Gaming the System: Why Not?

I think the interesting thing about being human is the capacity to make deliberate sub-optimal decisions. This only occurred to me after spending a decade or so in pursuit of helping other people make optimal decisions. The question then arises: why not? Why would you want to make a deliberately sub-optimal decision?

The answer comes in two flavours, the romantic and the pragmatic.

The romantic reply is that we're human. We aren't designed to game the system, especially when in the longer run, there may be no system, or a system too complex for us to game. We can game specific systems: that's how tiny hairless chihuahuas and pug-nosed pekes can come from the same stock as Russian wolfhounds. Breeding (and all other eugenic-type programmes) are just one example. But purebred show dogs tend to be vulnerable to things that mongrels aren't; if you optimise for 'best of show', you may also be sub-optimising for 'having a good life'.

The pragmatic answer is that the system can't be gamed. We never know enough; so how can we posit an optimal response? Heh, that sounds like the first answer.

But I did say that the answer comes in two flavours. Same ice-cream underlying both, but two flavours nevertheless. The first version stresses that keeping human by avoiding soulless optimisation is good. The second version stresses that systems are not human, despite many of them being anthropogenic. We made them; let's not let them make us.