[baddox]

I've seen the "satisfice rather than optimize" meme a lot recently. I think it's a pretty weak argument. The problem is that there is still a potentially massive amount of calculations and predictions (about costs, opportunity costs, trends, etc.) required to choose a reasonable acceptability threshold. If you take more time to gather this relevant information you can probably choose a better acceptability threshold. The meta-analysis is still an optimization problem with an additional variable to optimize over.

[xorcist]

It's not one argument. In its simplest form, take the digital camera megapixel race. Who in their right mind does anything useful with 20 megapixels, where most are buried in the noise levels for all common applications? Does that really need to be "optimized" further, even if it means quality and storage both suffers? A lot of real problems worked on in the industry could be described like that.

[baddox]

But if the satisficer's acceptability threshold is 25 megapixels, they're still not happy, and if their acceptability threshold is 0.5 megapixels, they'll be using a very noticeably poor camera.

[philwelch]

Opportunity cost only exists if you're an optimizer.