I agree with the thesis of this article but I actually think the point would be better made if we switch from talking about optimizing to talking about satisficing[1].
Simply put, satisficing is searching for a solution that meets a particular threshold for acceptability, and then stopping. My personal high-level strategy for success is one of continual iterative satisficing. The iterative part means that once I have met an acceptability criterion, I am free to either move on to something else, or raise my bar for acceptability and search again. I never worry about whether a solution is optimal, though, only if it is good enough.
I think that this is what many people are really doing when they say they are "optimizing", but using the term "optimzing" leads to confusion, because satisficing solutions are by definition non-optimal (except by luck), and some people (especially the young, in my experience) seem to feel compelled to actually optimize, leading to unnecessary perfectionism.
ps — Re-reading that wikipedia article reminds me of how often the topics that make the front page as "new" thoughts have been studied and written about in detail by thinkers of the past. Herbert Simon's Bounded Rationality has a lot to say about the toping of the original link.
Instead of being so hostile toward a word that you've just encountered, how would it be if we were more curious about the concept behind it?
Satisficing is a form of constraint satisfaction under certainty, which although leads to local optima, can turn out to be more robust to unknowns.
Optimization assumes a correct model of the world, and that we can find a point within that model that gives us the best trade-offs (optimum).
But our models of the world are often incomplete or wrong. And even if we get to that optimum point, we back ourselves into a corner if the environment ever changes on us.
Instead, iteratively finding a satisfactory solutions that helps us make progress in the right direction is often far more valuable, and more robust to model mismatches to the real world.
Simply put, satisficing is searching for a solution that meets a particular threshold for acceptability, and then stopping. My personal high-level strategy for success is one of continual iterative satisficing. The iterative part means that once I have met an acceptability criterion, I am free to either move on to something else, or raise my bar for acceptability and search again. I never worry about whether a solution is optimal, though, only if it is good enough.
I think that this is what many people are really doing when they say they are "optimizing", but using the term "optimzing" leads to confusion, because satisficing solutions are by definition non-optimal (except by luck), and some people (especially the young, in my experience) seem to feel compelled to actually optimize, leading to unnecessary perfectionism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing
ps — Re-reading that wikipedia article reminds me of how often the topics that make the front page as "new" thoughts have been studied and written about in detail by thinkers of the past. Herbert Simon's Bounded Rationality has a lot to say about the toping of the original link.