When is good enough, well, good enough? As compared to the absolute best. Quite often. If not usually. Because holding out for the absolute best brings with it some definite problems.
Such as, all the effort it takes to evaluate the merits of every possible option available to us. And the difficulty of arriving at criteria that would allow us to decide which of those options is #1, the best choice of all.
Today The Atlantic, which I subscribe to online, had an interesting article, The Secret to Success is ‘Monotasking,’ In other words, focusing on one thing at a time, rather than attempting to accomplish more through multitasking, which our brains are poorly suited for.
There was a mention of satisficing in the article.
Herbert Simon, a groundbreaking computer scientist, psychologist, and economist, once said that all his work was devoted to a single subject: how humans make decisions. Simon emphasized that we are always faced with imperfect information about our options and the potential consequences of our choices. Rather than “maximize,” or make the best choice from all available alternatives, he argued that people “satisfice”—consider a limited menu of options and choose one that is “good enough.”
Simon was, in his own words, an “incorrigible satisficer.” He didn’t agonize over keeping his options open. “He wore one brand of socks, thus, after the first purchase, never having to select the color or style of what he put on his feet each day,” his eldest daughter, Katherine, wrote. Simon “always had the same breakfast (bowl of oatmeal, half grape‑fruit, black coffee), and lived in the same house for 46 years.” One might be tempted to accuse him of a lack of ambition, if he hadn’t won a Nobel Prize.
Simon kind of reminded myself of me, aside from the Nobel Prize thing.
I also wear one brand of socks, Hylaea, which are quirky enough to have a L and R on each pair, telling me which sock goes on my left and right feet. (Yeah, it makes a difference.) One Hylaea option on Amazon is to get three pairs in lime green, orange, and blue. I’ve bought enough pairs to rotate between green, orange, and blue whenever one pair goes in the laundry. Sticking to that order saves me from having to decide what color to wear next.
Regarding breakfast, I almost always have two Loma Linda Little Links vegetarian sausages, one slice of whole wheat toast with berry jam, cereal, a cup of coffee, and a glass of flax milk. I’m a bit looser than Simon with my cereal choice, alternating between instant plain oatmeal and Nature’s Path Heritage Flakes. I had to switch to Heritage Flakes when Barbara’s Spoonfuls was dropped by the only store in Salem that carried them. I asked Claude, the AI model, what cereal was similar to Barbara’s Spoonfuls and it recommended Heritage Flakes.
Good enough for me. Saved me from pouring over the ingredient label on lots of types of cereal. I’d rather waste my time on more pleasurable activities.
It struck me that while I don’t believe in choosing any religion these days, if someone feels drawn to religiosity, they might as well do the “good enough” thing rather than holding out for the very best religion on our planet. Leaving aside the fact that there’s no way to judge “the very best,” actually living a religious life, if that’s your thing, makes more sense than spending a lot of time trying to decide which religion is #1.
Just choose one and see how it feels to you. Then dump it and try another religion if you aren’t happy with that choice. Or better, become an atheist.
In my reading this morning of Michael Pollan’s book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness, I came across this passage that seems to fit with the “good enough” satisficing notion.
Phenomenologists such as Thompson like to remind us that the “view from nowhere” — the perfectly objective third-person perspective to which science lays claim, is unattainable, because we can never step outside the bubble of human consciousness in which we live. That bubble shapes our understanding of reality and the questions we ask of it.
So, yeah, it could seem nice if we were able to put on our super-logical just-the-facts Spock-like hat and have our mind become a foolproof mechanism for selecting the optimum choice among any number of complex alternatives. However, what’d we lose if this happened would be our humanity, what makes us human.
Life is inherently imperfect. Any attempt to make it perfect is doomed to failure. Which would leave us worse off than before, since now we’d have to face the disappointment of having failed to make life perfect, instead of simply living an imperfect life.
Zen teacher Dainin Katagiri starts off the “Fundamental Suffering as Truth” chapter in his book, Each Moment Is the Universe, with this passage:
Human life is contradictory. We accept our lives and make an effort to live because there is continuation, but we are never satisfied because there is also discontinuation. A human being experiences contradiction in life, but an animal never does. If a lion wants to eat a horse, there is no question about whether it is right. The lion needs to eat the horse to support his life, so there is no contradiction there.
But when a human being wants to eat something, we do research: maybe it’s right to eat meat; maybe it’s not right. No matter how long we try to find the right reasons for something, there are still questions. This conflicting state of human life gives rise to reflection. Whatever answer we find, we reflect on it and ask, “Is that right?” or “Are you sure?” Human life is complicated, so we never find a completely satisfactory answer.
For some reason I’m unable to fathom, I’m reminded of a wonderful quotation by David Ignatow.
I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life
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I’d guess that much of what we choose comes from the totality of who we are or what life has made us into, what Thompson refers to in saying: “… we can never step outside the bubble of human consciousness in which we live.”
In this scenario, everything we think and do is predetermined, not by some mysterious written fate but by what constitutes the totality of ‘me’, my life, my accumulated information and experiences, my gender, etc. – our personal matrix from which we approach everyday life.
As far as I can see, all that we think and do emerges from this spiral of what constitutes ‘me’. Is there a way to ‘break out’ from this spiral of choiceless activity? Perhaps only through the vantage point of that which is arising now, or, as Alan Watts suggested, “Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.
Hm, satisficing.
That’s actually a term from operations research, that I’m familiar with, and have actually worked with. In OR problem-solving, we use this criterion in order to maintain the value of a variable above a certain threshhold (as opposed to maximizing for that variable). It isn’t an escape from rationality and logic, but one particular instance of rigorous application of math and logic to one particular kind of problem-solving.
Informally in our lives, certainly we can “satisfice” for what socks we wear, or what we have for breakfast, and so save on time and effort: but that’s precisely because those are relatively unimportant decisions, with relatively insignificant outcomes beyond the satisficing threshhold. That we can satisfice for some variables, does not mean that we can therefore reasonably satisfice for all variables!
For instance, we cannot satisfice for our understanding of whether vaccines work or don’t, we simply cannot. We need the most rigorously researched answer that is currently available now.
(Or at least, we can satisfice, we can do whatever the hell we want in a free country, and there has been no dearth of people holding steadfast to all kinds of nonsense about vaccines, not even when the pandemic was raging all around us: but we can’t reasonably do that. …We cannot reasonably satisfice for all variables, with the emphasis on “reasonably”. If we do not care about being reasonable, then of course the field is wide open for what we might believe, and what we do in accordance with those beliefs.)
Likewise for climate change. Won’t do to satisfice on that question, not by any rational reasonable yardstick.
Likewise with the God question, and religion generally. I mean, take the Abrahamic God: does He exist? If He does, and is as the Bible tells us He is: then we’re in for an eternity of torment if we don’t do as He commands us to. Worse, if the God of Mohammed exists, and we don’t follow the Koran and the Hadiths and the rest of it, then the Hell in store for us is even grislier. And thus, more generally, with the God question; and indeed with all/most “spiritual” questions. Just like the vaccine question, and the climate change question, these are a solidly and critically consequential questions, that scream out for a coherent, reasonable answer: and the reasonable atheist has arrived at a negative answer to these questions, is all.
How on earth can it be a question of “feels”, and of “good enough”, how? Religion is no country club: join this one, see if you like it, see if it makes you happy; else switch to something else?! The whole point of religion is the alleged factuality of it, and the alleged final outcome of abiding by it. Whether it is agreeable or disagreeable doesn’t enter into it, at least not primarily: unless of course one has already decided it is all bull, and elects to go through the motions of it nevertheless.
Nope. The God question cannot be satisficed. The choice of religion cannot be satisficed. At least not reasonably. (And if one does do that, then that is one of two things: either in one’s heart one has already arrived at a negative answer, and one is simply putting up appearances for whatever reason; or else it is simply the case of the individual igtheist not happening not to be particularly interested in this question at all, which last is fair enough, but that last speaks to their personal predilection and bandwidth and so forth, and not at all to what is generally reasonable or “wise” as far as that question.)
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Likewise that cliche about Mr Spock, and about “super-logicality” eroding our “being human”? That’s …pardon me, but that’s just a bunch of arrant nonsense.
The thing about Vulcans is the fact the they lack EQ. What makes Vulcans dysfunctional is not their logic, but their absence of effectual understanding of human emotion.
It’s like this. The nerd that is brilliant in studies but sucks at athletics may find he can’t pick up girls, and decide he wants to become an athlete. Fine, great, his choice. But how to go about doing that is not by therefore emulating the jocks by tamping down his “logicality” and acting dumb, and bringing his own effective IQ down to their level: but by actually working on his own atheletic abilities. Otherwise the physically unimpressive but brilliant nerd will simply end up becoming a poor physical specimen that’s also dumb, with even lesser chance than before of becoming attractive to the hot girls.
By human standards Mr Spock is dysfunctional. Dysfunctional not because he’s got a great IQ and thinks logically, but dysfunctional because he’s lacking in EQ and is absent effective understanding of human emotions. So that, should Mr Spock aspire to a promotion, and decide to emulate Capt Kirk: then he’d be ill advised to try to do that by acting less logically like he’s seen Kirk do, that would only make him even more dysfunctional and maybe just get him fired. No, what he needs to do is to emulate Kirk by upping is own EQ and his leadership qualities. Two very different things, those.
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Pardon me, I realize I’m going to town on what is probably a throwaway thought and post, and ending up doing the contrarian thing yet again; but I’m afraid I feel strongly about this, and I’d like to develop this …this strand of thought a bit more fully here, if I may.
Let’s not make words and terms and ideas like these some kind of excuse, and justification, for loose thinking. …And let’s please not end up making the subject matter of spirituality an excuse for absence of rigor.
Halfwittery is just as much out of place in spirituality, and just as dysfunctional in spirituality, as it is in any other discussion on any other subject.
Yeah, I like the sound of that: If I may be so presumptuous, I’d like to propose this as a motto for Churchless (and indeed for anyone and for any place that wishes to seriously examine and understand spirituality):
Spirituality does not admit of absence of rigor. We must always guard against the tendency, in others and also in ourselves, to favor the subject of spirituality simply in order to indulge in lack of rigor and wallow in incoherence and indulge in undefended “feels”. Halfwittery is as out of place in spirituality, and as dysfunctional in spirituality, as it is in any other discussion on any other subject.
(Loosen the rigor to let in, sans proper rigorous defense, Zen obscurantism for instance, or loosely reasoned Sapolsky-esque views on morals, or invalid Marchant-esque views about the centrality of QBism and what that indicates about consciousness and an external reality: and you’ll have no way to keep out outright oafishness like Jesus worshiping halfwittery, or indeed the Gurinder nonsense, not without resorting to fallacious special pleading and straight-out bias.)
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“Spiritual independence” cannot tantamount to independence from the need for rigor!
I might propose that the sequence of evolution is different than currently understood; and that aquatic creatures learned to fly, then flew to land, and there evolved into apes and humans. But that’s just speculation about evolution. And I may apply some scientific rigor to that idea, in which case it becomes a bona fide hypothesis—but still not fact. Only when this hypothesis passes even stricter rigor, including passing the test of parsimony, and where applicable the test of evidence, can we treat it as scientific fact, and only thereafter reasonably incorporate it into our general worldview.
And that applies even when the answer is a No. Speculating about aether is just speculation. Applying rigor to that speculation makes it a bona fide hypothesis. And testing for it, and not finding it, makes it a fact: in this case, a negative fact, the fact that there’s no aether.
Likewise, we can speculate about matters spiritual, whyever not. We might even, more seriously, research and hypothesize about matters spiritual. But no, just because the subject is religion, just because the subject is spirituality (or more generally metaphysics/philosophy), emphatically does not mean that we can therefore do away with rigor, as far as the actual conclusion of it all.
…I mean, one can always think and believe what one wants, one is free to do that, naturally; but if one does that sans rigor, when it comes to consequential questions, then one isn’t being rational, one isn’t being reasonable.
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I’d like to end this overly long comment, and then step back from repeatedly ending up making myself a contrarian pain in the neck, seemingly to no constructive purpose beyond simply oblique deflection, by repeating and once again proposing that motto for Churchless, and more generally for all those who are genuinely intersted in spirituality:
Spirituality does not admit of absence of rigor. We must always guard against the tendency, in others and also in ourselves, to favor the subject of spirituality simply in order to indulge in lack of rigor and to wallow in incoherence. Halfwittery is just as much out of place in spirituality, and just as dysfunctional in spirituality, as it is in any other discussion on any other subject.
(We can speculate, certainly, and let our imagination roam as wide as we want. But what we mustn’t do is imagine that just because we’ve chosen to do this in the field of spirituality, therefore we are somehow excused from the necessity of rigor that other fields require from us.)