No man steps twice into the same river for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.

Attention

I’ve observed that people tend to over-optimize information by simply consuming as much of it as possible. The more you consume the better, right?

Actually, more information is usually worse since the the amount of noise in any data increases exponentially as its time scale decreases. Consuming noisy data is called information toxicity, which is not only useless but also unnecessarily stressful and therefore unhealthy.

Procrastinating is also not typically considered something “optimal” yet holds an important role as your innate bullshit detector to inform you that what you’re doing, or how you’re doing it, needs to be reconsidered because something about it isn’t quite right.

Opportunities

Think about the major events in your life. How many of them were planned or gradual and how many were unplanned or sudden? I don’t know about you but the latter certainly describes my experience.

It’s a fact that most of the important things that happen to us in life, both good and bad, will be unprecedented and unplanned. In order to be robust against the unexpected you need a redundancy of resources, which over-optimizing would prohibit.

In other words, it is unwise to assume completeness of vision. Nassim Taleb calls it the Teleological Fallacy which is the mistaken assumption that you know where you’re going right now, you knew where you were going in the past, and others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.

Obviously, none of these are the case and indications to the contrary, such as any book about successful businesses, is usually hindsight narration. It overestimates the role of central planning and underestimates the role of randomness and trial-and-error.

Rather than highly detailed plans or commitment to an overly-specific course of action, we should prefer optionality; we need willingness not willfulness.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t optimize our resources, we should just be mindful of the context, build in some redundancy, and keep in mind that what we see isn’t necessarily all there is.

My name is Shawn and I write things about stuff, and not the other way around. If you enjoyed this article, hit that little heart below to share with others and follow me for more of the same.