Reflecting on the particular ways that perfectionism differs from the optimal policy (as someone who suffers from perfectionism) and looking to come up with simple definitions, I thought of this:
perfectionism looks to minimize the distance between an action and the ex-post optimal action but heavily dampening this penalty for the particular action “do nothing”
optimal policy says to pick the best ex-ante action out of the set of all possible actions, which set includes “do nothing”
So, perfectionism will be maximally costly in an environment where you have lots of valuable options of new things you could do (breaking from status quo) but you’re unsure whether you can come close to the best one, like you might end up choosing something that’s half as good as the best you could have done. Optimal policy would say to just give it your best, and that you should be happy since this is an amazingly good problem to have, whereas perfectionism will whisper in your ear how painful it might be to only get half of this very large chunk of potential utility, and wouldn’t it be easier if you just waited.
Reflecting on the particular ways that perfectionism differs from the optimal policy (as someone who suffers from perfectionism) and looking to come up with simple definitions, I thought of this:
perfectionism looks to minimize the distance between an action and the ex-post optimal action but heavily dampening this penalty for the particular action “do nothing”
optimal policy says to pick the best ex-ante action out of the set of all possible actions, which set includes “do nothing”
So, perfectionism will be maximally costly in an environment where you have lots of valuable options of new things you could do (breaking from status quo) but you’re unsure whether you can come close to the best one, like you might end up choosing something that’s half as good as the best you could have done. Optimal policy would say to just give it your best, and that you should be happy since this is an amazingly good problem to have, whereas perfectionism will whisper in your ear how painful it might be to only get half of this very large chunk of potential utility, and wouldn’t it be easier if you just waited.