An insight

Biggest policy mistake most make, at least w.r.t. goal of effective collective action, is to focus on what they'd do if king/queen, instead of what compromises they'd make, & which of current limited politically-feasible options they find least bad. This continues w/ Covid19.

— Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) May 5, 2020

This is a version of my observation that in too many decisions involving complex loosely coupled evolving processes, people attempt to default to finding maximizing solutions - finding the solution that provides the most of a single desired outcome.

The reality is that complex, loosely couple, evolving processes have multiple stakeholders, each with evolving multiple goals, each with a different and evolving prioritization of those goals, and each facing different and evolving constraints and tradeoffs.

The best you can hope for is to navigate across those stakeholders towards a solution that is acceptably beneficial to the most number over time. It is the acceptance of an optimal solution over a maximum solution.