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You can't optimize your way to being a good person
I tried to make the perfect moral choice every time. It eroded my humanity.
As the historian Mary Poovey argues in her book A History of the Modern Fact, that story starts all the way back in the 16th century, when Europeans came up with the super-sexy and revolutionary intellectual project that was … double-entry bookkeeping. They taught it to make moral judgments by scraping millions of personal dilemmas people write about on sites like Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?”, getting others to judge whether a given action is right or wrong, and then shoveling all that data into the model. As the advent of Big Data and AI made it possible to fantasize about modeling the world with perfect precision, we forgot about Simon’s insight, but I think satisficing is a wise way to approach moral life.
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