posted
Or, to put it less cleanly but more accurately, the adequate is the enemy of the superior.
I've been wrestling with this idea and its reversal, Voltaire's quote "The best is the enemy of the good." with more than a bit of psychology and game theory thrown in.
I'm interested in hearing people's ideas (if any) about the quotes, so I think I'll hold off on a long explanation.
So, just a bit about how I'm approaching them.
Good is the enemy of the best. Achieving success using a particular method makes us resistant to attempting other potentially better methods, sometimes even when others demonstrate them with superior results. "Getting better" is pursued by perfecting aspects of the current way of doing things. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
It's got some interesting applications in applied game theory. People confronted with games develop strategies. When they find one that works consistently, they often stop looking for better strategies. You even often get a situation where say you have four choices (A, B, C, D) and three situations (X, Y, Z) where A is superior in X but negative or very low in the rest, the same for B and Y and C and Z. D isn't superior in any, but yields second best results in all three cases. Many people will stick with just choosing D.
You find this often also in negative sufficiency situations. That is, the lack of something is damaging. People fix on this and assume that having a lot of this thing is automatically good. Money is a classic example of this. I think self-esteem is another.
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The best is the enemy of the good. To me, speaks about perfectionism and uncomprimising idealism. Sometimes you have to accept the best you can get isn't going to be the absolute best. Value is rarely absolute. Psychologically, it is almost always a matter of comparing what you have with what you want. Happiness is very much a matter of perspective as opposed to material goods.
Obviously, both in a strict mathematical and a fuzzier psychological approach, these ideas are contradictory. But they both ring true to me.
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Yes folks, that is the short version.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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It's very good - I suggest you give it a read. Among other things, he points out that "good" is a local maximum - it's hard to go straight up from "good" to "excellent". You have to change things around, shake up your life, which means that you may dip down into the "average" or even "bad" range. Ask anyone who's given up a good job to start an ultimately successful business.
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posted
Interesting blog. Depending on how you read it, you're always at a 7 (unless you're one in a million people who through luck or genetics have a massive advantage). He even says that when you shake up your life and get to your new 10, if you ever get there, you'll realize that there's another 10 ahead of you.
I suppose it's an interesting exercise in motivation, but it also seems like an exercise in futility. Yes, you should stay motivated, you should strive to reach your goals, but if you always have an attitude that what you have is never enough, will you ever be happy? Do you set yourself up so that you're always going for 10, and you can never get it?
I think it's good to keep bettering yourself. It's good to try new things. It's good to keep yourself healthy, to do what you like to do, to enjoy life.
At the same time, if you're happy where you are, if you like what you're doing, enjoy your relationship, have great friends, and get a lot out of life, why screw it up? Yes, compared to a pro athlete you're in horrible shape. Compared to a Fortune 500 CEO you're poor, compared to Tom Cruise's raving mad love for Katie Holmes, your relationship sucks.
Well, you can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself.
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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I'd suggest you read his entry on Self-Acceptance vs. Personal Growth. He's not suggesting that you base your life & self-worth on constantly getting better at all. But we all see areas in our life that need improvement - he's just pointing out, as Squicky did, that to do that, you might have to suffer some along the way. If you're stuck in a bad relationship, then there *are* ways to get into a good relationship - but that way might mean being in no relationship for awhile. If you're in a job you dislike, but the pay is good... well, you can probably get a job where the pay is also okay, and you love what you're doing, but you might have to suffer through unemployment, learning a bunch of new skills, and working your way back up the career ladder.
If your life is truly hunky dory, and there's nothing you want to change, great! But I don't think many people have those kind of lives - most of us have at least some area that we want to improve in, but we're afraid of the changes that we'll have to make to do so.
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posted
It reminds me of the classical on-line search paradox of explore vs. exploit. Consider it a dual objective problem: Finding the solution of 1) greatest utility and 2) quickest accessibility. You attempt to satisfy both objectives, but they are oppositional.
In decision theory there's a debate between the relative merits of naturalistic decion makinig (ala Kline) and deliberative decision making. Naturalistic decision making occurs very quickly, but has little guarantee of quality. While deliberative decion making results in a guarantee-ably "correct" decision, but may take an inordinate amount of time.
So, in your applied game theory scenario: people choose D because (for them) the cost of deliberating is higher than the expected benefit of reaching a solution of higher utility. I think they are still operating optimally, but because the structure of the game doesn't incorporate search cost into the payoffs, it isn't evident.
Posts: 2926 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
"Good to Great" by Jim Collins talks about this. To paraphrase (or plagerize as best as my memory serves me) he said something like, "We do not have a great education system primarily because we have a good education system. We do not have a great public healthcare system because we have a good system" And then the theme of the book was how to take a good company and turn it into a great company.
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posted
Basic game theory assumes that there are no search costs, as there is perfect information. You can set up games where there isn't perfect information, but things start getting really complicated really fast.
You could set up the problem with a single objective, but with severe constraints. So your objective is quickest accessibility, but the solution must fit high utility constraints. Then its a simple Operations Research problem to get a solution. I think this is what most people do, and it's what leads to the "good but not best" situation. They want to follow the quickest path to a minimum level of success. Once they reach that minimum (satisfy the constraint), they're okay with just idiling there.
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To me, the question seems to be which of the two objectives should you choose to be the constraint and which the objective. Do you find the solution with highest utility in a constrained amount of time, or do you return the most quickly found solution with utility level above a constrained threshold. In a sense, the dual objective problem (if you make the "grand" objective a linear combination of the two objectives) is the Langrangian relaxation of either of those constrained optimization problems.
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posted
I understand both sides of what you are trying to say (I think)
However the point that is striking home to me, is that "best" does not necessarily equal perfection. And the line between striving for the "best" and futily striving for perfection can get blurred.
Also, "perfection" may be a more subjective determination while "best" may require more objectivity.
posted
SenojRetep - That's true - it works either way.
We never got to dual objective problems altho I think I understand your explanation of it. Maybe when I get into an econ ph.d program...
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Disclaimer: I made up the term "dual objective" (I think) for this specific problem. The term "multi-objective" is the term most frequently used in the literature. "Dual objective" problems (in general) would be a subset of multi-objective problems.
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posted
In applied GT, there are few instances of isolated games. In this case, I'd add two variations.
One, say it's a competitive game. You can sort of model how new, small companies outperform large, established ones with this sort of game.
Two, say it's part of a repeated, but progressive game. That is, this game is really a step in a larger series of games whose results get carried over from one to the other. Non-optimal solutions, especially early on in the series, can have a profound effect on the final outcome.
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In my work, I'm most interested in the fixation on the negative case. This forms one of the bases for my attack on the self-esteem orthodoxy.
That is, not having self-esteem is a bad thing, so self-esteem is seen as a goal that it is good to pursue. Also, when one feels bad, "I need more self-esteem." is a common solution to the problem. However, there is considerable evidence that neither of these two are necessarily good or healthy things and they are certainly not logical.
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