This is a story about a main character who hates min-maxing, embarking on a new VRMMO journey with an alternative mentality to the norm.

Everyone Loves Min-Maxing (A Guide To Faulty Assumptions And Cognitive Biases)

Chapter 1 – Everyone Loves Min-Maxing (And The Folly of Faulty Assumptions)

A twenty-four year old recent college grad with dark hair and a lanky build stood in front of a large box that just came via delivery truck. It was the most recent capsule machine for the game Edenquest, the hottest new virtual mmo on the market. Once he figured out how to set up the machine, he’d be ready for launch day of Edenquest, which was in just a few hours.

His name was Daniel, and he was going to embark on a journey this weekend with dragons and adventurers and inns and taking on newbie quests and… the inevitable min-maxers barking on the forums like rabid dogs.

There were few things in this world that Daniel hated more than blind min-maxing. He hated it with a passion, and he hated it with all his soul, but he did so with a logical reason in mind. A reason that required a more open mind to understand than some idiots could muster up. And when he said idiots, he was calling out more than just gamers– he included engineers, revenue obsessed executives at Fortune 100 companies, and other min-maxing idiots with that as well.

Min-maxing was, in a nutshell, a solution to an optimization problem for certain isolated systems, like old video games. Now Daniel was not opposed to optimization. He thought that min-maxing had its time and place where it was in fact a good solution.

That time and place was an isolated system with a limited amount of variables, and a static system. In that situation, which often was the case with older games like Baldur's Gate that calculated outcomes based on stat thresholds and dice rolls, a min-maxed adventurer could easily pass the first ogre with a +1 enchanted dagger that gave just enough penetration in conjunction with his 18 strength and +2 from a strength potion to kill the ogre in three blows without taking a hit. Then they could go to town and pass a companion check with their 4 charisma stat and recruit a new party member to continue their journey.

But if just one variable changed, just ONE variable, and the entire equation could be thrown off, resulting in three hundred and forty six dead civilians.

The Boeing 737 Max was a new aircraft designed and marketed by The Boeing Company and slapped with “max” at the end like a piece of meat, kind of like a new iphone model. The new aircraft line ended up crashing twice in quick succession within a year and a half. The first crash occurred twelve minutes after takeoff from Jakarta, Indonesia, and the second crash occurred six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Daniel wasn’t an expert on aerospace engineering, but he knew the gist of what happened from speaking to one of his friends in the industry. Under pressure from the marketing and sales departments, Boeing engineers tried to create a more fuel efficient aircraft than before, by making the engines massive and shifting the new heavy and gigantic engines to a slightly more forward and higher place on the wings.

That shift in weight and position of the engine, in combination with a new computerized flight guidance system, caused the crashes.

And to rub salt on the wound, the crashes may have been preventable by certain safety modules that were sold as options by Boeing. As OPTIONS. As optional happy meal toys to the big mac max.

The company jeopardized the lives of hundreds of civilians to sell safety modules as options, and to slap “max” and “more fuel efficient” marketing jibes to the price tag of the new airplane. As if Apple changing the shape of the headphone jack almost every year to sell more chargers wasn’t scummy enough, companies like Boeing were changing the entire design of their tried-and-true aircraft like they were headphone jacks just to sell more of them.

As Daniel said, just one variable changed, and the entire equation got thrown off. In an effort to min-max fuel efficiency and revenue, three hundred and forty six people died.

What Daniel called blind min-maxing was a min-max mentality built off of blind trust in faulty assumptions, and applying the same tactics from an isolated system to a slightly more complex, chaotic system. But life was not an isolated system, and even games had come so far that they were no longer dice roll simulators that could be safely min maxed.

Oh, the boeing thing is just an anomaly.

Things like that don’t happen all the time. It’s not like other important things are also built off of min-max formulas.

Min-maxing and blind min-maxing are just harmless video game concepts.

Wrong.

Completely wrong.

While he was studying accounting in college, Daniel learned about a certain financial model known as the capital asset pricing model. Within this model, there was a variable known as the risk free rate, denoted as Rf. This was also known as the US treasury bill interest rate.

The US treasury bill rate was risk free? Now that right there was a faulty assumption.

To make this concept simple for the non-financially minded, this means that this stupid, idiotic, min-maxed formula assumed that the United States would always, without doubt, without exception, and without ever hiccuping, pay back treasury bills.

Now in 99.9% of universes for the foreseeable future, this was fine. But what if the United States was unable to pay back its debt obligations? Hell, what if the United States were to collapse?

It was unlikely for the United States government to completely collapse, especially within a single person’s lifetime, but was the risk truly zero if that lifetime got increased to a thousand years? Was it truly risk free? Of course not, and people knew this and still used the formula, because it worked 99.9% of the time. And that exposed the crux of the problem of a min-maxed formula– reliance on assumptions.

If a formula worked 99.9% of the time, what was the point of worrying about the possibility of failure? The United States government would never fall, right?

But that just wasn’t true. Speaking of an empire that persisted through millenia and people thought could never possibly fall… imagine the Roman empire never fell, but instead just persisted in its own way for thousands upon thousands of years.

That empire existed in the east. That empire was Ancient China, and after thousands of years of tenure, Ancient China finally fell. In the twentieth century, the very last emperor of Ancient China was exiled, and the empire was abolished.

And this led to a famous example of a min-maxed build failing horribly.

There was a very famous min-maxed real life build that existed in Ancient China and persisted until very recently. That build was called a eunuch. For anyone who wasn’t familiar with the concept, a eunuch was a male who was castrated as a boy to become the emperor’s assistant, resulting in the ultimate min-max build, sacrificing the ability to form a family, essentially much what made life worth living, with the ability to access the emperor’s court and close social circle. Many eunuchs ended up wielding immense political power and prestige, but without the ability to sire children this power was single lifetime use only. That was the tradeoff, and it was a good one for a young boy from a poor family looking to sacrifice everything for a chance at a better life.

The very last eunuch of the empire was castrated just weeks before the emperor abdicated his throne. And just like that, a min-max build built off of a faulty assumption completely failed, leaving the man destitute and scarred for the rest of his life for no benefit.

Min-maxing without considering assumptions was exactly like a person driving down an empty highway at max speed with their eyes closed. Assuming that the road was straight, assuming that the highway was empty, assuming that cars drove in a straight line without manual input, there was no need to keep your eyes open. But if any one of those assumptions was wrong...

With that thought in mind, Daniel opened the rectangular cardboard box in front of him, revealing a sleek and shiny capsule with the brand Evercore in bold capital letters emblazoned across the top of his capsule.

Once he plugged this damn thing in, he was going to make a character and go blast some min-maxers.