16 ms·

Just Too Efficient

570 points by MindGods 6y ago

082349872349872 6y ago
Normally one optimises GDP because that's (a) more or less measurable, and (b) more or less correlates with things that individual wants out of society. Part of Bray's point is that going for too much efficiency is like going for pure returns at the expense of risk, another part is that GDP is merely means, not the end, and blindly optimising for GDP continues to do so even when increasing GDP starts negatively correlating with having a worthwhile society. Efficiency yes, but please to measure in human utility per input, not in currency output per input?
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
Distributism would solve these problems, I'm just not sure we could ever get there with the current vested interests getting in the way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  So basically, communal ownership of the means of production? Where have I heard about that before... Not that I disagree with it. I just think that it fits so perfectly into socialist thought (as originally intended, not any of the statist revisions) that it really seems like nothing more but market socialism without the red. In fact, reading more about it, distributivism is just market socialism without a strong theoretical backing, without philosophical study and without any real praxis, as well as much less developped.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    We should aim to have distributed systems because they are more resilient. Everyone knows the story about Gorbachev and the US supermarket but we conveniently forget it when it comes to forging our own monopoly.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Yes. This is also one of the ideas of market socialism, along with many other socialist tendencies.
      - jtolmar 6y ago
        Whoever is downvoting this - you're being absolutely absurd, this is a basic statement of fact that you can look up on wikipedia.
  - jtolmar 6y ago
    Unfortunately, a lot of people have been told that "socialism" means "state power over the economy" and refuse to engage with enough socialist/communist theory to see what it actually is. Which gets you strange projects like the above. For that audience, and over-simplifying greatly: all communists are trying to create a decentralized system that evenly spreads power, and the main split among them is how to actually do that. Anarchists think we should build decentralized power structures until they've replaced our current centralized ones. Marxist-Leninists think we should replace the state with one that promises to implement communism later. Distributism reads a lot like somebody heard of Marxism-Leninism, thought it was dumb, reinvented anarcho-communism in response, and then described the result as opposed to communism, even though it's largely the same idea as one of the main branches of communist theory.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      That was essentially my conclusion as well. It is quite sad.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      > create a decentralized system that evenly spreads power That's simply not feasible, because many centralized systems are a lot more effective than decentralized ones. And centralized systems can't be run via a committee or via direct democracy either, so you will always have some people with outsized decision-making power. At least when you reward these actors with wealth (as opposed to raw political influence, as in socialist countries) they can then go and deploy that wealth on pro-social things, like many of wealthiest businesspeople do in the US. Distributism has the right idea, it's just not universally applicable.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        There is no socialist philosophy that objects to centralization of power as long as it is kept in check and limited to it's usefulness Even Anarchism doesn't say that no one should have outsized decision-making power. Just that it shouldn't be the same people every time, that there should be a good reason for it and that it should be kept in check. The old anarchist example was that of the pirate ship :) Also, decentralized systems are not always less efficient than centralized systems. Sometimes they are much more efficient, it depends on what you are optimizing for exactly. Indeed, centralized decision-making, while viable sometimes, need not be pluripotent, and it can be limited enough that it doesn't actually create a power imbalance. Many human societies actually operated in such a way. If you actually wish to read up a bit more on that, I'd suggest in the extreme of reading up on anarchism. If you use debian, you should be able to apt-get install anarchism :)
  - vidarh 6y ago
    A lot of Christian democratic ideals basically fits into the description "market socialism without the red", usually sprinkled with socially conservative views. It's notable that in a lot of Europe, the welfare systems we have today, for example, while they happened under pressure or fear of socialism, were pushed through with the help of Christian democrats. E.g. Bismarcks pension and healthcare bills that effectively formed the first large-scale welfare system were blatant attempts at stemming the growing support for what he saw as dangerous socialist parties becoming a threat to the established order - while stealing some of their social policies he proceeded to ban dozens of groups and newspapers and arrest their leaders. But he passed those bills with the help of the conservative Christian "Zentrum", the forerunner of Merkel's CDU, by appealing to Christian values.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      There are even more radical denominations - I know of a few Christian anarchists, it's an interesting worldview.
- wrnr 6y ago
  Their is great irony in the most hierarchical religious intuition in the history of the world arguing in favour of economical decentralisation after having forcefully resisted protestantism for centuries
sudeepj 6y ago
This resonates with me a lot. I chuckle sometimes when I see things like your fridge (or a smart kitchen) will order items for you by predicting things for you need. In future, it seems tech will do transactions with other tech with lesser human involvement, all in the name of efficiency. And then this will trigger another recursive cycle of optimizations. The rate at which tech is changing and along with it our society is way faster than rate at which humans can find a coping mechanism. We do not know what we are sleepwalking into.
pcstl 6y ago
I feel like I need to plug Zvi Mowshowitz's "Immoral Mazes" series of blogposts here, as it goes pretty in-depth into the whole matter of efficiency, slack, and "how hard should we work". https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS
- lixtra 6y ago
  It would be more efficient if you added the actual link https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS ?
  - pcstl 6y ago
    I actually intended to, but when I finished writing the comment I forgot to paste the link in. Thank you.
mikeklaas 6y ago
For a much grimmer and soul-wrenching take on this, read Meditations on Moloch by Scott Alexander: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-on-moloch https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...
- radu_floricica 6y ago
  And the yin to that yang: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/28/moloch-hasnt-won/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/28/moloch-hasnt-won/ Longer series, but the first post does a good job of summarizing Meditations on Moloch. Somewhat offtopic, try listenig to the original poem on youtube. It's a treat.
- dpc_pw 6y ago
  Meditations on Moloch made such an impact on me, that I routinely say aloud "Moloch" when I spot circumstances of competition leading to otherwise irrationally bad outcomes. Sort of in a religious way. :) I went to comments exactly to see if anyone mentioned it already. BTW. The efficiency (specialization) vs redundancy (genericity) is a kind of jing-jang, fractal thing and is part of how the universe ... dances... I'd say (inspired by Alan Watts lectures). Systems have cycles where they build specilization up until it becomes so fragile and unstable that it blows up and genericity takes over again. I don't know if that's like some law of cybernetics or something. Similar to how stability on one level of analysis leads to instability in the one above it (well described in Taleb's book).
- oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
  >an ancient Carthaginian demon This shouldn't bother me but it really does. For a community striving to be less wrong, how does someone write a 47-minute long post about Moloch but not know Moloch? It doesn't really matter since it's about the metaphor not the actual Moloch, but I guess it's because of where it's posted. Not sure if there's a name for it but there's a phenomena where if you say you care about something, you'll get a lot of flak for it compared to if you never mention it. Kind of like how Google always gets a lot of bad press since they claim to care about X when VCs for example have a much worse record but don't really get mentioned. With lesswrong's reputation, I can't help but be really put off by the inaccuracy.
paganel 6y ago
> The end-game · Efficiency, taken to the max, can get very dark. This is the main point behind most of the works of Jacques Ellul, we're re-discovering it at our own expense decades later. > The Ellulian concept of technique is briefly defined within the "Notes to Reader" section of The Technological Society (1964). It is "the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul
baxtr 6y ago
> They’re winning, but everyone’s losing. Huh. Interesting. I think it’s the other way around. Efficiency leads to more convenience and better prices. Thus, I have more time and money to spend on things that really matter to me. The most basic “item” is for example a dish washer. How many hours and water was wasted before doing this work by hand?
- llimos 6y ago
  This is exactly the point he addresses in his final paragraph. Efficiency is great, but up to a point, and we've passed it. Most of today's innovations are not freeing up people's time on the scale that the washing machine or dishwasher did. On the contrary, many of them are using up time without any productivity gains. Smartphones and Facebook have not improved any other part of the economy besides their own. Edit: See this interview which makes the point very well https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/robert-gordon-interview https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/robert-gordon-inter...
  - andyfleming 6y ago
    Or worse, the gains from efficiency improvements aren't benefitting the end-users anymore.
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    Agreed There's a point where more automation does not mean things become easier. Let's take the same dishwasher example. Of course it saves a lot of time for a family of four, for example. Pop it in and you're done. But for example, for a single person, this makes much less sense. Because the time it takes for putting it in the dishwasher, waiting to fill the machine and running the cycle is longer than just washing the damn dishes. No automation is "free". And overautomation causes problems as well.
    - Smaug123 6y ago
      Well, the wall-clock time may be longer, but the human time is much shorter. As long as you have one meal's worth of slack in the amount of crockery you have, the dishwasher wins by a country mile in the amount of effort expended.
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miked85 6y ago
This guy sure has a bone to pick with Amazon. Did so much change in the 5 years he worked for them?
- vidarh 6y ago
  Does he? It doesn't seem like he's arguing they're really doing anything "wrong", other than being caught up in a larger societal process and doing what society is saying is good and rewarding: > It’s important to realize that Amazon isn’t violating any rules, nor even (on the surface) societal norms. Waste is bad, efficiency is good, right? They’re doing what’s taught in every business school; maximizing efficiency is one of the greatest gifts of the free market. Amazon is really extremely good at it. This idea that capitalist efficiency is not something to blame the capitalist for, but is an effect of the mode of production of society overall is really very much a Marxist idea, and yet like your assumption that Bray is berating Amazon, people tend to similarly believe Marx hated capitalists. But like Marx praised capitalism into the skies for its efficiency yet criticised its bad sides, Bray is also pointing out that this efficiency has good sides. It's just that it also has bad sides, and we should worry that we blindly keep accepting the bad sides even as the toll it takes rises: > It’s hard to think of a position more radical than being “against efficiency”. And I’m not. Efficiency is a good, and like most good things, has to be bought somehow, and paid for. There is a point where the price is too high, and we’ve passed it.
kiba 6y ago
One way I heard efficiency described is the idea of a race car falling apart at the end of a race, doing its job in the most efficient manner as possible. Of course, this is pretty much inadvisable in every day life. We need some 'inefficiency' to ensure that our stuff won't break apart at the wrong time.
- chii 6y ago
  there's a time horizon attached to efficiency that needs to be considered. Sometimes this time horizon is not explicitly examined, but is just assumed. For the case of a racing car, if the engineers were told to design it with maximum efficiency possible, and it only has to last the race, then yes, why not have it break and fall apart at the end, if doing so means it runs at a very high efficiency?
  - withinboredom 6y ago
    It's not very efficient to win the race if you have to replace the car every race.
    - mantas 6y ago
      Unless your plan is to win that one race and quit.
    - IndrekR 6y ago
      F1 engines used to last only one race, 2 hours max. Now there is a rule that max 4 engines can be used per season, resulting in engine life of 20 hours or so.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- mqus 6y ago
  But otoh, this kind of efficiency is probably the reason why washing machines and other household items are now breaking sooner than before ("planned" obsolescence)
agumonkey 6y ago
Efficiency goes dark when the measure is myopic. If the system took in account the quality of food rather than the price tag .. the efficiency wouldn't be a problem. Quantity over quality in a way.
qznc 6y ago
Big enterprises are (too) great at improving efficiency for their low-level workers. On the other hand they utterly fail to do so with the middle management. The alternative theory would be that middle management does its job efficiently but it is a different one than the job description says.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Low-level work can often be measured in some way, and that's the kind of "efficiency" one can improve most easily. Whereas the whole point of having middle management in a firm is to deal with the many things that can't be measured easily,
m12k 6y ago
I'm currently reading The Divide by Jason Hickel, a book that explores the origin and causes of global inequality. This article reminded me of the book's chapter about the enclosure movement in Britain: Families used to just farm and live off the land. The enclosure movement made most of this land the property of the aristocracy, who would then lease it back out to farmers - but they would keep increasing the price of the lease, so the farmers now had to work themselves to death and use every means to increase yield, in order to keep up, and not get replaced by someone else. It was much more efficient than the previous subsistence farming. (And left many thousands without a home or the means to support themselves)
- qznc 6y ago
  The farmers probably paid the aristocracy before as well under a different name. What prevented the aristocrats to increase it before?
  - m12k 6y ago
    No, the aristocracy didn't own the land before it was enclosed - the land used to just be commonly owned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
- obiwanpallav1 6y ago
  Here is the link to the book on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32603498-the-divide https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32603498-the-divide
tommilukkarinen 6y ago
"But, wealth! If we all work less, we’ll be poorer, right? Because the total cash output of the economy is a (weird, nonlinear) function of the amount of work that gets put in." In the previous sentence or so, there was talk about margins of healthcare, which have disappeared. These margins don't exist without more work. Maybe it is rather that we are working with more things with less effort, rather than doing few things well. Also cash and work have some correlation, but I think there is higher more profound correlation with work and total amount of products such as roads and buildings. Cash rarely stays in bank accounts but circulates and randomly spawns service and concrete products. Everyone should work, all the time, to leave this a better place than we found it. And there is still much work to do.
- deleted 6y ago
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praptak 6y ago
"The theoretical basis of alienation within the capitalist mode of production is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists." -- that's Wikipedia on Marx' theory of alienation. Sounds weirdly similar and weirdly appropriate.
Animats 6y ago
Union, yes! This is an old complaint going back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution at least. The US once had an 8-hour day and a 40-hour week. Now those are only memories. Unions. The people who brought you the weekend.
- aliante 6y ago
  And the people who brought in stuff like seniority rights and #notmyjob. Unions create an anemic culture.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  The increased work hours are among the professional class. It consists of professionals competing, not exploitation from the top. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-workism-making-americans-miserable/583441/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-w...
  - morelisp 6y ago
    I don't know how you can believe this unless you somehow also believe professionals are at the top.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      In the case of professionals, the extra work is generally optional for extra rewards. You can have a career as a software engineer with a 40 hour week if you want. It just won't be at Amazon. You can have a career as a lawyer, just not at big law. Professionals get to opt in and get commensurate rewards. The factory workers didn't get anything extra for their extra efforts.
      - ben_w 6y ago
        When I was working in a factory (summer holiday job during my A-levels), onetime was paid at time-and-a-half. Now I’m a software dev working in an office, the base pay is much better, but there is no overtime.
aliante 6y ago
> Twenty years ago, France introduced a 35-hour workweek. Their economy still functions. It seems to be quite anemic.
- msy 6y ago
  It's the seventh largest economy in the world with a per-capita GDP of $42k.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Notably, looking up graphs of GDP per capita of France and the UK and putting them next to each other, I'd challenge anyone to see when the change happened. One thing that comparing GDP per capita growth tends to show is that global and regional overall development totally swamps even seemingly large changes like the 35 hour week. What the change also tends to gloss over is that the number of hours worked per worker in France is not particularly low. According to OECD, for 2019 it stood at 1505 vs. 1538 for the UK or 1386 for Germany. The reduction in France, to the extent it changed anything, may have distributed work a bit more but it did not suddenly drastically reduce the hours worked. The average number of hours worked per worker dropped somewhat over the few years after the reform, but it dropped across all the major OECD countries, and by similar rates.
- ivalm 6y ago
  For past 30 years us gdp per capita ppp has been consistently ~35% greater, which is to say that the roughly grow at the same rate https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=France+and+us+gdp+per+capita+ppp https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=France+and+us+gdp+per+... Here is a ratio to illustrate my point better (the ratio is roughly flat) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=France+divided+by+us+gdp+per+capita+ppp https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=France+divided+by+us+g...
photon12 6y ago
This is also true for software production: we have made writing and deploying software so easy to do that the rate at which training of software developers to produce PRs has outpaced the ability for systems either human or automated to handle managing the introduction of risk in all this new code. This talk [1] by by Mark Sherman of the Software Engineering Institute at CMU is about as dark as the summary of injuries Tim presents in his post. He mentions there are on the order of hundreds of thousands of CVE reports that there are neither time nor money to triage. [1] https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/sherman/ https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/sherman/
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  As a society, "injury" (defined broadly to include software bugs as well as knee damage) has always been accepted for certain benefits. At some point we decide that the injuries are worth the cost of progress. We send astronauts to space knowing that we will kill about 1 in 30 of them. We let thousands die on roads so we can move around cities quickly. Everything we enjoy about modern society has a certain amount of injury risk. We are constantly saying skew the bugs, let's see what happens.
  - photon12 6y ago
    I feel like the idea that society has accepted software bugs for some other benefit is questionable, given that software has only had an impact on most people's lives for a relatively small period of time in relation to the amount of time humans have studied philosophy and ethics. Edit: also I'm discussing security bugs where there are asymmetries in the risk profiles and threat models of actors and agents.
  - 3pt14159 6y ago
    People conflate risk (likelihood of the event) and hazard (amount of harm if the event happens) and I think it degrades our conversations. The issue with software is that hazard has quite a large range, due to class attack (hitting all instances of something at once, like a software update poisoned with malware) and I don't think even software developers understand the scale of a worst case scenario, let alone most politicians.
ihuk 6y ago
The part about Amazon reminded me of one of the best quotes from Frank Herbert's Dune: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune
- bartmika 6y ago
  “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind.“ - Frank Herbert, Dune Chronicles
abiro 6y ago
There is a broader point here: maximizing local efficiency in systems leads to greater fragility overall. The current COVID crisis highlights this very well with shortages due to global supply chains.
Giho 6y ago
The article start with the example of to cleaners that takes a break at their job and that is seen as inefficient in today's society. But I say this is most a misuse of the word and understanding of efficiency. Taking a break is a stop in productivity short term(cleaning in this example). Efficiency can actually be better by a break, by boosting productivity long term and thus reaching the goal (clean streets) with higher quality. Most management try to think scenarios in closed simplified systems with in- and outputs at a certain time, but by doing this the bigger picture is missed. For example: By neglecting the cleaners wellbeing (physically and mentally) the output may be good cleaning for a while but as times go with no break the wellbeing decrease and so the output.
- adrianN 6y ago
  At which point you simply fire them and hire new cleaners?
  - Giho 6y ago
    Until it affect the whole society in a way that its difficult to get productive workers or the unemployed litter more because of no good wellbeing.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      But until then a lot of beautiful shareholder value was created.
- quietbritishjim 6y ago
  The problem with this argument is that it's less important than the one in the article but easier to undermine. What if a soulless bureaucrat read it and thought, "OK then, I'll try it out and see if it increases productivity" and find that, even in the long term, it doesn't. Is that enough justification to remove breaks? If course not. The truth is, it's irrelevant whether it increases efficiency. It reminds me of someone who believes that all torture is morally wrong, but then adds "and it doesn't work anyway". Now if someone can find a situation where it does work then they can undermine that position with addressing the core argument.
cosmodisk 6y ago
I work in an environment where everything can be measured: emails sent, calls answered, CRM cases resolved, SMS sent and so on. I can even see if anyone went to the toilet at a particular time. And I simply ignore half of it. The jobs that are being monitored are already bad enough: monotonous, repetitive,and etc. And tbh, by ignoring half of all these metrics,I somehow have almost issue free workforce, as opposed to the other department that follows it by letter. Let's be efficient but let's not go completely crazy either.
- karaterobot 6y ago
  Raises the question: do you ever wonder whether your monitoring of the employees will someday, itself, start to get monitored?
  - bartmika 6y ago
    “See how easily our technologies turn on us? The more power you think you have, the more quickly it slips from your grasp.“ - Tracer Tong, Deus Ex The older I get, the more prophetic that quote becomes.
lazyjones 6y ago
One can't lament about maximized efficiency in societies and corporations while ignoring competition. If Amazon doesn't optimize, Alibaba will take over and nothing will change for the better. If we put more "humanity" in our food production, our food will become more expensive and most people will opt for cheaper, imported food. There are always dependencies, consequences, prerequisites for interventions in the natural order of things and far too many articles get written in total ignorance of these. And far too often, bad examples of modern consumer products (like the grocery-ordering fridge or Facebook) are used to argue against efficiency.
- nojs 6y ago
  Reminds me of this pg classic [1]: > When we say that one kind of work is overpaid and another underpaid, what are we really saying? In a free market, prices are determined by what buyers want. People like baseball more than poetry, so baseball players make more than poets. To say that a certain kind of work is underpaid is thus identical with saying that people want the wrong things. > Well, of course people want the wrong things. It seems odd to be surprised by that. And it seems even odder to say that it's unjust that certain kinds of work are underpaid. Then you're saying that it's unjust that people want the wrong things. It's lamentable that people prefer reality TV and corndogs to Shakespeare and steamed vegetables, but unjust? That seems like saying that blue is heavy, or that up is circular. In the same way, it’s “lamentable” that people buy mass-produced products that are slightly inferior and cheaper, but not surprising. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html?viewfullsite=1 http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html?viewfullsite=1
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    You can fool some of the people all of the time; therefore you should rationally invest all your efforts in maximizing resource extraction from those people. That means the less foolish aren't provided with good choices, so how can society evolve to choose good stuff?
- Tarq0n 6y ago
  One important example of this is pensions. Some people argue that we should settle for less consumption and economic growth. However, our concept of retirement is predicated on these. If you want to change the workings of the economy, you have to reinvent retirement first, or you'll end up with the elderly starving.
bostik 6y ago
The word missing from the post is "headroom". In critical systems it's more often called safety margin. If you let the beancounters squeeze out headroom in the name of greater efficiency, you sacrifice resilience and reliability. In other news, water is wet.
- H8crilA 6y ago
  Funnily enough - margin of safety is also exactly what works best in capital(ist) markets. See Graham&Dodd, or Buffett&Munger. This reminds me that capitalism will probably be just fine once people are reminded (yet again) about what risk is, and that they should treat all their counterparties well, to get those long term win-win situations.
  - agustamir 6y ago
    > This reminds me that capitalism will probably be just fine once people are reminded (yet again) about what risk is Can you elaborate on this? What is the risk, and what do people need to be reminded of?
bambax 6y ago
> It’s important to realize that Amazon isn’t violating any rules, nor even (on the surface) societal norms. Not taking orders from robots, or having your agenda defined by robots/automatic scripts, should in fact be a societal norm. One can argue with a human boss, however bad or mean or stupid they are. You can't argue with a robot and that's what makes people's lives miserable.
studentik 6y ago
Professor Julian Birkinshaw judges that we may go from knowledge era where technologies lower transaction costs to zero to post-knowledge era where we use our knowledge to make more people feel better emotions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVP0tb6FzCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVP0tb6FzCs
rland 6y ago
Many things are so much less efficient now, though. Where formerly we ate what was in season, we now have produce shipped around the globe, sometimes raw foods shipped across the ocean and turned into process foods and then shipped right back again. We eat meat in nearly every meal. We used to die quickly at home when we were incurably sick; now we cling to half-life for years or decades. We used to let our kids out the front door when they were bored, now we drive them all over town for everything in their busy calendar. When we wanted to learn how to do a job, we'd talk to someone doing it and start working directly under them, quickly making ourselves useful. Now we spend years learning totally unrelated stuff, just to prove that we're human beings with a pulse who can be hired. Now, flying across the world to have fun is 'necessary,' because parks and natural areas in our own backyards are not enough. etc...
- pojntfx 6y ago
  The industrial revolution and it’s consequences have been a disaster for the human race
  - quotemstr 6y ago
    The industrial revolution is the greatest thing to ever happen to humanity. It allowed the planet to host seven and a half billion people instead six hundred million. Do the lives of all these people mean nothing to you? What about all their positive experiences? Would you return us to the Malthusian limit to live out your agrarian fantasy? Which 6.9 billion people would you let die?
    - el_oni 6y ago
      That's a rather fallacious argument. 6.9bn people never existing != killing 6.9bn people. And the hosting of those 7bn people has caused irreperable damage to ecosystems. Why are you so happy for the extinction of entire species, but not for 6.9bn people not existing?
      - quotemstr 6y ago
stareatgoats 6y ago
He points to a real problem, but the solution is - what? We are not in a position to say "efficiency must stop", all we can say is ~"this efficiency drive has serious drawbacks" - which we can say in all perpetuity to no avail. I'm wondering if this is might be a problem of "incomplete models". Defined such, the human need for "inefficient gaps" in their work could be factored into the models, and we might get something that resembles a less controlled mode of production again, which doesn't burn out the workforce. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
cheesecracker 6y ago
I thought the 8 hour work week was introduced by Ford, because he figured out it would maximize productivity. Not by Unions. Pretty sure Tim Bray has turned full socialism, to be honest. If an "efficiency rate" leads to too many injuries, it is not the best "efficiency rate". I don't think you need Unions to figure that out, it is in the capitalist interest to then reduce the efficiency rate. I find the whole idea of discussing "how much should we work" very telling. It comes from a position of high privilege and ignorance - the idea that we live in abundance, and stuff only needs to be distributed somehow. If you are naked in the jungle, the question is not "how many hours should I work", the question is "what do I have to do to survive". If it takes 80 hours to build shelter, make a fire and hunt some food, then you'll work 80 hours. If you manage to build stuff that reduces your work load, good for you. Like in the jungle, build a net that automatically catches fish, so you don't have to spent so many hours hunting. Not you have spare time. Good for you. But don't ask some imaginary entity (god? capitalism? the government?) to provide you with your spare tie and assign your jobs. I'd like to add that to me the story of the 8 hour work week is also a warning before corporate employment. Because if 8 hours maximize your productivity, it means you are wasted after 8 hours. All you can still hope to do is eat and watch some TV. But that's not a reason to me to blame corporations . If you don't like it, negotiate with the corporations to work only part time, or seek to improve your skills so that you can ask for more money and afford more spare time. Nobody owes anybody a job.
- ianleeclark 6y ago
  > I thought the 8 hour work week was introduced by Ford, because he figured out it would maximize productivity. Not by Unions. The Haymarket Massacre happened 30 years prior to Ford introducing the 8 hour workday in his plants. Furthermore, there had been labor agitation resulting in 8-hour days in other parts of the country decades before Ford did so.
  - cheesecracker 6y ago
    Thanks for the information. Nevertheless the claim that only Unions can reduce work hours is simply false. People can negotiate their contracts. Many people work less than 40 hour work weeks.
bambax 6y ago
The word "efficient" isn't defined in the article. Is it a synonym for "productivity" (output per worker)? Modern society seems obsessed by productivity. It's interesting for example that the mission statement for the Gates Foundation is to build a world where every person has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life. Why is that? What if I don't want to be productive? Am I still entitled to be healthy, or is health reserved for "productive" people? In Cape Town, at the top of Table Mountain lives a species of little mammals, the dassie (rock hyrax). They spend most of their day staring into the void, not looking for food, not mating, doing nothing. (I know because I once spent a day watching them.) The official explanation is that they either stand guard for predators, or they stay immobile in the sun to keep warm. But isn't it possible they're having an aesthetic experience? The scenery there is simply breathtaking, and changes constantly due to moving clouds just below. Contemplation is possibly the least productive activity one can think of; yet it's vital, if not for dassies, at least for us humans. One possibility may be that we love productivity so much, simply because it's eminently, and easily, measurable: weight the output, divide by the number of workers, done. We need a way to measure contemplation.
- quotemstr 6y ago
  > Am I still entitled to be healthy, or is health reserved for "productive" people? Who pays for the sustenance of these idle people and why are they obligated to do it? Life is not sustained by manna from heaven. Life is sustained by the hard work of real people. Glorifying idleness is a giant "screw you" to the people who make civilization possible.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    We are of course not obligated, but it's a good bet that those who are currently idle will become productive if we enable them to do so, and we all stand to benefit. Teach a man to fish, and all that.
    - quotemstr 6y ago
      I'm all for helping people be productive. It's a shame to waste human potential. But if you have the ability to be productive and choose to be idle instead, nobody is under any obligation to feed, house, or clothe you. If you want things made by other people and you're able to work, you must work. Anything else is incompatible with basic tenets of fairness. And even ignoring fairness and descending to the level of crude practicality, when you take from the productive and give to the unproductive, the size of the former group shrinks and the latter one grows. Eventually, there's not enough productivity to go around and the whole thing collapses.
jwr 6y ago
There is also another side to efficient systems: as you remove the slack, they become fragile. The inefficiencies are what allows systems to adapt to changing environments. You could also think of this as the bias-variance tradeoff, lack of generalization, or overly specific adaptation. This can be seen in the supply chains and economies right now with the COVID-19 impact. Economies with ultra-efficient supply chains (like the US or Western Europe) are being hit the worst, while those with slack and inefficiencies (like Central/Eastern Europe post-communist countries) can absorb the impact much better.
fierarul 6y ago
Efficiency is very unevenly distributed. If only my local and national administration would be half as efficient as Amazon!
scandox 6y ago
This is such an obvious and basic truth to most working people that it barely merits saying. It is only we that have to "work it out". That's why many of us that do this work are so valuable to our employers: we aim for efficiency without asking what it is efficient for. Efficiency without a specific goal doesn't mean anything. It's like Philip K Dick's Autofac. Just a replication machine.
malkia 6y ago
Several times in my software engineering career, I've experienced cases where super-optimizing a system leads to later removing the optimzation due to critical bugs found much later (threading, racing conditions, producing invalid data, etc.), thus leading to less performant than before software.
ReptileMan 6y ago
When you optimize a complex system for single variable you get suboptimal strange and shitty results. This is revelation that every software engineer and gamers know by heart after year of experience.
kstenerud 6y ago
> It’s important to realize that Amazon isn’t violating any rules, nor even (on the surface) societal norms. Waste is bad, efficiency is good, right? They’re doing what’s taught in every business school; maximizing efficiency is one of the greatest gifts of the free market. Amazon is really extremely good at it. It's important to realize that tycoons cornering the market in days gone by weren't violating any rules or societal norms. They were just maximizing efficiency. Same goes for industrial revolution era business owners demanding 16+ hour work shifts and tossing the broken people aside. You didn't need much skill to feed the machines; just functional hands. Eventually, society steps in and changes the rules to favour the downtrodden, and those who stand to lose from the change fight and complain bitterly about interference and the unfairness of making their efficiency harder to achieve, and then it gets pushed through regardless and life goes on. We may not be able to prescribe remedies against future abuse in many cases (and probably shouldn't in some), but we can at least recognize it when it's there, and do something about it. That's what a free society is about.
aj7 6y ago
Just think how much more efficient porn is than the real thing.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
> In practice, interest rates stay low, governments can borrow more or less for free, and all sorts of crazily doomed shit is getting investment funding. Please continue this while I find something to get VC funding
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smitty1e 6y ago
A few points: * People scale poorly. There is a reason Agile favors a "less is more" approach. * There is more than one dimension. Money is an easy metric, but not the sole one. Diminishing returns kick in when we optimize for frog$kins. * Wisdom is hard to communicate. If human wisdom were cumulative, we should have long ago reached some paradise where everyone shares their toys nicely. Doesn't happen, and great parents are followed by dull kids. And the wiser parents somehow have less offspring than the fools. This, too, is counterproductive.
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dgudkov 6y ago
The key question that is missing in the article - efficient for whom, buyers or sellers? Too often (but not always), business is a zero sum game. Make customers pay 20% more without extra cost and your business will be 100% more profitable (assuming 20% profitability). Or, which happens more often, cheapen quality/cost by 20% while retaining the price, and your profitability doubles. Competition is supposed to enforce efficiency on sellers, but the temptation to cheapen quality is just too big, because it turns out customers are less picky than they should've been in theory, and are ready to give up quality for something free (as free social network) or cheaper (as cheaper sugar-laden food). So when your competitor cheapens quality and it goes down well with the customers, what else can you do besides watching your market share shrinks? EDITED: typos.
- hrktb 6y ago
  The efficient for whom par is clearly stated all along, with even a direct mention: > and (for the business) efficient Otherwise on the bigger point about competition: it doesn’t seem to me the landscapes are that tight, except when you’re in the efficiency game. If your target is Amazon, you’re in for a ride and can leave your ethics in the closet. If your goal is to find a viable niche where you can grow with your customers, you won’t be in a zero-sum, drive the prices to the ground kind of rat race. Finding that kind of niche if of course far from easy, now I’d argue a rat race to become the next Amazon isn’t either.
- ComodoHacker 6y ago
  >what else can you do Either follow the suit or cater to subset of customers who value quality.
- inerte 6y ago
  An article I read recently makes a similar point on maximizing only one side of supply and demand and the effects for consumers and “quality”, in this case, how animals are killed. Good read: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/7/8/21311327/farmers-factory-farms-cafos-animal-rights-booker-warren-khanna https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/7/8/21311327/farmers...
dnc 6y ago
Related to this and discussed quite a few times on HN ([1],[2]), 'In Praise of Idleness', an essay by Bertrand Russell: https://libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Praise%20of%20Idleness.pdf https://libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Prais... . I return to it every once in a while, if not to regain a bit of sanity, than just to enjoy clarity of thought and style in his writing. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21509144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21509144 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015092
xg15 6y ago
Efficiency is not the problem, because the term "efficient" by itself is meaningless. You have to define what you consider the "costs" to minimize or the "benefits" to maximize to even be talking about efficiency. In many cases, the quantity that is being optimized is simply profit.
- dpflan 6y ago
  Yes, the article mentions the metrics movement that allows these efficiency calculations. Other variables need to be added to the equation to maximized (and minimized) such as employee well-being.
moomin 6y ago
Pretty much everyone in management should read “Slack” by Tom DeMarco. And try to make changes to free up that time for their reports. It will pay off.
throw0101a 6y ago
I am reminded of this observation from another thread: > If we suppose that the goal of society is to produce the greatest utility, and that the utility wealth provides an individual is sub-linear (i.e. twice as much money makes you less than twice as happy), then inequality is inefficient resource allocation. > However, we also suppose that some level of inequality can lead to greater productivity, and thus greater utility overall. The question is then what level produces the best outcome? * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505342
mdale 6y ago
Some great commentary here :) I for one am enjoying being not so efficient this morning.
csours 6y ago
> “All of the overcapacity that has been squeezed out of our healthcare system; we now wish we had it. All of the redundancy in our food production that has been consolidated away; we want that, too. We need our old, local supply chains — not the single global ones that are so fragile in this crisis. And we want our local restaurants and businesses to survive, not just the national chains.” Just In Time - the machine that changed the world (See Toyota Production System) Just In Time works great, until it doesn't. The factory works at 1 unit per minute, demand is pretty inelastic. Society is pretty elastic, if a bunch of people decide they want toilet paper TODAY, the Just In Time system is going to starve out.
- gwern 6y ago
  Just In Time works great; that and other efficiencies have brought humanity to a world so cosmically wealthy, so infinitely more developed than robust decentralized green (ie. medieval peasant standard of living) economies, that its inhabitant can lounge around eating bon-bons getting obese while endlessly resharing on social media the same photo of one shop out of thousands being out for a day or two of a luxury as a devastating indictment of Just in Time.
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- jimbokun 6y ago
  There were a lot of articles written about the Great Toilet Paper shortage, but in reality after a short period of time everyone got all the toilet paper they needed. I think the system responded very well.
known 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
derefr 6y ago
> Summary: Certain (not all) Amazon warehouses seem to have per-employee injury rates that are significantly higher than the industry average, as in twice as high or more. Apparent reason: It’s not they’re actually dangerous places to work, it’s just that they’ve maximized efficiency and reduced waste to the point where people are picking and packing and shipping every minute they’re working, never stopping. And a certain proportion of human bodies simply can’t manage that. They break down under pressure. Wouldn’t a more parsimonious explanation be that the job previously consisted of a safe part and a dangerous part, and it was easier to automate the safe part, so now more of a human's time on the job is spent doing the dangerous part? If you imagine the "safe part" of the job as "slack" (i.e. imagine that the employees were previously half working, and half doing nothing—not that they actually were, but it makes the model clearer), then they've effectively just gotten rid of all the slack, and so made the employees do twice as much work per work day. If there's a constant small probability of injury per item packed, then of course doing twice as much work per work day, will lead to twice as many injuries per employee per work day. You'd have gotten the same number of employee-injuries out per items-packed in, no matter what time scale that packing occurred on.
- padiyar83 6y ago
  > If there's a constant small probability of injury per item packed, then of course doing twice as much work per work day, will lead to twice as many injuries per employee per work day This assumes injury-risk is a linear function of number of items packed. That's not true. Fatigue increases injury-risk - that is how tired you and your entire team is while performing the task. If the person sorting the packages up the line is tired and making mistakes, the person binning it is more prone to mistakes, leading to an injury. In summary, there is a "fatigue-threshold" after which injury-risk increases non-linearly (say exponentially) with every item packed.
  - derefr 6y ago
    If fatigue is a simple threshold (i.e. you "become fatigued" after a certain number of units of work done), then the obvious solution is to work the employees at 100% utilization for half as long (at which point they should be roughly as fatigued as the employees worked half as hard for twice as long), and then swap them out for a second shift. (I.e., instead of having 10 employees with 40hr weeks, you now have 20 employees with 20hr weeks.) This is the approach I believe is also advised for improving productivity/decreasing errors in the medical field (where doctors have a hard time not pushing themselves to 100% all the time, because of their personalities): hire more doctors per hospital, such that each doctor can be cut down to a shorter shift (and thus maybe lower salary, too.) If, on the other hand, fatigue is about the lack of micro-rests between individual units of work, then the appropriate solution is more subtle: 1. replace the low-quality rest of doing "slack" work, with high-quality rest of doing nothing-at-all (or even "actively" resting, the equivalent of an athlete doing cool-down stretches between sets of an exercise), so that employees can cool down more quickly and/or return closer to peak productivity from each rest; 2. have slightly more employees (hopefully fewer than double), working off branching lines, such a way that units of work are directed to go to whichever employee is "fresh" rather than "stalled." Like processors with pipelined executions and multiple APUs per core, directing instructions to the APU that isn't currently blocked.
SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
The question is not always "Is this efficient?" but "Who is this efficient for?" A lot of the things that he is describing are very efficient for the company providing them, and now less so for the customer.
yogthos 6y ago
Words like efficiency and freedom are loaded terms that have an implicit context. It's always important to ask what the context actually is. Efficient to what end, or freedom to do what. All too often we discover that we are not the beneficiaries of the efficiencies and freedoms being discussed.
mcguire 6y ago
"Item: Speaking of which, it seems that when you have a problem with a business, the process for solving it each year becomes more and more complex and opaque and irritating and (for the business) efficient." Hey, I was there! Back in the '90s, IBM was getting too many support calls for AIX forwarded to the AIX team, so they introduced another layer of phone tech support to cut down on it.
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570 points by MindGods 6y ago

Normally one optimises GDP because that's (a) more or less measurable, and (b) more or less correlates with things that individual wants out of society. Part of Bray's point is that going for too much efficiency is like going for pure returns at the expense of risk, another part is that GDP is merely means, not the end, and blindly optimising for GDP continues to do so even when increasing GDP starts negatively correlating with having a worthwhile society. Efficiency yes, but please to measure in human utility per input, not in currency output per input?

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

Distributism would solve these problems, I'm just not sure we could ever get there with the current vested interests getting in the way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism

sudosysgen 6y ago
So basically, communal ownership of the means of production? Where have I heard about that before... Not that I disagree with it. I just think that it fits so perfectly into socialist thought (as originally intended, not any of the statist revisions) that it really seems like nothing more but market socialism without the red. In fact, reading more about it, distributivism is just market socialism without a strong theoretical backing, without philosophical study and without any real praxis, as well as much less developped.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  We should aim to have distributed systems because they are more resilient. Everyone knows the story about Gorbachev and the US supermarket but we conveniently forget it when it comes to forging our own monopoly.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Yes. This is also one of the ideas of market socialism, along with many other socialist tendencies.
    - jtolmar 6y ago
      Whoever is downvoting this - you're being absolutely absurd, this is a basic statement of fact that you can look up on wikipedia.
- jtolmar 6y ago
  Unfortunately, a lot of people have been told that "socialism" means "state power over the economy" and refuse to engage with enough socialist/communist theory to see what it actually is. Which gets you strange projects like the above. For that audience, and over-simplifying greatly: all communists are trying to create a decentralized system that evenly spreads power, and the main split among them is how to actually do that. Anarchists think we should build decentralized power structures until they've replaced our current centralized ones. Marxist-Leninists think we should replace the state with one that promises to implement communism later. Distributism reads a lot like somebody heard of Marxism-Leninism, thought it was dumb, reinvented anarcho-communism in response, and then described the result as opposed to communism, even though it's largely the same idea as one of the main branches of communist theory.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    That was essentially my conclusion as well. It is quite sad.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    > create a decentralized system that evenly spreads power That's simply not feasible, because many centralized systems are a lot more effective than decentralized ones. And centralized systems can't be run via a committee or via direct democracy either, so you will always have some people with outsized decision-making power. At least when you reward these actors with wealth (as opposed to raw political influence, as in socialist countries) they can then go and deploy that wealth on pro-social things, like many of wealthiest businesspeople do in the US. Distributism has the right idea, it's just not universally applicable.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      There is no socialist philosophy that objects to centralization of power as long as it is kept in check and limited to it's usefulness Even Anarchism doesn't say that no one should have outsized decision-making power. Just that it shouldn't be the same people every time, that there should be a good reason for it and that it should be kept in check. The old anarchist example was that of the pirate ship :) Also, decentralized systems are not always less efficient than centralized systems. Sometimes they are much more efficient, it depends on what you are optimizing for exactly. Indeed, centralized decision-making, while viable sometimes, need not be pluripotent, and it can be limited enough that it doesn't actually create a power imbalance. Many human societies actually operated in such a way. If you actually wish to read up a bit more on that, I'd suggest in the extreme of reading up on anarchism. If you use debian, you should be able to apt-get install anarchism :)
- vidarh 6y ago
  A lot of Christian democratic ideals basically fits into the description "market socialism without the red", usually sprinkled with socially conservative views. It's notable that in a lot of Europe, the welfare systems we have today, for example, while they happened under pressure or fear of socialism, were pushed through with the help of Christian democrats. E.g. Bismarcks pension and healthcare bills that effectively formed the first large-scale welfare system were blatant attempts at stemming the growing support for what he saw as dangerous socialist parties becoming a threat to the established order - while stealing some of their social policies he proceeded to ban dozens of groups and newspapers and arrest their leaders. But he passed those bills with the help of the conservative Christian "Zentrum", the forerunner of Merkel's CDU, by appealing to Christian values.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    There are even more radical denominations - I know of a few Christian anarchists, it's an interesting worldview.
wrnr 6y ago
Their is great irony in the most hierarchical religious intuition in the history of the world arguing in favour of economical decentralisation after having forcefully resisted protestantism for centuries

sudeepj 6y ago

This resonates with me a lot. I chuckle sometimes when I see things like your fridge (or a smart kitchen) will order items for you by predicting things for you need. In future, it seems tech will do transactions with other tech with lesser human involvement, all in the name of efficiency. And then this will trigger another recursive cycle of optimizations. The rate at which tech is changing and along with it our society is way faster than rate at which humans can find a coping mechanism. We do not know what we are sleepwalking into.

pcstl 6y ago

I feel like I need to plug Zvi Mowshowitz's "Immoral Mazes" series of blogposts here, as it goes pretty in-depth into the whole matter of efficiency, slack, and "how hard should we work". https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS

lixtra 6y ago
It would be more efficient if you added the actual link https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS ?
- pcstl 6y ago
  I actually intended to, but when I finished writing the comment I forgot to paste the link in. Thank you.

mikeklaas 6y ago

For a much grimmer and soul-wrenching take on this, read Meditations on Moloch by Scott Alexander: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-on-moloch https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...

radu_floricica 6y ago
And the yin to that yang: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/28/moloch-hasnt-won/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/28/moloch-hasnt-won/ Longer series, but the first post does a good job of summarizing Meditations on Moloch. Somewhat offtopic, try listenig to the original poem on youtube. It's a treat.
dpc_pw 6y ago
Meditations on Moloch made such an impact on me, that I routinely say aloud "Moloch" when I spot circumstances of competition leading to otherwise irrationally bad outcomes. Sort of in a religious way. :) I went to comments exactly to see if anyone mentioned it already. BTW. The efficiency (specialization) vs redundancy (genericity) is a kind of jing-jang, fractal thing and is part of how the universe ... dances... I'd say (inspired by Alan Watts lectures). Systems have cycles where they build specilization up until it becomes so fragile and unstable that it blows up and genericity takes over again. I don't know if that's like some law of cybernetics or something. Similar to how stability on one level of analysis leads to instability in the one above it (well described in Taleb's book).
oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
>an ancient Carthaginian demon This shouldn't bother me but it really does. For a community striving to be less wrong, how does someone write a 47-minute long post about Moloch but not know Moloch? It doesn't really matter since it's about the metaphor not the actual Moloch, but I guess it's because of where it's posted. Not sure if there's a name for it but there's a phenomena where if you say you care about something, you'll get a lot of flak for it compared to if you never mention it. Kind of like how Google always gets a lot of bad press since they claim to care about X when VCs for example have a much worse record but don't really get mentioned. With lesswrong's reputation, I can't help but be really put off by the inaccuracy.

paganel 6y ago

> The end-game · Efficiency, taken to the max, can get very dark. This is the main point behind most of the works of Jacques Ellul, we're re-discovering it at our own expense decades later. > The Ellulian concept of technique is briefly defined within the "Notes to Reader" section of The Technological Society (1964). It is "the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul

baxtr 6y ago

> They’re winning, but everyone’s losing. Huh. Interesting. I think it’s the other way around. Efficiency leads to more convenience and better prices. Thus, I have more time and money to spend on things that really matter to me. The most basic “item” is for example a dish washer. How many hours and water was wasted before doing this work by hand?

llimos 6y ago
This is exactly the point he addresses in his final paragraph. Efficiency is great, but up to a point, and we've passed it. Most of today's innovations are not freeing up people's time on the scale that the washing machine or dishwasher did. On the contrary, many of them are using up time without any productivity gains. Smartphones and Facebook have not improved any other part of the economy besides their own. Edit: See this interview which makes the point very well https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/robert-gordon-interview https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/robert-gordon-inter...
- andyfleming 6y ago
  Or worse, the gains from efficiency improvements aren't benefitting the end-users anymore.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  Agreed There's a point where more automation does not mean things become easier. Let's take the same dishwasher example. Of course it saves a lot of time for a family of four, for example. Pop it in and you're done. But for example, for a single person, this makes much less sense. Because the time it takes for putting it in the dishwasher, waiting to fill the machine and running the cycle is longer than just washing the damn dishes. No automation is "free". And overautomation causes problems as well.
  - Smaug123 6y ago
    Well, the wall-clock time may be longer, but the human time is much shorter. As long as you have one meal's worth of slack in the amount of crockery you have, the dishwasher wins by a country mile in the amount of effort expended.

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miked85 6y ago

This guy sure has a bone to pick with Amazon. Did so much change in the 5 years he worked for them?

vidarh 6y ago
Does he? It doesn't seem like he's arguing they're really doing anything "wrong", other than being caught up in a larger societal process and doing what society is saying is good and rewarding: > It’s important to realize that Amazon isn’t violating any rules, nor even (on the surface) societal norms. Waste is bad, efficiency is good, right? They’re doing what’s taught in every business school; maximizing efficiency is one of the greatest gifts of the free market. Amazon is really extremely good at it. This idea that capitalist efficiency is not something to blame the capitalist for, but is an effect of the mode of production of society overall is really very much a Marxist idea, and yet like your assumption that Bray is berating Amazon, people tend to similarly believe Marx hated capitalists. But like Marx praised capitalism into the skies for its efficiency yet criticised its bad sides, Bray is also pointing out that this efficiency has good sides. It's just that it also has bad sides, and we should worry that we blindly keep accepting the bad sides even as the toll it takes rises: > It’s hard to think of a position more radical than being “against efficiency”. And I’m not. Efficiency is a good, and like most good things, has to be bought somehow, and paid for. There is a point where the price is too high, and we’ve passed it.

kiba 6y ago

One way I heard efficiency described is the idea of a race car falling apart at the end of a race, doing its job in the most efficient manner as possible. Of course, this is pretty much inadvisable in every day life. We need some 'inefficiency' to ensure that our stuff won't break apart at the wrong time.

chii 6y ago
there's a time horizon attached to efficiency that needs to be considered. Sometimes this time horizon is not explicitly examined, but is just assumed. For the case of a racing car, if the engineers were told to design it with maximum efficiency possible, and it only has to last the race, then yes, why not have it break and fall apart at the end, if doing so means it runs at a very high efficiency?
- withinboredom 6y ago
  It's not very efficient to win the race if you have to replace the car every race.
  - mantas 6y ago
    Unless your plan is to win that one race and quit.
  - IndrekR 6y ago
    F1 engines used to last only one race, 2 hours max. Now there is a rule that max 4 engines can be used per season, resulting in engine life of 20 hours or so.
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mqus 6y ago
But otoh, this kind of efficiency is probably the reason why washing machines and other household items are now breaking sooner than before ("planned" obsolescence)

agumonkey 6y ago

Efficiency goes dark when the measure is myopic. If the system took in account the quality of food rather than the price tag .. the efficiency wouldn't be a problem. Quantity over quality in a way.

qznc 6y ago

Big enterprises are (too) great at improving efficiency for their low-level workers. On the other hand they utterly fail to do so with the middle management. The alternative theory would be that middle management does its job efficiently but it is a different one than the job description says.

zozbot234 6y ago
Low-level work can often be measured in some way, and that's the kind of "efficiency" one can improve most easily. Whereas the whole point of having middle management in a firm is to deal with the many things that can't be measured easily,

m12k 6y ago

I'm currently reading The Divide by Jason Hickel, a book that explores the origin and causes of global inequality. This article reminded me of the book's chapter about the enclosure movement in Britain: Families used to just farm and live off the land. The enclosure movement made most of this land the property of the aristocracy, who would then lease it back out to farmers - but they would keep increasing the price of the lease, so the farmers now had to work themselves to death and use every means to increase yield, in order to keep up, and not get replaced by someone else. It was much more efficient than the previous subsistence farming. (And left many thousands without a home or the means to support themselves)

qznc 6y ago
The farmers probably paid the aristocracy before as well under a different name. What prevented the aristocrats to increase it before?
- m12k 6y ago
  No, the aristocracy didn't own the land before it was enclosed - the land used to just be commonly owned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
obiwanpallav1 6y ago
Here is the link to the book on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32603498-the-divide https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32603498-the-divide

tommilukkarinen 6y ago

"But, wealth! If we all work less, we’ll be poorer, right? Because the total cash output of the economy is a (weird, nonlinear) function of the amount of work that gets put in." In the previous sentence or so, there was talk about margins of healthcare, which have disappeared. These margins don't exist without more work. Maybe it is rather that we are working with more things with less effort, rather than doing few things well. Also cash and work have some correlation, but I think there is higher more profound correlation with work and total amount of products such as roads and buildings. Cash rarely stays in bank accounts but circulates and randomly spawns service and concrete products. Everyone should work, all the time, to leave this a better place than we found it. And there is still much work to do.

deleted 6y ago
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praptak 6y ago

"The theoretical basis of alienation within the capitalist mode of production is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists." -- that's Wikipedia on Marx' theory of alienation. Sounds weirdly similar and weirdly appropriate.

Animats 6y ago

Union, yes! This is an old complaint going back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution at least. The US once had an 8-hour day and a 40-hour week. Now those are only memories. Unions. The people who brought you the weekend.

aliante 6y ago
And the people who brought in stuff like seniority rights and #notmyjob. Unions create an anemic culture.
MattGaiser 6y ago
The increased work hours are among the professional class. It consists of professionals competing, not exploitation from the top. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-workism-making-americans-miserable/583441/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-w...
- morelisp 6y ago
  I don't know how you can believe this unless you somehow also believe professionals are at the top.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    In the case of professionals, the extra work is generally optional for extra rewards. You can have a career as a software engineer with a 40 hour week if you want. It just won't be at Amazon. You can have a career as a lawyer, just not at big law. Professionals get to opt in and get commensurate rewards. The factory workers didn't get anything extra for their extra efforts.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      When I was working in a factory (summer holiday job during my A-levels), onetime was paid at time-and-a-half. Now I’m a software dev working in an office, the base pay is much better, but there is no overtime.

aliante 6y ago

> Twenty years ago, France introduced a 35-hour workweek. Their economy still functions. It seems to be quite anemic.

msy 6y ago
It's the seventh largest economy in the world with a per-capita GDP of $42k.
- vidarh 6y ago
  Notably, looking up graphs of GDP per capita of France and the UK and putting them next to each other, I'd challenge anyone to see when the change happened. One thing that comparing GDP per capita growth tends to show is that global and regional overall development totally swamps even seemingly large changes like the 35 hour week. What the change also tends to gloss over is that the number of hours worked per worker in France is not particularly low. According to OECD, for 2019 it stood at 1505 vs. 1538 for the UK or 1386 for Germany. The reduction in France, to the extent it changed anything, may have distributed work a bit more but it did not suddenly drastically reduce the hours worked. The average number of hours worked per worker dropped somewhat over the few years after the reform, but it dropped across all the major OECD countries, and by similar rates.
ivalm 6y ago
For past 30 years us gdp per capita ppp has been consistently ~35% greater, which is to say that the roughly grow at the same rate https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=France+and+us+gdp+per+capita+ppp https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=France+and+us+gdp+per+... Here is a ratio to illustrate my point better (the ratio is roughly flat) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=France+divided+by+us+gdp+per+capita+ppp https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=France+divided+by+us+g...

photon12 6y ago

This is also true for software production: we have made writing and deploying software so easy to do that the rate at which training of software developers to produce PRs has outpaced the ability for systems either human or automated to handle managing the introduction of risk in all this new code. This talk [1] by by Mark Sherman of the Software Engineering Institute at CMU is about as dark as the summary of injuries Tim presents in his post. He mentions there are on the order of hundreds of thousands of CVE reports that there are neither time nor money to triage. [1] https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/sherman/ https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/sherman/

MattGaiser 6y ago
As a society, "injury" (defined broadly to include software bugs as well as knee damage) has always been accepted for certain benefits. At some point we decide that the injuries are worth the cost of progress. We send astronauts to space knowing that we will kill about 1 in 30 of them. We let thousands die on roads so we can move around cities quickly. Everything we enjoy about modern society has a certain amount of injury risk. We are constantly saying skew the bugs, let's see what happens.
- photon12 6y ago
  I feel like the idea that society has accepted software bugs for some other benefit is questionable, given that software has only had an impact on most people's lives for a relatively small period of time in relation to the amount of time humans have studied philosophy and ethics. Edit: also I'm discussing security bugs where there are asymmetries in the risk profiles and threat models of actors and agents.
- 3pt14159 6y ago
  People conflate risk (likelihood of the event) and hazard (amount of harm if the event happens) and I think it degrades our conversations. The issue with software is that hazard has quite a large range, due to class attack (hitting all instances of something at once, like a software update poisoned with malware) and I don't think even software developers understand the scale of a worst case scenario, let alone most politicians.

ihuk 6y ago

The part about Amazon reminded me of one of the best quotes from Frank Herbert's Dune: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune

bartmika 6y ago
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind.“ - Frank Herbert, Dune Chronicles

abiro 6y ago

There is a broader point here: maximizing local efficiency in systems leads to greater fragility overall. The current COVID crisis highlights this very well with shortages due to global supply chains.

Giho 6y ago

The article start with the example of to cleaners that takes a break at their job and that is seen as inefficient in today's society. But I say this is most a misuse of the word and understanding of efficiency. Taking a break is a stop in productivity short term(cleaning in this example). Efficiency can actually be better by a break, by boosting productivity long term and thus reaching the goal (clean streets) with higher quality. Most management try to think scenarios in closed simplified systems with in- and outputs at a certain time, but by doing this the bigger picture is missed. For example: By neglecting the cleaners wellbeing (physically and mentally) the output may be good cleaning for a while but as times go with no break the wellbeing decrease and so the output.

adrianN 6y ago
At which point you simply fire them and hire new cleaners?
- Giho 6y ago
  Until it affect the whole society in a way that its difficult to get productive workers or the unemployed litter more because of no good wellbeing.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    But until then a lot of beautiful shareholder value was created.
quietbritishjim 6y ago
The problem with this argument is that it's less important than the one in the article but easier to undermine. What if a soulless bureaucrat read it and thought, "OK then, I'll try it out and see if it increases productivity" and find that, even in the long term, it doesn't. Is that enough justification to remove breaks? If course not. The truth is, it's irrelevant whether it increases efficiency. It reminds me of someone who believes that all torture is morally wrong, but then adds "and it doesn't work anyway". Now if someone can find a situation where it does work then they can undermine that position with addressing the core argument.

cosmodisk 6y ago

I work in an environment where everything can be measured: emails sent, calls answered, CRM cases resolved, SMS sent and so on. I can even see if anyone went to the toilet at a particular time. And I simply ignore half of it. The jobs that are being monitored are already bad enough: monotonous, repetitive,and etc. And tbh, by ignoring half of all these metrics,I somehow have almost issue free workforce, as opposed to the other department that follows it by letter. Let's be efficient but let's not go completely crazy either.

karaterobot 6y ago
Raises the question: do you ever wonder whether your monitoring of the employees will someday, itself, start to get monitored?
- bartmika 6y ago
  “See how easily our technologies turn on us? The more power you think you have, the more quickly it slips from your grasp.“ - Tracer Tong, Deus Ex The older I get, the more prophetic that quote becomes.

lazyjones 6y ago

One can't lament about maximized efficiency in societies and corporations while ignoring competition. If Amazon doesn't optimize, Alibaba will take over and nothing will change for the better. If we put more "humanity" in our food production, our food will become more expensive and most people will opt for cheaper, imported food. There are always dependencies, consequences, prerequisites for interventions in the natural order of things and far too many articles get written in total ignorance of these. And far too often, bad examples of modern consumer products (like the grocery-ordering fridge or Facebook) are used to argue against efficiency.

nojs 6y ago
Reminds me of this pg classic [1]: > When we say that one kind of work is overpaid and another underpaid, what are we really saying? In a free market, prices are determined by what buyers want. People like baseball more than poetry, so baseball players make more than poets. To say that a certain kind of work is underpaid is thus identical with saying that people want the wrong things. > Well, of course people want the wrong things. It seems odd to be surprised by that. And it seems even odder to say that it's unjust that certain kinds of work are underpaid. Then you're saying that it's unjust that people want the wrong things. It's lamentable that people prefer reality TV and corndogs to Shakespeare and steamed vegetables, but unjust? That seems like saying that blue is heavy, or that up is circular. In the same way, it’s “lamentable” that people buy mass-produced products that are slightly inferior and cheaper, but not surprising. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html?viewfullsite=1 http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html?viewfullsite=1
- perl4ever 6y ago
  You can fool some of the people all of the time; therefore you should rationally invest all your efforts in maximizing resource extraction from those people. That means the less foolish aren't provided with good choices, so how can society evolve to choose good stuff?
Tarq0n 6y ago
One important example of this is pensions. Some people argue that we should settle for less consumption and economic growth. However, our concept of retirement is predicated on these. If you want to change the workings of the economy, you have to reinvent retirement first, or you'll end up with the elderly starving.

bostik 6y ago

The word missing from the post is "headroom". In critical systems it's more often called safety margin. If you let the beancounters squeeze out headroom in the name of greater efficiency, you sacrifice resilience and reliability. In other news, water is wet.

H8crilA 6y ago
Funnily enough - margin of safety is also exactly what works best in capital(ist) markets. See Graham&Dodd, or Buffett&Munger. This reminds me that capitalism will probably be just fine once people are reminded (yet again) about what risk is, and that they should treat all their counterparties well, to get those long term win-win situations.
- agustamir 6y ago
  > This reminds me that capitalism will probably be just fine once people are reminded (yet again) about what risk is Can you elaborate on this? What is the risk, and what do people need to be reminded of?

bambax 6y ago

> It’s important to realize that Amazon isn’t violating any rules, nor even (on the surface) societal norms. Not taking orders from robots, or having your agenda defined by robots/automatic scripts, should in fact be a societal norm. One can argue with a human boss, however bad or mean or stupid they are. You can't argue with a robot and that's what makes people's lives miserable.

studentik 6y ago

Professor Julian Birkinshaw judges that we may go from knowledge era where technologies lower transaction costs to zero to post-knowledge era where we use our knowledge to make more people feel better emotions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVP0tb6FzCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVP0tb6FzCs

rland 6y ago

Many things are so much less efficient now, though. Where formerly we ate what was in season, we now have produce shipped around the globe, sometimes raw foods shipped across the ocean and turned into process foods and then shipped right back again. We eat meat in nearly every meal. We used to die quickly at home when we were incurably sick; now we cling to half-life for years or decades. We used to let our kids out the front door when they were bored, now we drive them all over town for everything in their busy calendar. When we wanted to learn how to do a job, we'd talk to someone doing it and start working directly under them, quickly making ourselves useful. Now we spend years learning totally unrelated stuff, just to prove that we're human beings with a pulse who can be hired. Now, flying across the world to have fun is 'necessary,' because parks and natural areas in our own backyards are not enough. etc...

pojntfx 6y ago
The industrial revolution and it’s consequences have been a disaster for the human race
- quotemstr 6y ago
  The industrial revolution is the greatest thing to ever happen to humanity. It allowed the planet to host seven and a half billion people instead six hundred million. Do the lives of all these people mean nothing to you? What about all their positive experiences? Would you return us to the Malthusian limit to live out your agrarian fantasy? Which 6.9 billion people would you let die?
  - el_oni 6y ago
    That's a rather fallacious argument. 6.9bn people never existing != killing 6.9bn people. And the hosting of those 7bn people has caused irreperable damage to ecosystems. Why are you so happy for the extinction of entire species, but not for 6.9bn people not existing?
    - quotemstr 6y ago

stareatgoats 6y ago

He points to a real problem, but the solution is - what? We are not in a position to say "efficiency must stop", all we can say is ~"this efficiency drive has serious drawbacks" - which we can say in all perpetuity to no avail. I'm wondering if this is might be a problem of "incomplete models". Defined such, the human need for "inefficient gaps" in their work could be factored into the models, and we might get something that resembles a less controlled mode of production again, which doesn't burn out the workforce. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

cheesecracker 6y ago

I thought the 8 hour work week was introduced by Ford, because he figured out it would maximize productivity. Not by Unions. Pretty sure Tim Bray has turned full socialism, to be honest. If an "efficiency rate" leads to too many injuries, it is not the best "efficiency rate". I don't think you need Unions to figure that out, it is in the capitalist interest to then reduce the efficiency rate. I find the whole idea of discussing "how much should we work" very telling. It comes from a position of high privilege and ignorance - the idea that we live in abundance, and stuff only needs to be distributed somehow. If you are naked in the jungle, the question is not "how many hours should I work", the question is "what do I have to do to survive". If it takes 80 hours to build shelter, make a fire and hunt some food, then you'll work 80 hours. If you manage to build stuff that reduces your work load, good for you. Like in the jungle, build a net that automatically catches fish, so you don't have to spent so many hours hunting. Not you have spare time. Good for you. But don't ask some imaginary entity (god? capitalism? the government?) to provide you with your spare tie and assign your jobs. I'd like to add that to me the story of the 8 hour work week is also a warning before corporate employment. Because if 8 hours maximize your productivity, it means you are wasted after 8 hours. All you can still hope to do is eat and watch some TV. But that's not a reason to me to blame corporations . If you don't like it, negotiate with the corporations to work only part time, or seek to improve your skills so that you can ask for more money and afford more spare time. Nobody owes anybody a job.

ianleeclark 6y ago
> I thought the 8 hour work week was introduced by Ford, because he figured out it would maximize productivity. Not by Unions. The Haymarket Massacre happened 30 years prior to Ford introducing the 8 hour workday in his plants. Furthermore, there had been labor agitation resulting in 8-hour days in other parts of the country decades before Ford did so.
- cheesecracker 6y ago
  Thanks for the information. Nevertheless the claim that only Unions can reduce work hours is simply false. People can negotiate their contracts. Many people work less than 40 hour work weeks.

bambax 6y ago

The word "efficient" isn't defined in the article. Is it a synonym for "productivity" (output per worker)? Modern society seems obsessed by productivity. It's interesting for example that the mission statement for the Gates Foundation is to build a world where every person has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life. Why is that? What if I don't want to be productive? Am I still entitled to be healthy, or is health reserved for "productive" people? In Cape Town, at the top of Table Mountain lives a species of little mammals, the dassie (rock hyrax). They spend most of their day staring into the void, not looking for food, not mating, doing nothing. (I know because I once spent a day watching them.) The official explanation is that they either stand guard for predators, or they stay immobile in the sun to keep warm. But isn't it possible they're having an aesthetic experience? The scenery there is simply breathtaking, and changes constantly due to moving clouds just below. Contemplation is possibly the least productive activity one can think of; yet it's vital, if not for dassies, at least for us humans. One possibility may be that we love productivity so much, simply because it's eminently, and easily, measurable: weight the output, divide by the number of workers, done. We need a way to measure contemplation.

quotemstr 6y ago
> Am I still entitled to be healthy, or is health reserved for "productive" people? Who pays for the sustenance of these idle people and why are they obligated to do it? Life is not sustained by manna from heaven. Life is sustained by the hard work of real people. Glorifying idleness is a giant "screw you" to the people who make civilization possible.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  We are of course not obligated, but it's a good bet that those who are currently idle will become productive if we enable them to do so, and we all stand to benefit. Teach a man to fish, and all that.
  - quotemstr 6y ago
    I'm all for helping people be productive. It's a shame to waste human potential. But if you have the ability to be productive and choose to be idle instead, nobody is under any obligation to feed, house, or clothe you. If you want things made by other people and you're able to work, you must work. Anything else is incompatible with basic tenets of fairness. And even ignoring fairness and descending to the level of crude practicality, when you take from the productive and give to the unproductive, the size of the former group shrinks and the latter one grows. Eventually, there's not enough productivity to go around and the whole thing collapses.

jwr 6y ago

There is also another side to efficient systems: as you remove the slack, they become fragile. The inefficiencies are what allows systems to adapt to changing environments. You could also think of this as the bias-variance tradeoff, lack of generalization, or overly specific adaptation. This can be seen in the supply chains and economies right now with the COVID-19 impact. Economies with ultra-efficient supply chains (like the US or Western Europe) are being hit the worst, while those with slack and inefficiencies (like Central/Eastern Europe post-communist countries) can absorb the impact much better.

fierarul 6y ago

Efficiency is very unevenly distributed. If only my local and national administration would be half as efficient as Amazon!

scandox 6y ago

This is such an obvious and basic truth to most working people that it barely merits saying. It is only we that have to "work it out". That's why many of us that do this work are so valuable to our employers: we aim for efficiency without asking what it is efficient for. Efficiency without a specific goal doesn't mean anything. It's like Philip K Dick's Autofac. Just a replication machine.

malkia 6y ago

Several times in my software engineering career, I've experienced cases where super-optimizing a system leads to later removing the optimzation due to critical bugs found much later (threading, racing conditions, producing invalid data, etc.), thus leading to less performant than before software.

ReptileMan 6y ago

When you optimize a complex system for single variable you get suboptimal strange and shitty results. This is revelation that every software engineer and gamers know by heart after year of experience.

kstenerud 6y ago

> It’s important to realize that Amazon isn’t violating any rules, nor even (on the surface) societal norms. Waste is bad, efficiency is good, right? They’re doing what’s taught in every business school; maximizing efficiency is one of the greatest gifts of the free market. Amazon is really extremely good at it. It's important to realize that tycoons cornering the market in days gone by weren't violating any rules or societal norms. They were just maximizing efficiency. Same goes for industrial revolution era business owners demanding 16+ hour work shifts and tossing the broken people aside. You didn't need much skill to feed the machines; just functional hands. Eventually, society steps in and changes the rules to favour the downtrodden, and those who stand to lose from the change fight and complain bitterly about interference and the unfairness of making their efficiency harder to achieve, and then it gets pushed through regardless and life goes on. We may not be able to prescribe remedies against future abuse in many cases (and probably shouldn't in some), but we can at least recognize it when it's there, and do something about it. That's what a free society is about.

aj7 6y ago

Just think how much more efficient porn is than the real thing.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

> In practice, interest rates stay low, governments can borrow more or less for free, and all sorts of crazily doomed shit is getting investment funding. Please continue this while I find something to get VC funding

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smitty1e 6y ago

A few points: * People scale poorly. There is a reason Agile favors a "less is more" approach. * There is more than one dimension. Money is an easy metric, but not the sole one. Diminishing returns kick in when we optimize for frog$kins. * Wisdom is hard to communicate. If human wisdom were cumulative, we should have long ago reached some paradise where everyone shares their toys nicely. Doesn't happen, and great parents are followed by dull kids. And the wiser parents somehow have less offspring than the fools. This, too, is counterproductive.

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dgudkov 6y ago

The key question that is missing in the article - efficient for whom, buyers or sellers? Too often (but not always), business is a zero sum game. Make customers pay 20% more without extra cost and your business will be 100% more profitable (assuming 20% profitability). Or, which happens more often, cheapen quality/cost by 20% while retaining the price, and your profitability doubles. Competition is supposed to enforce efficiency on sellers, but the temptation to cheapen quality is just too big, because it turns out customers are less picky than they should've been in theory, and are ready to give up quality for something free (as free social network) or cheaper (as cheaper sugar-laden food). So when your competitor cheapens quality and it goes down well with the customers, what else can you do besides watching your market share shrinks? EDITED: typos.

hrktb 6y ago
The efficient for whom par is clearly stated all along, with even a direct mention: > and (for the business) efficient Otherwise on the bigger point about competition: it doesn’t seem to me the landscapes are that tight, except when you’re in the efficiency game. If your target is Amazon, you’re in for a ride and can leave your ethics in the closet. If your goal is to find a viable niche where you can grow with your customers, you won’t be in a zero-sum, drive the prices to the ground kind of rat race. Finding that kind of niche if of course far from easy, now I’d argue a rat race to become the next Amazon isn’t either.
ComodoHacker 6y ago
>what else can you do Either follow the suit or cater to subset of customers who value quality.
inerte 6y ago
An article I read recently makes a similar point on maximizing only one side of supply and demand and the effects for consumers and “quality”, in this case, how animals are killed. Good read: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/7/8/21311327/farmers-factory-farms-cafos-animal-rights-booker-warren-khanna https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/7/8/21311327/farmers...

dnc 6y ago

Related to this and discussed quite a few times on HN ([1],[2]), 'In Praise of Idleness', an essay by Bertrand Russell: https://libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Praise%20of%20Idleness.pdf https://libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Prais... . I return to it every once in a while, if not to regain a bit of sanity, than just to enjoy clarity of thought and style in his writing. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21509144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21509144 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015092

xg15 6y ago

Efficiency is not the problem, because the term "efficient" by itself is meaningless. You have to define what you consider the "costs" to minimize or the "benefits" to maximize to even be talking about efficiency. In many cases, the quantity that is being optimized is simply profit.

dpflan 6y ago
Yes, the article mentions the metrics movement that allows these efficiency calculations. Other variables need to be added to the equation to maximized (and minimized) such as employee well-being.

moomin 6y ago

Pretty much everyone in management should read “Slack” by Tom DeMarco. And try to make changes to free up that time for their reports. It will pay off.

throw0101a 6y ago

I am reminded of this observation from another thread: > If we suppose that the goal of society is to produce the greatest utility, and that the utility wealth provides an individual is sub-linear (i.e. twice as much money makes you less than twice as happy), then inequality is inefficient resource allocation. > However, we also suppose that some level of inequality can lead to greater productivity, and thus greater utility overall. The question is then what level produces the best outcome? * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505342

mdale 6y ago

Some great commentary here :) I for one am enjoying being not so efficient this morning.

csours 6y ago

> “All of the overcapacity that has been squeezed out of our healthcare system; we now wish we had it. All of the redundancy in our food production that has been consolidated away; we want that, too. We need our old, local supply chains — not the single global ones that are so fragile in this crisis. And we want our local restaurants and businesses to survive, not just the national chains.” Just In Time - the machine that changed the world (See Toyota Production System) Just In Time works great, until it doesn't. The factory works at 1 unit per minute, demand is pretty inelastic. Society is pretty elastic, if a bunch of people decide they want toilet paper TODAY, the Just In Time system is going to starve out.

gwern 6y ago
Just In Time works great; that and other efficiencies have brought humanity to a world so cosmically wealthy, so infinitely more developed than robust decentralized green (ie. medieval peasant standard of living) economies, that its inhabitant can lounge around eating bon-bons getting obese while endlessly resharing on social media the same photo of one shop out of thousands being out for a day or two of a luxury as a devastating indictment of Just in Time.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jimbokun 6y ago
There were a lot of articles written about the Great Toilet Paper shortage, but in reality after a short period of time everyone got all the toilet paper they needed. I think the system responded very well.

known 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

derefr 6y ago

> Summary: Certain (not all) Amazon warehouses seem to have per-employee injury rates that are significantly higher than the industry average, as in twice as high or more. Apparent reason: It’s not they’re actually dangerous places to work, it’s just that they’ve maximized efficiency and reduced waste to the point where people are picking and packing and shipping every minute they’re working, never stopping. And a certain proportion of human bodies simply can’t manage that. They break down under pressure. Wouldn’t a more parsimonious explanation be that the job previously consisted of a safe part and a dangerous part, and it was easier to automate the safe part, so now more of a human's time on the job is spent doing the dangerous part? If you imagine the "safe part" of the job as "slack" (i.e. imagine that the employees were previously half working, and half doing nothing—not that they actually were, but it makes the model clearer), then they've effectively just gotten rid of all the slack, and so made the employees do twice as much work per work day. If there's a constant small probability of injury per item packed, then of course doing twice as much work per work day, will lead to twice as many injuries per employee per work day. You'd have gotten the same number of employee-injuries out per items-packed in, no matter what time scale that packing occurred on.

padiyar83 6y ago
> If there's a constant small probability of injury per item packed, then of course doing twice as much work per work day, will lead to twice as many injuries per employee per work day This assumes injury-risk is a linear function of number of items packed. That's not true. Fatigue increases injury-risk - that is how tired you and your entire team is while performing the task. If the person sorting the packages up the line is tired and making mistakes, the person binning it is more prone to mistakes, leading to an injury. In summary, there is a "fatigue-threshold" after which injury-risk increases non-linearly (say exponentially) with every item packed.
- derefr 6y ago
  If fatigue is a simple threshold (i.e. you "become fatigued" after a certain number of units of work done), then the obvious solution is to work the employees at 100% utilization for half as long (at which point they should be roughly as fatigued as the employees worked half as hard for twice as long), and then swap them out for a second shift. (I.e., instead of having 10 employees with 40hr weeks, you now have 20 employees with 20hr weeks.) This is the approach I believe is also advised for improving productivity/decreasing errors in the medical field (where doctors have a hard time not pushing themselves to 100% all the time, because of their personalities): hire more doctors per hospital, such that each doctor can be cut down to a shorter shift (and thus maybe lower salary, too.) If, on the other hand, fatigue is about the lack of micro-rests between individual units of work, then the appropriate solution is more subtle: 1. replace the low-quality rest of doing "slack" work, with high-quality rest of doing nothing-at-all (or even "actively" resting, the equivalent of an athlete doing cool-down stretches between sets of an exercise), so that employees can cool down more quickly and/or return closer to peak productivity from each rest; 2. have slightly more employees (hopefully fewer than double), working off branching lines, such a way that units of work are directed to go to whichever employee is "fresh" rather than "stalled." Like processors with pipelined executions and multiple APUs per core, directing instructions to the APU that isn't currently blocked.

SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago

The question is not always "Is this efficient?" but "Who is this efficient for?" A lot of the things that he is describing are very efficient for the company providing them, and now less so for the customer.

yogthos 6y ago

Words like efficiency and freedom are loaded terms that have an implicit context. It's always important to ask what the context actually is. Efficient to what end, or freedom to do what. All too often we discover that we are not the beneficiaries of the efficiencies and freedoms being discussed.

mcguire 6y ago

"Item: Speaking of which, it seems that when you have a problem with a business, the process for solving it each year becomes more and more complex and opaque and irritating and (for the business) efficient." Hey, I was there! Back in the '90s, IBM was getting too many support calls for AIX forwarded to the AIX team, so they introduced another layer of phone tech support to cut down on it.

deleted 6y ago

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