[jandrese]

It's true for life in general. It is a rare luxury to have and understand all of the information before being asked to make a decision. This is why fields like economics have traditionally been poor predictors of actual human activity, they assume an ideal that is rarely true.

[NTDF9]

Reminds me of the trope that the choice should ALWAYS be left with consumers. Every consumer is a 'rational actor'. Reality is most humans have too many things going on, too many choices with not adequate info and are emotional actors.

[devereaux]

Yet solutions emerge, even if individual agents have zero intelligence

http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/Gode%20and%20Sunder-JP...

Your lack of belief in the force of the free hand is troubling, especially when it can be proved by computer models and reality.

[coddingtonbear]

To clarify for the person you've responded to: the problem with humans isn't exactly that we individually have _too little_ intelligence, it's that the heuristics we have evolved to use for compensating for missing information include a great deal of bias. This results in the very-well-documented lack of rational actors in the real world.

[scsilver]

Not to mention the distortion of rationality created by advertising.