Optimize everything
- Optimization works astonishingly well in narrow domains — factories, ads, load times. Smart people generalize: if rigor helped *here*, it should help *everywhere*. Romance, taste, and slack look like waste on a spreadsheet.
- Over-optimization kills the romance. It strips the surplus meaning that makes a thing valuable to a buyer, a reader, or a partner. You get a locally efficient husk and wonder why demand fell.
- Jakob Greenfeld’s anti-optimization point lands: squeezing every variable can destroy the very quality you were trying to maximize. Romance isn’t inefficiency — it’s part of the value.
- Optimize the boring constraints. Leave room for taste, story, and play where value is created by surplus, not by squeezing.
See also Romance language and Jakob on anti-optimization.