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wallowinmaya comments on In Praise of Maximizing – With Some Caveats - Less Wrong
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Comments (19)
I see no mention of costs in these definitions.
Let's try a basic and, dare I say it, rational way of trying to achieve some outcome: you look for a better alternative until your estimate of costs for further search exceeds your estimate of the gains you would get from finding a superior option.
That's not satisficing because I don't take the first option alternative that is good enough. That's also not maximizing as I am not committed to searching for the global optimum.
Continuing my previous comment
I agree: It's neither pure satisficing nor pure maximizing. Generally speaking, in the real world it's probably very hard to find (non-contrived) instances of pure satisficing or pure maximizing. In reality, people fall on a continuum from pure satisficers to pure maximizers (I did acknowledge this in footnotes 1 and 2, but I probably should have been clearer).
But I think it makes sense to assert that certain people exhibit more satisficer-characteristics and others exhibit more maximizer-characteristics. For example, imagine that Anna travels to 127 different countries and goes to over 2500 different cafes to find the best chocolate cookie. Anna could be meaningfully described as a "cookie-maximizer", even if she gave up after 10 years of cookie-searching although she wasn't able to find the best chocolate cookie on planet Earth. :)
Somewhat relatedly, someone might be a maximizer in a certain domain, but a satisficer in another domain. I'm for example a satisficer when it comes to food and interior decoration, but (more of) a maximizer in other domains.
That's not true -- for example, in cases where the search costs for the full space are trivial, pure maximizing is very common.
My objection is stronger. The behavior of optimizing for (gain - cost) does NOT lie on the continuum between satisficing and maximizing as defined in your post, primarily because they have no concept of the cost of search.
Then define "maximizing" in a way that will let you call Anna a maximizer.
Ok, sure. I probably should have written that pure maximizing or satisficing is hard to find in important, complex and non-contrived instances. I had in mind such domains as career, ethics, romance, and so on. I think it's hard to find a pure maximizer or satisficer here.
Sorry, I fear that I don't completely understand your point. Do you agree that there are individual differences in people, such that some people tend to search longer for a better solution and other people are more easily satisfied with their circumstances – be it their career, their love life or the world in general?
Maybe I should have tried an operationalized definition: Maximizers are people who get high scores on this maximization scale (page 1182) and satisficers are people who get low scores.
Yes, I agree that there are individual differences in people. But your post is, at its core, not about people, it's about decision strategies or algorithms. You defined them in a particular way. I am, essentially, saying that your definitions have some issues.
But note that if you "operationalize" your definitions, you switch what is being defined -- from algorithms to humans, and these are very very different things.