The Problem Of Choice

Given the overall emphasis the eldrae place on freedom of choice and freedom of choices, how do they deal with issues of overchoice and the apparently paradoxical consequence that having too many choices on the table makes people less likely to effectively make the right choice due to the need to spend more time and resources (physical and psychological) to effectively evaluate them? How does that in turn manifest in practical terms?

There’s a thing I wrote way, way back in pre-this-version-of-the-‘verse history contrasting the eldrae and human approaches to automotive dashboard design that seems peculiarly relevant here.

Specifically, that starting from what were probably fairly similar arrangements, the latter have stripped down the engine monitoring to a generic ‘check engine’ light and a vestigial temperature gauge, while the climate controls are mostly run by an overall temperature setting and some simple push-button preset configurations…

…while the former have built them up to the point at which you can not only drill down to monitor, say, the exact composition of your exhaust gases in real-time but also rewrite all 438 key parameters of the engine management computer as you go. And the climate controls let you specify individual temperature and humidity settings for each vent.

(As I believe may also have been mentioned, there’s a related effect in product design and manufacturing, which can be summed up as: the more options, the better, since products that aren’t hugely customizable don’t sell…

…this has been known to cause a few problems in the export market. There are resellers whose entire business model revolves around taking those choices away from the customer.)

This particular non-human psychological quirk has its origins back in the Precursor Era. The trakelpanis trakóras amán desired servitors capable of managing highly complex industrial and other processes that they did not wish to concern themselves with for long periods of time, something for which choice fatigue and/or overchoice error would have been a distinct flaw. Being giant reality-warping dragons at the height of their civilization, they got rid of it. Or at least pushed the threshold for it so damn high that it’s not a significant phenomenon.

(As a side note, I’d add that this would almost certainly have bitten the trakelpanis trakóras amán right on the ass given time, inasmuch as a lack of choice-fatigue corresponds strongly with qalasír and the spectacularly dynamic temperament of the race. This, though, never had a chance to happen inasmuch as their civilization blew itself up shortly thereafter, freeing the unfinished proto-eldrae to make their very own bloody, destructive mess of their First Civilization.)