the place we ended up is where the truth is told

so in my effort to assemble songs that would psyche me up, cos it's so hard to get out of bed these days, i've been listening to army of anyone. there is something about that that sounds very much like stone temple pilots, but without scott weiland. the lead singer is richard patrick, who also fronts filter, and his voice is nowhere as good as weiland, which kind of drags down their sound. there is something just a little boring about their songs, which is fine if it's cranked up loud, but not the best for listening to in my room. though in my research (read: wikipedia) about army of anyone, there is apparently a rumor that STP are going to reform for a summer tour. that would be mind-blowing. considering there are talks of a led zeppelin world tour, i just need kurt cobain to come back from the dead to make my life complete.

but that's not really the main point. a couple of days ago i was thinking about rationality while doing a particularly irritating reading. it concerns the idea of moving from a second best situation to a first best situation. the problem with that is that doing so involves taking a hit to utility, which means that rationally, we are unable to do that without either some kind of radical break or the removal of the second best situation entirely.

now what if we don't really know what the first or second best are? rather, we are not sure of the combination of decisions we need to take to get to either. there is now an additional problem. suppose we begin at an arbitrary point and we are trying to make decisions to get to our first best. but we don't really know how to get there. so we make a series of rational, but not necessarily optimal decisions due to incomplete information, and inadvertently end up at the second best. the first best situation now becomes, rationally, out of reach. we have unknowingly removed a possible outcome, while being entirely rational, but there is clearly a possible improvement.

i think a lot of the world's suboptimal outcomes result from a process like that. the fact is that when information is bad, we are led to make a lot of horrible, but entirely rational, decisions. at the end of the day, we end up at a place where we can understand how things could be better, but no idea how to get there except to incur great cost. how problematic.