Time (in particular in a chess game) is a precious resource -- to justify spending it you need cost-benefit analysis.
Position is also a precious resource in chess. You need to structure your play so that the trade-off between time and position is optimal, and cutting off your search the moment you think of a playable move is not that trade-off. Evidence in favor:
Your position offers no criteria and no way to figure out when you've spent enough resources (time) and should stop -- and that is the real issue at hand.
Nor am I claiming to offer such a way. I agree that the optimal configuration is difficult to identify, and furthermore that if it weren't so, a great deal of economics would be vastly simpler. My claim is a far weaker one: that whatever the optimal configuration is, stopping after the first solution is not it. This may sound trivial, and to a regular LW reader, it very well may be, but based on my observations, very few regular (as in not explicitly interested in self-improvement) people actually apply this advice, so it does seem important enough to merit a rationality quote dedicated to it.
the optimal configuration is difficult to identify
By the way, in certain situations it's analytically solvable -- see e.g. here.
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: