There are a whole lot of problems where if you/the system, dont have time, resources, information etc reaching an optima isnt possible. With sucb problems striving for efficiency turns out to be a negative. See the explore-exploit trade off for example.
So finding simple efficient solutions are never enough. We have to study other mechanisms. Especially the brain.
When you dont have an explanation, people make up stories. And the made up stories effect everything.
Here is Richard Gariott, game designer, explaining how quickly it happens -
"if we put a fishing pole there, it had to do something, so we made fish for players to catch. This wasn’t meant to be a key feature of the game, and we didn’t spend a lot of time on it, stocking the water with generic-looking fish. We gave fishermen a simple fifty-fifty chance of catching a fish every time they put their line in the water. It didn’t matter if they were fishing in a river or in the ocean, there was a fifty-fifty chance. It didn’t matter if it was morning, noon, or night, still fifty-fifty. But to our surprise, when we launched the game, fishing immediately became very popular. Fifty-fifty doesn’t mean the result will alternate each time, it means that over a span of time the result will be even. As a consequence players began to speculate that there might be some other rule behind fishing, believing that they had better results when fishing two or three yards farther offshore than when they cast close to the riverbank. Fishing at night, some people were convinced, was more productive than fishing in the afternoon. People created their own mythology; they believed there were special fishing holes, and wouldn’t tell anyone else where they were. None of that was true, but players believed it"
Samething happens with people and the stories they tell about their brains and the thoughts that come out of it. See Xi Jinping for example. What his brain is doing effects billions of people.
But tomorrow someone might stumble upon rules underlying it all and that will have huge effects on existing stories we tell ourselves.
So finding simple efficient solutions are never enough. We have to study other mechanisms. Especially the brain.
When you dont have an explanation, people make up stories. And the made up stories effect everything.
Here is Richard Gariott, game designer, explaining how quickly it happens - "if we put a fishing pole there, it had to do something, so we made fish for players to catch. This wasn’t meant to be a key feature of the game, and we didn’t spend a lot of time on it, stocking the water with generic-looking fish. We gave fishermen a simple fifty-fifty chance of catching a fish every time they put their line in the water. It didn’t matter if they were fishing in a river or in the ocean, there was a fifty-fifty chance. It didn’t matter if it was morning, noon, or night, still fifty-fifty. But to our surprise, when we launched the game, fishing immediately became very popular. Fifty-fifty doesn’t mean the result will alternate each time, it means that over a span of time the result will be even. As a consequence players began to speculate that there might be some other rule behind fishing, believing that they had better results when fishing two or three yards farther offshore than when they cast close to the riverbank. Fishing at night, some people were convinced, was more productive than fishing in the afternoon. People created their own mythology; they believed there were special fishing holes, and wouldn’t tell anyone else where they were. None of that was true, but players believed it"
Samething happens with people and the stories they tell about their brains and the thoughts that come out of it. See Xi Jinping for example. What his brain is doing effects billions of people.
But tomorrow someone might stumble upon rules underlying it all and that will have huge effects on existing stories we tell ourselves.