ellie Voyyd's Website

No X Is Better Than Bad X

This is a heuristic you should get to know. Think of these examples:

No leadership are better than bad leadership.
No security is better than bad security.
No optimization is better than bad optimization.
No news is good news.

Like with any heuristic, it does fail in some cases:

Eating bad food (like McDonalds) is better than not eating.
Having a bad life is better than not being alive.
Making bad art is better than not making anything.
Having a bad social interaction is better than isolating.

I bet you can think of situations where even these counter-examples fail, but that is the point of a heuristic: it doesn't attempt to solve everything, but is good enough that you can usually fall back on it if you can't make a decision with as much information as you'd like.

It is a good idea to regularly evaluate the way you go about things, and "No X is better than Bad X" is a good evaluation tool.

An example might be in organizing your things: maybe, in a half-assed attempt to organize your things, you came up with a categorization scheme that seemed "good enough", but as you go about your daily life you come to realize that this categorization scheme you came up with actually just ends up making things more complicated and tedious than they were before they were already.