wallowinmaya comments on In Praise of Maximizing – With Some Caveats - Less Wrong

22 Post author: wallowinmaya 15 March 2015 07:40PM

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Tags: altruism ethics superintelligence rationality satisficing effective maximizing

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Comment author: Lumifer 16 March 2015 05:57:12PM 0 points [-]

in the real world it's probably very hard to find (non-contrived) instances of pure satisficing or pure maximizing.

That's not true -- for example, in cases where the search costs for the full space are trivial, pure maximizing is very common.

In reality, people fall on a continuum from pure satisficers to pure maximizers

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.

Anna could be meaningfully described as a "cookie-maximizer"

Then define "maximizing" in a way that will let you call Anna a maximizer.

Comment author: wallowinmaya 17 March 2015 10:55:09AM *  4 points [-]

That's not true -- for example, in cases where the search costs for the full space are trivial, pure maximizing is very common.

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.

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.

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.

Comment author: Lumifer 17 March 2015 03:16:03PM 0 points [-]

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

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.

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