Re: Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice [...] talks about how offering people more choices can make them less happy. A simple intuition says this shouldn’t ought to happen to rational agents: If your current choice is X, and you’re offered an alternative Y that’s worse than X, and you know it, you can always just go on doing X. So a rational agent shouldn’t do worse by having more options. The more available actions you have, the more powerful you become—that’s how it should ought to work.
This makes no sense to me. A blind choice between lady and tiger is preferable to a blind choice between a lady and two tigers. Problems arise when you don’t know that the other choices are worse. So having more choices can be really bad—in a way that has nothing to do with the extra cycles burned in evaluating them.
Re: Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice [...] talks about how offering people more choices can make them less happy. A simple intuition says this shouldn’t ought to happen to rational agents: If your current choice is X, and you’re offered an alternative Y that’s worse than X, and you know it, you can always just go on doing X. So a rational agent shouldn’t do worse by having more options. The more available actions you have, the more powerful you become—that’s how it should ought to work.
This makes no sense to me. A blind choice between lady and tiger is preferable to a blind choice between a lady and two tigers. Problems arise when you don’t know that the other choices are worse. So having more choices can be really bad—in a way that has nothing to do with the extra cycles burned in evaluating them.