BOOK 1 DESCRIPTION — CORE
(Optimization or Pseudo-optimization — The Foundation Volume)
When is a decision truly allowed to be called “better”?
This question sounds simple.
Yet most important decisions in life, organizations, and technology dodge it.
Instead, we say:
“reasonable at the time”
“no other choice”
“anyone in my position would do the same”
This book starts from a suspicion:
If a decision is only correct in the short term
but degrades the entire future choice space,
is it still allowed to be called “optimal”?
Optimization is not an outcome; it is a label
“Optimal” is not a self-contained state.
It is a label — and that label only has meaning
when we know who has the authority to attach it, and by what standard.
In practice, many decisions are called optimal
only because:
they win in a narrow comparison,
within a short timeframe,
from a perspective locked in from the start.
This book does not ask:
“Is that decision reasonable?”
It asks:
“Among the possibilities eliminated from the outset,
is there any that disqualifies this result from being called optimal?”
Pseudo-optimization: locally correct, wrong in evaluative scope
A decision can:
improve one metric,
solve an immediate problem,
and still make the system harder to live with later.
This book calls that phenomenon pseudo-optimization —
not technically wrong,
but wrong in the scope of evaluation.
The issue is not whether the decision is right or wrong,
but:
what standard allows us to keep calling it optimal
once its consequences spill beyond the original frame?
This book does nothing
This book:
offers no advice,
supplies no formula,
teaches no way to make a “righter” decision.
It exists to strip the right to call a decision “optimal”
when the decision-maker has not clarified
the standard they are implicitly using.
If you need certainty — this book is not for you.
If you are ready to doubt your own standard —
this is the starting point.
