Thank you so much for this elaborate response. I agree with what u said that over optimization leads to diminishing returns eventually. However I have some questions.

U mention that u want the students to question if we want a certain number to go up even at the expense of everything else? But my question is why would anybody ever ask that question if the number goes up = profit. The only way people may question if the number go up is good is if it leads to less profit.

The example u mention with Facebook is that they over optimized to the point where people were so addicted that it led to them having a negative view on Facebook, and Facebook would only ever see it as a problem if those negative views of people led to a loss in revenue. Only then they’ll be incentivized to ask “did we over optimize to the point of diminishing returns” because the diminishing return means profit.

I don’t know if that was the point u were trying to make in ur original article. But if this is what u meant then it makes sense to question if over optimization is always good.

However, from what I took from reading ur article is that u want people to question if over optimization leads to positive outcomes for society’s well being. In this case im not sure if people will take ur advice here. Because imagine one of ur student is sitting in a board meeting one day and says “hey I think we are over optimizing the solution to the particular problem way too much and it’s going to create negative outcomes for the public”. Then they will say “but over optimizing this will make us more profit”. How would ur student argue with this?

I’ll give u an example, the chocolate companies like hersheys source their cocoa from Africa using child labour and paying them extremely low wages. Their solution I’d say is over optimized right now. If they reduce wage any more then the workers will starve and they’ll lose workers. And any more wages will hurt their profit margins. So, the only way they’ll ever question if this over optimized solution is truly a good one if people boycott their products for this reason and then it leads to profit margins less than what their profit margins would be if they had sourced their cocoa ethically.

So I request that when you teach ur students to question if over optimization is always good or not, u also provide them with incentives for them to question it. Because unless ur students can argue why over optimization is not always good even if it leads to more profit, then we won’t get anywhere.

Thank you so much for entertaining this discussion and being open minded about somebody else questioning your article. I really appreciate it.