Ask A Genius 150 – Breadth of Search
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/16
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yea, strongly! That doll-truck difference probably came out of the 70s and 80s with the self-esteem movement.
Rick Rosner: There was the no-fun granola lifestyle. The free to be you and me. The public television, there was a certain egalitarianism that had a joylessness attached to it. It was kind of like moving into a clean, equal future that is like the Star Wars future because it is underpopulated with foolishness and sleaziness. It’s why Blade Runner looks like a more fun world to live in than the Star Trek clean plazas of the 25th or 23rd century.
SDJ: This came from – what some would consider a scourge of – theories devoid of empiricism.
RR: One more thing before we move onto the future. This has to do with another topic: breadth of search or width of search. Peoples’ are higher now because we search more among people for potential partners as opposed to if you’re living in 1922 Brooklyn.
SDJ: [Laughing].
RR: There’s more settling then. There’s an algorithm there. If you want a piece of fish to cook for dinner, and if you only want an 8 ounce piece of fish, and if you’re looking in the pre-packaged fish in the grocery store, and most of the packages have run about 12 ounces, your search strategy is that you pick up a couple packages and see that they’re mostly running 12 ounces and find one that is 10 ½ ounces.
You hold onto that one until you find one that is less than that. You take the second one that sets a new record for smallness and then you settle on that because any further search is a waste of time. You will not get significant improvement. You search once. You find 10 ½ ounces. You search another half dozen and find one that is – I don’t know – 9.8 ounces. Even though, it is not the 8 ounces you were looking for. It was close enough and any further search among the fish is a waste of time.
So you settle for one that is 9.8 ounces because you may never find one that is 8 ounces, which may not be among the packaged fish. Also, is it worth searching through another 20 packages of fish to find one that is 9.6 ounces? Probably not, there’s your settling strategy. To some extent, because the world have 7 ½ billion people in it, you’re going to settle at some point if you’re going to settle down with a partner.
You’re not searching through 3 ¾ billion people in the world of the opposite sex. You’re not even searching the entire population of the city because it would be a huge pain in the ass, but the point at which you settle can be further along. Instead of having to pick up each package of fish, if there were an app that just listed the weights of all packages of fish and showed you th one with the more ideal weight, you’d go with it.
Now, we have technology that widens the scope of search and that means that on average who you settle for is selected from a larger population using more criteria and might be expected to have less settling in it. Less horrible than the 3 guys that you had to choose from in Brooklyn in 1922.
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