The meaning of “pessimal”

The following appears in The New York Times story on digital globes by Mark Vanhoenacker:

For digital globe engineers, the holy grail remains a spherical computer screen. Edward R. Tufte, the author of “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information,” is enthusiastic about the potential of digital globes to remind us of earth’s offline realities — “by forgetting about the 3D whole Earth, flatland economic optimizing leads to global pessimizing” — as well as the possibility that a company like Apple will someday soon roll out a Retina-caliber spherical display.

An inquiring emailer asked about “pessimizing.” My response:

Pessimal is a word my housemate (Ludwell Sibley) and I concocted around 1963 at Stanford; it is the opposite of optimal. It was my response to economisting (see my Beautiful Evidence on economisting) theories that claim some sort of optimal outcomes (usually in a narrow, theoretical sense). That, in turn, led to the mocking phrase “Pareto pessimal” to make fun at optimality claims, probably as a response to reading Buchanan and Tullock. Similar play to encourage a bit of skepticism about statistical estimation theory: instead of “Least Squares Estimators,” “Most Squares Estimators.”

It is also my story about how the Earth ends: that local optimizing (local maximization of local interests) eventually adds up, via a massive accumulation of externalities and unanticipated consequences, to global pessimizing. Global warming might work along those lines. Or when too many Dear Leaders go thermonuclear. Or perhaps some hints in the recent financial crash, as fiercely local optimizers aggregated to a big screw-up.

More grandly: locally competitive evolution and locally competitive markets, which, while producing locally optimal outcomes (at least in our theory-dreams), lead to globally lousy results. Seeds of their own destruction and so on. This is also an answer to the Fermi Paradox “Where are they?”, where they = extraterrestrial intelligence. Thus the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been unsuccessful because ETI’s have blown themselves up before they were able to spread, conquer, or communicate successfully with other intelligence beings. So it goes.

These thoughts partly grow from maybe the best paper ever in social science, the sociologist
Robert Merton’s “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action” (by Robert Merton the father, not the economist son).

I was thrilled that pessimizing got into the Times, which now makes it officially a word, defined easily by being in parallel with optimizing. I sent the quote in an email to the reporter (probably after an interview) so as to get it exactly the way I wanted to say it, and the Times quoted it accurately.

Other words of mine: chartjunk, data-ink, data-ink-ratio, non-data-ink, sparkline, slopegraph, rugplots, ghostgrid (graph paper), economisting. At Princeton years ago, I taught a statistical graphics seminar with John Tukey, who made up his own very extensive private vocabulary (he coined the words bit and software) and was said to speak in Tukish.