How to Be a Bad Tourist in Croatia

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

— Herbert Simon

It's easy to grab attention on social media, hard to hold it. 

Attention-grabbing headlines (like the one for this post) assault us moment by moment.

But the vast majority of the posts attached to such headlines fail to pay off.

Like a damp Chinese rocket, they fizzle upon launch, leaving us vexed and perplexed. (I read the whole post about touring Croatia and still haven't a clue how to be a good tourist there.)

Most social posts disappoint readers because their authors aren't rewarded for legwork, but only for eyeballs.

All you find when you read these posts, at best, are vapid opinions, impressions, clichés, and half-truths. 

Hard research and data are absent.

Economist Herbert Simon blamed readers, not writers, for the failure.

Humanity has a habit, Simon believed, of coasting through life without seeking data; in fact, shunning it.

We make all of most important decisions—about ourselves, our families, our businesses, our habitats, our government, and our planet—based on half-assed data-gathering.

He called our method of decision-making satisficing (satisfying + sufficing).

To satisfice is to settle on a course of action that's acceptable—that suffices despite your lack of data about causes, conditions, and consequences.

Usually, that mans we choose the very first option that presents itself, and never the "optimal" option.

Simon believed we are fundamentally—perhaps genetically—allergic to data and that most serious problems we face are "computationally intractable."

Only artificial intelligence, he believed, could save mankind from its penchant for bad decision-making.

I'm sure if I asked a supercomputer to advise me about being a good tourist in Croatia, the machine would tell me to stay home and read journalist Slavenka Drakulić's 250-page Cafe Europa Revisted and maybe leave Croatia to itself.