What are you optimizing for?

This question can strike as silly to normal people. It doesn’t strike as silly to engineers and people that have an optimization mindset though, which is exactly the people that might fall into the trap of optimizing for the wrong variable. It’s kind of paradoxical that people that spend so much time thinking about it and about what are the bests ways to select the best variables to end up falling for precisely the heuristic that was supposed to save them. That’s me.

In my attempt to optimize everything, I tried to optimize myself. I even considered optimizing myself to make society optimal, IE if everyone was optimal AKA as convinced about the same optimization goal that I had, the world would be optimal (and pretty good, at least in my mind). But that’s the issue, I was optimizing for some sort of efficiency metric, or output, or GDP, or whatever. I then realized how far off some people were from this optimal way of being, which led me to find lots of quirks and funny things that people do and that deviate them from maximum efficiency and output.

This led me to a very tough way of being, kinda stoic, but also stressful, and mean… It gave me a very mean sense of humor, in which I could accurately identify traits in people and spot how far off they are from optimization, which in turn gave me humor tools. I love humor, but if you always use the same tool it starts to look very similar to just being mean.

A salient example of this mindset that I can think about happened just now, which prompted me to write this:

Looking out my window I saw the last orange trees of the autumn. It was really pretty while it lasted, but last night’s rain left most of the trees naked and all the orange leaves now lay dirty on the muddy ground.

That’s the thing about autumn: the pretty part lasts very little, 2/3 weeks tops. Then you’re stuck with shitty weather, cold temperatures, gray skies, naked trees, and sad gardens.

This led me to realize how the people that say that autumn is their favorite season are not being reasonable, they are daydreamers: they have this mental fantasy of what autumn is when in reality most of it sucks. But in their minds they only recall the nice part, forgetting the sadder and longer reality.

Then there’s me: I’m practical, I like summer or spring bc everything is constantly pretty and you get to wear few clothes. AHA! I’m so smart and practical, unlike these silly dreamers.

The thing is that these people are filling a demand in the societal market, the market for dreamers, and in this market, money is not as important as HAPPINESS (which is the only target variable that really matters) and since a huge factor of happiness is human connections, these dreamers end up being perfectly rational in daydreaming since they are optimizing for their personal happiness, as well as doing good to society by being happy, bc society demands (aka people like) happy people.

So there you have it: apparent unpragmatic dreamers and autumn lovers ended up being so much more pragmatic than myself, and all this just by listening to how they feel and what makes them happy, instead of convolutedly thinking about optimization and writing even more convoluted blog entries.