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I meant to post this a long time ago, if you didn't see it yet, those 20 minutes won't be wasted :

The paradox of choice - TED talk from Barry Schwartz.

I'm happy to see I'm not the only person who feels there's something wrong when you go to the supermarket and you have 50 different pasta sauces to choose from!

I remember reading an article about the Google homepage in Korea, which has additional rollover animations, instead of the minimalistic look we're used to. The article said Google added extra options because market research showed that people there attributed more credibility and value to products which had loads of options. Yet, when the people were asked about their satisfaction with the electronic fridges, ovens and whatnot that they bought, several weeks down the line, they almost unequivocally said they would have preferred something simpler to use.

very interesting! thanks for sharing!

Hasn't this been a big problem with Windows? It wants to give you everything, of which you'll use a fraction and realize it doesn't do everything you want anyway.

Partly, the simplicity of choice is why I like RTK. It's either a yes or no with no reason to guess. I might disagree with the No sending the card back to stack 1 regardless of where it's at, but I don't have to squirm on how "correct" I was.

On the otherhand... I have 5 more fingers.

Since I'm a poor student I just buy whatever is the cheapest price per weight

The negative effects caused by an over-abundance of choice can create a source of opportunities though. How many consultancies, magazines, monesupermarket.coms and other services would go under if choice was restricted?

Of course I'm not going to read reviews or hire a consultant to buy my tomato sauce but will I care if it's not the best one?

I agree with the talk, but just looking at the other side of the coin.

By the way, I think that Japan is pretty similar to Korea in the way that you mentioned. If I had to guess what the most popular home page was, I'd go for yahoo.co.jp which is a bit cleaner now but I used to think it looked like a mess.

Also, he says in the talk that it's not possible to buy a cell phone with few options. This isn't true. In Japan, they marketed a phone which consisted of the number pad, a green button to dial and a red button to hang up and nothing else. Not even an address book. It was designed for the "elderly" and people who were fed up with excess functionality.

I thought it was a really interesting product and I was curious to see how well it did.

Nukemarine Wrote:Hasn't this been a big problem with Windows? It wants to give you everything, of which you'll use a fraction and realize it doesn't do everything you want

Reminds me of this comic.

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wrightak Wrote:In Japan, they marketed a phone which consisted of the number pad, a green button to dial and a red button to hang up and nothing else. Not even an address book.

But that would be quite below the "magic number" that Barry Schwartz mentions at the end of the talk, i.e. perhaps taken too far on the other end? I mean the address book would seem like something nearly every user would want to make use of.

Also as for the elderly perhaps the motivation was to make the phone more "accessible" rather than more "humanized" (ie. users with hands shaking , or trouble to pinpoint very small buttons, lower eye sight...). So I wouldn't expect those results to reflect the interest or lack of interest for a simpler phone.

Saw this a few years ago when my friend showed me.

I think there is some surface validity, but I don't really buy into it. And I also think it is a cop out.

I will agree that there is probably some paralyzing effect when some people are given too many choices. But I don't really believe that the choices themselves are the cause or reason for that paralyzing effect. I think it is something else within the people. I don't have any definite idea of what this may be, but some of it may be a lack of experience in making choices.

Living itself is a choice. We consciously feed ourselves. We (hopefully) move our lives forward. If someone is confronted with choices of jam or electronics and becomes overwhelmed and paralyzed to the point of it deserving serious discussion and merit, I can't imagine how they are dealing with the infinite choices they are presented with in life.

Probably I imagine people like that don't really live their lives by "choice". They go day by day, doing what they've been trained to do in the last xx years of their life, unconscious of the fact that everything they do is a choice and something they have the ability to affirm or deny.

To reach the conclusion of making a choice people must be able to evaluate their choices. If someone can evaluate all their choices and the person knows themselves what is important to them, I don't think most people would experience this paralyzing effect. But if they can't evaluate their choices, of course making a decision would be difficult. So again, if presented with an abundance of choices, this speaker might say it is that abundance itself which paralyzes people, but this is another example where it is not the number of choices itself, but instead an inability to measure the choices.

I think there is certainly validity in the point made about the health system. Medicine should be recommended by a professional, not left to normal people to gamble on which one sounds more beneficial or seems to have less drawbacks.

Choice is a funny thing. For example in the past women didn't have much choice as to whether they can work or not. Most families lived on one income. After changes in women's rights they gained the choice to work which is definitely a good thing in terms of independence, and many did choose to work.

By doing so the income in working families increased, they could afford higher prices, and that invariably inflated prices, especially in housing, to match. The net result is that today families have lost choice, because for many the only choice is that both HAVE to work full time jobs in order to be able to afford a decent home.

A smarter choice would have been for us all to aim towards working 6 months out of the year and still be able to afford everything we need. Oh well.

(As an aside, you'll find that whenever something increases affordability of homes for example higher incomes, lower interest rates, or tax breaks, people stretch themselves and home prices inflate to match them such that at the end homes are no more affordable than before and there is no way back).

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sutebun Wrote:But I don't really believe that the choices themselves are the cause or reason for that paralyzing effect. I think it is something else within the people.

Like fear of making the wrong choice? Fear is a good candidate to paralyze people.

I see what you're coming from with your description of choice. But I think Barry Schwartz 's point is "do we have to impose ourselves all those choices, many of which are unnecessary" ? Do we need to burden ourselves like this? It's not a choice of what to do with our lives, it's choosing from arrays of possibilities that we created ourselves, many which are actually mediocre! (applies to the supermarket offerings, jobs, electronic products, relations, you name it).

And how do you evaluate those choices? Often you can only evaluate after you've made the choice and see the consequences unfold. That's why it take guts to create new ventures and most entrepreneurs feel the adrenaline "rush" when they take risks. You can't fully evaluate the choices in advance. You can calculate the risks, or you can have choices which are situations you have already faced. In Barry Schwartz's example, if he could have chosen the same pair of jeans he always wore before, the choice was trivial, there was no risk, he knew what would be the consequences.

ファブリス Wrote:But that would be quite below the "magic number" that Barry Schwartz mentions at the end of the talk, i.e. perhaps taken too far on the other end? I mean the address book would seem like something nearly every user would want to make use of.

Also as for the elderly perhaps the motivation was to make the phone more "accessible" rather than more "humanized" (ie. users with hands shaking , or trouble to pinpoint very small buttons, lower eye sight...). So I wouldn't expect those results to reflect the interest or lack of interest for a simpler phone.

I think that there may have been a similar model with very basic features like an address book. The one I described was definitely the most extreme though.

You're right that some of the buyers may have been forced to choose such a phone for physical considerations like the ones you mentioned. However, I remember seeing the television advertisement and I don't remember the older gentleman in it having shaky hands or bad eyesight. I may be wrong though, it was a couple of years ago when I saw it.

To say those results wouldn't reflect interest in a simpler phone assumes that at least the majority of buyers bought it because of physical considerations rather than because they want a simpler phone. Personally, I doubt this to be the case. The phone I mentioned was one example but I do believe that there are others out there which offer fewer choices. Ironically, it's the abundance of choice in itself which allows these phones to be available.

In 2004, I worked in a New Hampshire primary campaign...one thing that campaigns do is make a lot of phone calls, which poses a variety of logistical problems for getting enough phone lines for volunteers to call voters. So one thing that we did was get a bunch of prepaid cellphones for people to use.

We quickly learned that the older volunteers had a lot of trouble making calls on the cell phones. They would dial and forget to press "send". If they mis-dialed, they didn't know how to delete the mistaken number. After ending a call, they had to hunt for the "end call" button.

Even though these were very simple phones with few features, we learned to give the old people regular phones and let the younger volunteers use the cell phones.

Thora Wrote:..and greater spouse choices surely must be a good thing?

There's a big difference with spouse choices though. Presumably, at least in the societies that Barry refers to, the choice has to be mutual.

It appears I deleted while you typed - sorry. I was joking with the spouse comments. I was referring to the cartoon in the video with the couple at the alter in which the groom says, "You'll do". I thought it was amusing. On the one hand, I suppose a great number of spouse options means a greater number of potential mutual connections. But on the other hand, perhaps it just means greater chances of Barry paralysis. Now back to Kanji in Context - I'm procrastinating.

I like to think that Barry's point may have been "How can we recognize these threats to our satisfaction, and then, using our understanding avoid being dissatisfied?" Perhaps we can look at all the choices and know that the perfect salad dressing really isn't one of these 125 varieties. So, pick one that is good enough. If it's not perfect (and does the perfect choice really exist), then savor that it is basically a good choice, in spite of some problem. And don't take the rap personally that one wasn't careful enough in evaluating all the choices sufficiently to choose the one with no faults.

To get back on topic, is there a perfect order to the kanji? Is there a perfect keyword? A perfect story? Are we bad if we didn't pick the best story to use?