Bounded Rationality and the Remains of the Day

I'm blogging right now because I literally cannot decide what else to do. I did my dishes already, and I could clean my bathroom (lord knows it needs it), but i'm really tired and I'm in a shitty mood and I don't feel like it. I could work on any of the various school projects that require my attention, but I have failed to do that all evening, and I sure as shit don't think that's gonna happen at this late hour (it's 10:20 pm). I could pick up my banjo and screw around on it, but I'm probably not gonna do that. I could go read a book, but I don't know...what would I read? I took my library books back today cause they were late. So, what am I supposed to do now? And if I read, then that means I'm not gonna clean my bathroom or work on school or play banjo, and don't I need to do those things too?

Arrgh!!!

Herbert Simon introduced the concept of "bounded rationality" into social science and organizational theory. One of Simon's most lasting ideas is "satisficing." Simon argued that humans are not designed to follow the homo economicus model of rational optimization that had been assumed in micro economics. In that model, optimization is done across the entire universe of options available to the decision maker at any one time. Under this model, humans (and by extension, their organizations) are maximizers. But Simon argued that's not how people actually work. Instead, people make tradeoffs of one or two variables against each other at any one time. They never actually contain the unbounded universe of possibilities in their heads; that's just too much data to calculate. Instead of looking across all of the possible investments in the entire world to decide how to spend a few new dollars in profit, a company says "ok, we can buy a new machine or hire a new employee." That's called satisficing.

Right now, I am paralyzed by choice. How can I possibly optimize the last hour of my day? My brain cannot make all the necessary caluclations to maximize my utility. Perhpas I need to convert myself to a satisficing mentality. I need to bound my rationality for it to even function. If my choice was only between cleaning the bathroom and watching a movie on netflix, or between drawing some pictures and reading a book, maybe I could make that decision. But, here I am, just going along with default setting...screwing around on the internet. But, I guess I also just wrote a little about Herb Simon and bounded rationality and its fight with rational choice theory. So...i guess that was my satisficing decision.