Would you rather have two options or five?

In election selection, where’s perfection?

While driving last night, I was listening to NPR’s Florida primary coverage last evening and an interesting comment emerged from the mass of spin:

Robert Sigel pointed out that Democrats surprisingly over-represented in voting in an “unimportant” primary (Florida has been stripped of its delegate privileges). Democrats brought nearly 1.7M to vote while Republicans brought over 1.9M. The general view was that this was a low number for the GOP and a high one for the Democrats.

The analyst had a remarkable explanation: the public prefers to make a choice between clear alternatives and the fewer the better. That is, Hilary vs. Obama will attract more votes than Giuliani vs. Huckabee vs. Romney vs. McCain vs. Paul. I nearly drove off the road.

That was an insane position, right? How could anyone prefer less choices to more? But then I thought about it more and a few observations came out:

1. Candidates cannot easily be evaluated in the abstract

This isn’t like Coke vs. Pepsi or chocolate versus vanilla. The rating of a candidate is done over a variety of issues and character traits.  And to make matters worse, we have limited information on how strong a candidate is on issues where they have not been tested. (For instance, Barack sounds like he is a born leader but he has had few opportunities to test this trait.)

Even assuming we trusted candidates and had perfect information, we have to look at our concerns across many dimensions. A typical voter has some opinion on some subset of: trade policy, immigration policy, reproductive rights, the GWoT, the Iraq War, North Korea, Iran, the death penalty, education reforms, civil liberties, homeland security, and tax and fiscal policy. And that’s just policy. We also have to factor in decision making, intelligence, leadership, compassion, credibility, and work ethic. This ultimately makes the whole solution akin to solving a giant multi-variable equation. Given that five or six variables challenges even very strong math students, it’s understandable that we have trouble with this choice.

Even if you could score a candidate on every dimension, optimizing this is very difficult to understand. Why?  That brings me to proposition 2.

2. Part of the problem in evaluating candidates is we don’t have obvious preferences built up.

What’s more important to me between abortion rights, civil liberties, and a coherent Iraq policy? Well I don’t want to choose. I want to get all of the right outcomes. But parties assemble on coalitions and we are forced to make trade offs in our political lives.  For instance, I’m pro-free trade but I’m more interested in social liberalism so I’ll choose Edwards over Romney. But we don’t like the harder choices. At some point we have to chose between which passion we care about the most. And that is very hard.

3. Our tendency is to pick certain constraints and rule people out based on that.

(note: the math in this section is fuzzy but mostly researched)

I’m single so I’ll use this example: pretend you’re looking for a mate and God tells you you can choose from every eligible partner in the world except people you already know of. They’re going to say yes. So, you probably are looking at hundreds of millions of potential mates. The optimal man or woman could be anywhere. And unlike real life, they will not turn you down. I’d argue the natural tendency would be to look for a person you know or a celebrity who is (in your head) the epitome of the traits you desire. But I’m tossing that option.

So, I still have a few hundred million women to sort through. I can’t actually get through all of them. Even if I could, I couldn’t process the data. So I’m going to do category selects.

Start with age and language. I’m 27 and I can speak English, Spanish, and French. When I select for English, French, and Spanish speakers who are my age (25-32), we’ve whittled the population to approximately 40 million women. That’s clearly still too many women. Ok, now we start doing more preferences. I’ll look at college educated women. Oh, the number drops a lot to 10 million. Ok, I lied, I probably want an American or Canadian woman. Ok, now we’re down to 3 million. That’s still a lot. Even if I speed dated, I couldn’t get through that. Next goes intelligence: knock out everyone with an IQ under 120.  (Yes, I may have done some redundant selection here.) That gets us to 150 thousand. Ok, now we’re getting tricky. Do looks or personality drop next?

You can imagine where it goes from here. And the horrifying thing is that in this example, God gave me access to everyone and I still couldn’t ensure I’d make the optimal choice. The end cuts could easily be dropping out a perfect woman. The reason is that our desires are not cut and dried. I want someone who satisfies many criteria well, but the specific functions of each are poorly known. And to make matters worse, with a partner or with a politician, I don’t want to do trade offs. I wince. Hence, the categorical cuts.

Conclusion:

Gary Danko’s versus Denny’s

I’m a foodie and I love fancy restaurants. I also like comfort food. And there’s good reason for enjoying both: the experiences are truly unique. In a gourmet Michelin rated restaurant, the chef is in command. They will often give you a full constructed menu and you have to choose between meals rather than items. The flipside is Denny’s: tons of options, the menu is basically at your mercy. You can get 17 eggs poached and four pieces of bacon  on the side of a Lumberjack Special. You can get Hollandaise sauce with scrambled eggs. A gourmet chef would kill you if you asked for such a thing.

So, imagine you walk into a fancy restaurant and they give you an enormous menu. The chef is bored tonight and you’re the only customer. And he says he’ll make you any of 100 meals. They are all entirely different. For beverages, one has champagne, one has Rioja, one has orange juice, one soymilk, one goat milk. The deserts vary. Everything does. What will you do? Can you actually read 100 items? My gut reaction will be to look for things I cannot eat and things I love and use them to constrain choice. But is there a risk that by killing a meal that has white zin, I may have missed the best combination of soup, appetizer, and entree ever? And that might have mattered more than the wine? Yet, that’s the only way we can balance these equations. We can’t solve them for ourselves.

My summation: we prefer the presentation of choice but will seek to immediately constrain it. That is, don’t take my freedom away from me. I’ll do that myself.

What does a Coen brothers movie, an iPhone, and my startup have in common?

I’m thinking about innovation today. In order to innovate, to create a new business model, or to do anything new you have to abandon some existing illusions. This is alarmingly difficult to do. It’s often hard to watch.

I saw No Country for Old Men on its opening day. I was enamored from beginning to end. Like A History of Violence and Limbo, it uses the suspense genre and subverts it to discuss more significant ideas. Yet, that subversion comes at a price. The audience is frequently alienated.

I think all the films require some inspection (and perhaps introspection) to understand, but I don’t believe that any of them are inordinately complicated. Yet all three films were simultaneously criticized (by the public) and adored (by the literati) for their endings. And I won’t even discuss the Sopranos. There are two elements at work:

First, all these works attempted to introduce new ideas in traditional form. They broke the artistic contract between the viewer and the content producer.

Second, the new elements were not obviously called out. The audience had to come to them.

The best analogy I can draw is a very good consumer product with awesome features and no clean UI. Does that make it smug? Perhaps. But there’s an insistence that the work should stand on its own terms, rather thanobeying convention. In a vacuum, we laud this approach. In reality, it is painful.

“We do what we do best, not what is best to do…” – Martin Amis, roughly

For state of mind, I recently read an essay by Paul Graham on learning how to do what you love. Graham’s primary conclusions appear to be: 1) doing what you really love will become a relentless search for some and often painful, 2) understanding the difference between what you love and what seems prestigious is difficult (Stumbling Upon Happiness, perhaps?), 3) if you are pursuing it, it may very well pay off. But perhaps we have no choice.

This has been a steady preoccupation of mine for the past few years, that question of what we do and why we do it. Despite being remarkably intelligent, we humans rarely seem to consider that our actions have meaningful alternatives. We push inexorably down a narrow hallway to a life that is based on what has been accomplished, not what we wish to see accomplished. And then, when there, we make choices to preserve status or keep our futures on target. We do this with often tragic consequences. The oddest thing about it is that our best spiritual leaders, supposedly the stewards of our morals, all cautioned about this trend.

That’s pretty esoteric, so let me make it clear: you grow up, you usually fall in love early, you usually have children, you usually buy a house. Like socially acceptable crack, your life now revolves around this construct. I’m not down on marriage (though I’m less upbeat than some on the topic), but if you hold back on any one of those decisions, the game changes. Once children enter the mix, everything falls apart.

In the excellent film “Thank You for Not Smoking“, Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) puts this perfectly when he hollowly justifies his role as a tobacco lobbyist with, “everyone’s got to pay the mortgage” immediately followed by his admission that that claim is a “Yuppie Nuremburg Defense.” And moreover, since people justify their behavior through their dependents and possessions, could we be a better society if we all rented?

The thing that occupies my mind is that these issues seem academic, but they have profound and perverse ramifications. Since we’ve entered Pontius Pilate-mode on Iraq, we aren’t considering why we were such suckers in the first place. I’ll submit that we allowed it to happen merely because of this mold of thinking. If you’re afraid of loss, you can justify your behavior with any action. Lacking sound economic trade-off analysis , conscience irrationally fights fear and fear’s fires can be be better stoked. And so bitterness, fear of starvation, and economic hardship become war, genocide, and any number of other brutalities.

It may be that worrying about goodness is just a terrible idea. Carol Shields might have been saying that very thing in “Unless.” But as Paul Graham cautioned, I probably am not going to get around it, so I best put my shoulder to the wheel…