I wouldn’t say “picks the best option” is the most interesting thing in the conceptual cluster around “actual optimizer”. A more interesting thing is “runs an ongoing, open-ended, creative, recursive, combinatorial search for further ways to greatly increase X”.
Like, “actual optimizer” does mean “picks the best option”. But “actual bounded optimizer” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality can’t mean that exactly, while still being interesting and more relevant to humans, while very much (goes the claim) not looking like how humans act. Humans might take a visible opportunity to have another child, and would take visible opportunities to prevent a rock from hitting their child, but they mostly don’t sit around thinking of creative new ways to increase IGF. They do some versions of this, such as sitting around worrying about things that might harm their children. One could argue that this is because the computational costs of increasing IGF in weird ways are too high. But this isn’t actually plausible (cf. sperm bank example). What’s plausible is that that was the case in the ancestral environment; so the ancestral environment didn’t (even if it could have) select for people who sat around trying to think of wild ways to increase IGF.
Like, “actual optimizer” does mean “picks the best option”. But “actual bounded optimizer” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality can’t mean that exactly, while still being interesting and more relevant to humans, while very much (goes the claim) not looking like how humans act. Humans might take a visible opportunity to have another child, and would take visible opportunities to prevent a rock from hitting their child, but they mostly don’t sit around thinking of creative new ways to increase IGF. They do some versions of this, such as sitting around worrying about things that might harm their children. One could argue that this is because the computational costs of increasing IGF in weird ways are too high. But this isn’t actually plausible (cf. sperm bank example). What’s plausible is that that was the case in the ancestral environment; so the ancestral environment didn’t (even if it could have) select for people who sat around trying to think of wild ways to increase IGF.