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Comment by tzot | Hacker News Reader

If one can absolutely prioritize their “wants” (no “want” has equal rank with any other), then any choice between two of them is simple: choose the higher ranked and “sacrifice” the lower one, right?

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It's trickier than that because often those "wants" aren't discrete and undividable, and ranking A over B often doesn't imply that you'd accept getting zero of B until A is fully fulfilled, rather you are likely to prefer sacrificing some A to get some B even if A is a priority and you'd prefer it to have a larger "share of fulfilment" than B.

How do you resolve a choice between poorly fulfilling a higher-ranked want and perfectly fulfilling a lower-ranked one?

In the context of an absolute ranking system, the choice is to act towards the higher-ranked want vs the lower-ranked want, so the resolution is simple: the higher-ranked wins. If one values completion over incompleteness, then one can prioritize that want over all (or many) others.

This, uhhh, this seems like a good argument against using an absolute ranking system. Suppose you want to eat and have money. If you rank eating first, you'd be willing to pay a million dollars for a can of tuna. If you rank money first, you'd be willing to starve to death so long as someone offered you a single dollar.

Yes, ranked wants with artificially restricted phrasing have exactly this problem you describe.

Guestimate the available resources, and maybe do some of both?

But this is a hard choice. Do you want to try and fail to be a rockstar, or become a moderately successful software engineer who will be wealthy and have a stable career. The question is what aspects of each want you actually want?

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