Yes, the unknowledgeable shopper will feel overwhelmed if you ask them what spice you want to buy out of 40 different spices, but the world would be much worse if there was a mandate that you could only buy pepper and garlic.
It would be easier for the unskilled cook, but serious chefs would have their ability severely curtailed.
Likewise, I think a lot of the "paradox of choice" applications evolve into tyranny - force simpliciy, because hey, that's great for people! All these choices confuse people! It's true, yes, that 80% to 90% of people don't want more choice and the choice is a hardship for them. But removing choice from that last 10 to 20% that are educated on the tradeoffs is really, really, really bad.
There's a fundamental flaw with the whole premise of paradox of choice - it ignores that there are people for whom a wide variety of choices is incredibly valuable and important. Encouraging restricting choices (especially by force! yuck!) makes things easier for most people, but destroys a lot of potential for amazing creations as well.
The kinds of choices I hate are the ones that have been deliberately and often artificially cooked up between things that are in essence the same -- or that I'd benefit from really being the same.
Two examples:
(1) Washing powder. My local supermarket has a whole aisle filled with essentially identical products in different packaging (many from the same manufacturer/conglomerate). Ironically, this proliferation of meaningless branding seems to push out genuine choice: despite the acres of shelf space devoted to washing powders, I can't buy an ecologically sound washing powder here.
(2) Travel insurance. The choices faced for insurance (and other financial products) are genuinely overwhelming: to sensibly choose between the hundreds of available policies I'd need to read and compare the T&Cs for each one. I'd enormously prefer there to be some central body mandating a minimum standard for travel insurance (or maybe 2 or 3 levels of minimum standards) and then just pick the cheapest policy adhering to my standard of choice.
In the absence of this, companies often appear to go out of their way to make it difficult to compare their products with others' -- mobile/cell-phone plans are a case in point here.
In short, the 'paradox of choice' should really be 'the paradox of pointless artificial choices'... but then it becomes more obvious that it's only a paradox if you were previously a sucker for economic theory at its purest and most crazy.
Less is only better insofar as it widens the "difference gap" between each option.
Having said that... Why Julia Sweeney is always at TED is still a mystery to me. When one of her videos come up, I can't find the skip button fast enough.
That said, I think that one of the biggest entrepreneurial opportunities on the web is recommendation of content. I sometimes think about how much stuff there is to experience, from books to movies to music, and it depresses me that I'll only ever be able to enjoy a tiny, tiny fraction of it all before I die. With that in mind, I'd like to know I'm experiencing the best this world has to offer. It's a complicated problem, but I have my wallet ready for the person who solves it.
Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds
http://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_...
William Kamkwamba on building a windmill
http://www.ted.com/talks/william_kamkwamba_on_building_a_win...
anyway here is my answer a year ago : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=443008
