🎯Satisficing

Choosing the first option that clears a bar set in advance, and then stopping, as opposed to searching for the best one.

Herbert Simon's argument in 🔬 A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice (1955) is that a real chooser has limited time, information and arithmetic, so optimising is a description of nobody. What people can do is set an aspiration level, look until something meets it and take that. The level moves with experience: up when good options are easy to find, down when they are not. The word itself, 🔤 Satisfice, he supplied a year later.

Example: this vault. In January the bar was I can find a note and I do not have to build anything. It cleared the bar, and I have not compared alternatives since. The itch list is where the optimiser in me is kept.

Often confused with: settling, or low standards. The bar can be high. What makes it satisficing is that the bar is decided before the search and the search then ends.

Notes: 📖 Simon on satisficing. The claim I took from it: 💎 Good enough is a rational stopping rule.