the perils of choice

During dinner with my parents last night, the topic of how people react to "too much" choice came up.  My mom said how she always felt too much choice was indeed too much, and kept her from making any choice, but thought she was unusual and that most people liked to have a lot of choice.  My argument was that people say that, but when you look at what they actually do, too much choice is bad.

Following my general rule of locating authorities for claims I made, I defer to Barry Schwartz, whose excellent Google talk addresses this in wonderful detail.

Some thoughts that come to mind while watching that:

Theory: Younger people, who have grown up in a world that inundates them with choice, have in reaction tended to become satisficers, because the alternative (maximizer) generally leads to unhappiness, for reasons explained by Schwartz.  Consequently, they are happier and more adaptable than those of us whose selection model was developed at a time when maximization was the preferred approach.  (In a situation with limited choice maximization, which is naively the preferred solution, is likely to be indistinguishable from satisfaction because the same choice meets both criteria while the few remaining alternatives don't even satisfy.)

Perfection is the enemy of good enough.  But "good enough" is the enemy of "great:".  Maximizers want "great".

Leakage: The experience of the context of a decision impacts the experience of the consequence of the decision.  Specifically, if you are stressed while making a selection, that stress remains after the selection is complete and you are moving on.  Consequently, you will be less happy with the results, and less likely to put yourself in a situation where you must make similar decisions.

Successful continuous bloggers, then, are those who do not spend hours agonizing over word selection and searching for the perfect phrase, because the people who do so are dissatisfied with the results---especially in the absence of external validation that would increase the return on their investment---and consequently their postings fall off and the blog is abandoned.

ah, snow....

We got about five inches of snow last night here, and I had to do shopping today or I'd be serving frozen waffles to my parents for Christmas dinner.  Store parking lots on Christmas Eve with snow.  Yuck.

In fact, it was pretty benign.  I had the foresight to get a Subaru Outback when selecting my car here: all wheel drive, eight inch clearance.  A little slippery, but no problems getting out and about, even in the side streets which St. Paul, in its infinite wisdom, decided didn't need to be plowed.  (They have belatedly declared a snow emergency now, which appears to mean that they're going to sit on their collective behinds until 9pm tonight, at which point they'll start plowing the five inches that accumulated yesterday, plus the 2-4 inches coming today and the 5-9 inches tonight.  Just across Hamline in Falcon Heights, all the streets including the side ones were plowed sometime before 8:30a this morning.)

The parking lot at the co-op, and in fact all the other stores, was well plowed and barely a third full.  I95 a little slow, but not congested.  University Avenue a total sloppy mess (St. Paul, again; Minneapolis plowed their stretch), but very few vehicles daring it.  The curb in front of Penzey's on Grand (St. Paul: wait for it...) actually had a cleared spot with room for two small cars---and a Jeep Cherokee Limited slapped in the middle of it.  But the Subaru easily drove over and out of the pile of snow left in the remaining spot.

By about 1030a, I was wrapping things up, and everybody else seemed to be getting to the point where panic had set in and they just had to venture out to buy that last wind-up parrot for Cousin Joe's rug-rats even if it meant trying to navigate their Ford Festivas through the drifts.

I love my car.  And...

Go SPUGs!