20 ms·

Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

745 points by joubert 6y ago

shivenigma 6y ago
Why not move fast and break things? I think it is a trade-off between being efficient and breaking something and being stable.
ssivark 6y ago
The fundamental problem is the inverted-U shape of payoffs to “optimizing” any one factor (or a small subset of key focus areas). Beyond a point, you’re just “overfitting” to the incorrect metric and underperforming in the truer sense. Yeah, you might not have a metric for the “deeper value”... c’est la vie! Any decision making approach that tries to ignore that problem/limitation is simply stupid. The other problem with prizing efficiency is that we often optimize for efficiency under an incorrect model of the situation (model-reality-mismatch) — underweighting the likelihood of upsetting possibilities. That’s essentially what the idea of “black swan”/“fat tails” is about. It’s not really about statistics, unless you’re using a flawed and over-simplified statistical model to ground your metric of efficiency. IMHO the same problem underlies the approach/framework of behavioral economics. In many situations, observed human behavior might be “irrational” only because your model of reality is naively simplistic. It shouldn’t be surprising that a satisficing approach works better in reality than an optimizing approach; if it does sound surprising, consider that your intuitions might be biased by an incorrect model of reality!
bschne 6y ago
I've found "efficiency as the opposite of stability" a very powerful concept to think about - even though it's fairly simple, it seems to be almost a fundamental law. Whether it's about the economy at large, your own household, a supply chain, what have you - as soon as you optimize for efficiency by removing friction, you take all the slack/damping out of the system and become instantly more liable to catastrophic failure if some of your basic conditions change. Efficiency gives you a speed bonus, at the cost of increased risk / less resilience to unforeseen events. Stewart Brand's concept of "Pace Layering" comes to mind for how to deal with this at a systemic level - https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2 https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2
- MadSudaca 6y ago
  Maybe the problem is that efficiency and robustness are orthogonal?
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    They at least aren't in direct tension.
    - mcguire 6y ago
      Up to a point, being inefficient conflicts with robustness. If you're profligately wasting a resource, you are in for a hard time if that resource dries up. On the other hand, past a point, efficiency conflicts with robustness. To maximize efficiency, you become tightly coupled to some resource and again have a hard time if that resource dries up.
  - aaron-santos 6y ago
    If you think about the two-dimensional efficiency/robustness space you can pretty easily see how it's isomorphic to the return/volatility space by way of simple transformations. If yourself to be convinced that such a bridge exists you can also bring tools in the return/volatility space back into the efficiency/robustness space by applying the appropriate inverse transformations. Maybe the conclusions are common sense, but I'd still read a blog framing that process by way of analogy.
    - aaron-santos 6y ago
      EDIT: If you allow yourself.. :/
    - MadSudaca 6y ago
      Interesting idea, thanks for sharing.
  - Double_Cast 6y ago
    They're orthogonal for non-trivial decisions. Once you hit the efficient frontier of anything, you need to start making trade-offs.
CincinnatiMan 6y ago
The problem is you can only slow down if everyone else does too, unless you're willing to step down in "class" which a lot of people have trouble with.
- acephal 6y ago
  And in a number of different domains in life at that
- TuringTest 6y ago
  > The problem is you can only slow down if everyone else does too That's a myth propagated by people with a stake in the pie. Nature shows us that you only need to be hyper-efficient and in a constant arms race if you're competing for the same resources. Otherwise, you can adopt an opportunistic survival strategy that trades efficiency for variety and a diversity of useable resources. Of course, efficiency is the only option when there are companies trying to grab all the resources available, as in our current business setting. But that's definitely not a healthy environment.
FpUser 6y ago
>"Multitask; text on one device while emailing on a second, and perhaps conversing on a third." Result - shitty content of texting, emails and shitty conversation. I am not sure who in their right mind actually advocates that.
- imafish 6y ago
  I think no one advocates it but many practice it.
- allenu 6y ago
  The problem could be twofold: 1) our tools push us towards multitasking. Notifications pop up and there's a sense of immediacy where you need to deal with it now (texting back) or it will get "lost" in the stream of new notifications, never to be dealt with. 2) people today expect everything, even communications, to be responsive, leading to a low content response immediately as opposed to a high quality one later. For #1, modern tools like Slack favor immediate responses since it's not set up to treat conversations or requests as manipulable items. With email you can drag and drop into folders and deal with them one by one. With slack, once you've "seen" a message, there's really no way to put it somewhere to remind yourself to respond. (If there is, it's not obvious to me.)
  - naavis 6y ago
    You can at least click on the context menu of a message and select ”Remind me” to set a reminder about the it. But yeah, I do agree with you. Slack messages are less ”manipulable”.
jlarocco 6y ago
I think the article is drawing the wrong conclusions. In every example given, the problem isn't "too much efficiency", but failing to plan for unlikely situations. Making something inefficient doesn't magically increase preparedness.
- mcguire 6y ago
  No, but maximizing efficiency doesn't necessarily increase preparedness either. Being prepared has costs.
  - jlarocco 6y ago
    Sure, preparedness has costs, but the article makes the point poorly, IMO. Many of the arguments are non sequiturs. The last example is particularly bad. On an icy road, it doesn't matter if a car gets 100 mpg or 10 mpg - speed and traction are far more important factors.
Taylor_OD 6y ago
Of course not trying cram as much in as possible makes life better. However tell that to a CEO who has built a business off an unsustainable, for a normal person who wants to have a life outside of work, efficiency mindset.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  Or a CEO who is keenly aware of the benefit of what they do. It would be difficult, for example, to convince a solar manufacturer that panel costs should decrease slowly when they know how many fossil fuel plants will be built because of that.
- r00fus 6y ago
  This was me a few years ago. Hyper-efficient, doing 60+h weeks + workouts + family. Couldn't imagine it differently. Then I had a medical condition that required me to slow down, changing my lifestyle completely. Only in retrospect do realize my situation was extremely fragile.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  The CEO gets it from above. Investors want to hold a portfolio with a particular risk/return profile. In order to do that, the individual components of the portfolio need to be running at higher risk, higher return profiles. (Portfolio theory is why I am in favour of social safety nets. A worker wishes a relatively safe risk/return profile will voluntarily choose a much higher risk job when they can combine it with a low-risk backstop.)
chasd00 6y ago
the article doesn't make sense to me when making decisions: "we should be asking which option will give us good-enough results under the widest range of future states of the world" doesn't that lead you right back to the struggle for the most efficient way to determine the optimal "good-enough" answer? Also, the article talks about efficiency but efficiency of what exactly? What if you're very efficient at a maintaining a relaxed and happy lifestyle?
- Double_Cast 6y ago
  Suppose you're playing a videogame. Your character just leveled up. You can upgrade either Attack or HP. * "Upgrade Attack" is more efficient. It allows you to beat the game faster. But since your HP is low, you can't afford to make mistakes (get hit). * "Upgrade HP" is more robust. It increases your damage-buffer, which allows you to absorb more mistakes without dying. But if you make zero mistakes, you won't beat the game as quickly as if you'd upgraded Attack. IRL the dichotomy is often "income vs wealth", "velocity vs displacement", "throughput vs latency", "strength vs endurance", etc.
- zackmorris 6y ago
  As it relates to hacking, I think of it as: clients can be fickle because they don't even know what they want sometimes. So I picture next steps as coalescing, like a wave collapsing. Uncertainty comes to dominate the process, so it works more like evolution than planning (stochastic vs deterministic). My problem solving algorithm is to look up to 7 steps ahead, along up to 7 different branches in the tree of possibilities (I'd like to examine more choices but my brain can't hold them all). In practice this is always at least 2 and 2, so this task or its alternative, and then looking at the next step along each branch. Then I prune the tree, selecting for the steps that work across as many branches as possible, without rewrites or duplication. I'm often working on a common dependency several steps out that other people aren't aware of yet. This could be thought of as a breadth-first search or parallel search. Unfortunately on an individual level, the tech industry seems to be going the opposite direction, exploring deeply down very long and linear branches of the tree. Coders are expected to implement an idea and be ready to scrap it without hesitation, iterating over and over again until finished, rather than simulating the outcome in their minds. More of a depth-first, serial search. I think the split is due to programming moving from an individual endeavor towards teams. We can't see inside each other's heads, so we plot the course and divvy up steps among the members. The cost of this is that serial searches will almost always turn up suboptimal results, because the resources to do broader searches get withheld so we miss elegant solutions and even perceive them as more costly. To answer your question, the serial approach works best for individual tasks, but misses the big-picture view that might have let us see that the task didn't need to be done in the first place. So my vote would be to see more quiet reflection and less spinning and churning. But I'm mostly outvoted, so it probably comes down to personality, with junior developers being more sought-after than senior developers like me who might be perceived as reserved/overcautious/conservative.
brentjanderson 6y ago
Reminds me of this piece from Seth Godin on the importance of building slack into our lives: https://seths.blog/2019/06/investing-in-slack/ https://seths.blog/2019/06/investing-in-slack/ (Not the chat app)
- r00fus 6y ago
  One of my RSS feeds is Seth's Blog. Nice mindfulness tips and perspective tehre.
david_draco 6y ago
Insurance is the opposite of a lottery. If you think buying lottery tickets are a waste of money because you lose out in the long run, the same argument should lead you to think having insurance is a good thing.
- mkoubaa 6y ago
  If insurance was cost effective in the long run, insurance companies wouldn't be profitable
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    Insurance schemes do not have to be run for a profit. It's not a law of nature.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    That is only true in a zero sum system. If insurance can get say 3% profit margin but allows for others to take a riskier approach which overall produces 7% more profit by allowing slimmer margins both can profit. There are risks to that sort of leverage for both parties, especially in black swan events. It is akin to loans essentially - the one taking them may be giving profits to others but that doesn't mean it isn't cost effective.
  - ska 6y ago
    You aren't protecting against the expected value though, you are protecting against variance.
    - mkoubaa 6y ago
      No argument there
- geewee 6y ago
  Why? I'd think the whole point of insurance is that everyone (as an average) loses out in the long run?
devilduck 6y ago
Pace is relative and I think teams will generally average out in terms of pace. Finding a pace that fits you and your style would be an essential factor in having better work efficacy. My boss works really fast, works constantly and is probably a workaholic, a pace which I can not and will not try to match, so I have to work at my own pace and this throws off how project planning goes because the PMs are used to his pace and don't give me an optimal amount of time on projects, so I will find myself rushing which of course makes me feel bad and triggers my impostor syndrome. Eventually this pace will break down and become unmanageable for me and I'll have to quit, which will hurt their production even more. Pace and efficiency are definitely linked, but I don't necessarily know that I think faster = more efficient. And there are folks mentioning stability, also definitely linked here, but i think max efficiency would lean more into stability than pace. Linking pace with efficiency also seems to create the idea that "faster will be the winner" which, you know, that's a whole thing, introducing competition in an arguably healthy way. I generally tend to find that emotion will usually come before logic. Building something that could be considered efficient, but a feeling says "This could be more efficient" and then logic jumps in and does the work. Just some stream of consciousness writing here, food for thought maybe, or extremely poor quality ideas!
austinl 6y ago
One of my favorite quotes on this topic comes from Aurelius' description of his adopted father in Meditations. [Y]ou would never say of him that he "broke out a sweat": but everything was allotted its own time and thought, as by a man of leisure - his way was unhurried, organized, vigorous, consistent in all. I feel like I spend a lot of time rushing from one thing to the next, constantly questioning whether I'm spending time wisely. And then I end up accomplishing less because I lack focus in one area. I've instead been trying to relax, slow down, and take tasks one at a time until completion. I'd also recommend Cal Newport's book, Deep Work, on this.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I'm still stumped over the fact that humans are behind Antique Roma existentialism on average.
- vishnugupta 6y ago
  > but everything was allotted its own time and thought, as by a man of leisure As an extreme example; watching Schumacher at his peak perform during a qualifying lap or during race, in treacherous rainy conditions, while everyone was absolutely struggling, and him out front, half a lap ahead of everyone was like watching poetry in motion. You could tell he was very relaxed just by the way his hands operated the steering wheel, hitting the apex every time in a single motion, no twitching or tossing around the car. It seemed he just had more time, as in the time had just slowed down for him compared to everyone else. Edit: Typo; damn you Mac OS auto-correct!
  - austinl 6y ago
    as by a man of leisure is my favorite phrase in the passage. I think it's the key to the whole thing. It's implies what kind of mindset you should try to adopt: relax, enjoy what you're doing and appreciate the moment (if you're able to). Aurelius' adopted father was a consul three times, which is certainly not a stress-free job! But he apparently was able to keep cool by the way he approached his work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_consul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_consul
  - 6y ago
Taek 6y ago
This comment thread is making me realize we don't have a good word to distinguish between efficiency as in "we only have 7 hospital beds because that's all we need on 99% of each day" and efficiency as in "we replaced steps X,Y,Z with just step X', because we found that X' could accomplish everything that XYZ could accomplish but it's faster, more accurate, and cheaper". One makes a tradeoff by reducing overheads and buffers, and the other doesn't have any tradeoffs, it's just a better way of doing things based on novel techniques.
- milesskorpen 6y ago
  I don’t know if those two things are as different as you suggest. Multiple steps add redundancy, if you fail one step you can get much of the value from other steps. More steps are frequently added in response to edge cases. Could be a Chesterton’s Fence scenario Instead of bemoaning efficiency, it’d be interesting to reward/value redundancy and antifragility, at least at the system level. I think this could mean trust busting, regulation, and general cultural shifts.
  - r00fus 6y ago
    As long as those steps Y & Z are actually adding redundancy/antifragility, then yes. If the purpose is some deprecated feature or dependency that simply serves no purpose or is now an anti-feature, it would be more efficient to remove. It would be good to have proof of a Chesteron's Fence analysis to say "yes, we know that Y & Z purposes and have analized the cost/benefit to removing them and the populations/systems impacted" - would this be an impact analysis?
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    Multiple steps don't always add redundancy, sometimes they're just noise or artifacts. I had a colleague who, when opening a file, would first click on the Windows desktop, then "My Computer", then navigate to the directory, open the file, and close the Explorer window. There was zero redundancy versus leaving the directory open so they could open the next file (or using the application's "Open File" dialog). That is a perfect example of wasteful motion (in their case due to a poor mental model of how computers worked, as I learned through later discussions) that could be simplified significantly without loss of quality or redundancy in the system. Contrast this with: The surgical office called me this morning and stated, "The surgery is for a ganglion cyst on your left wrist." Which I confirmed. When I go in on Tuesday for the surgery this will be repeated, and a mark will be made on the area to be cut open (though in this case it'd be really hard to screw up and open the right wrist, as there is no, quite visible, cyst there). That is useful redundancy of the sort you describe. Removing any step (the initial visit a week ago, the call today, the check when I arrive, the mark on the wrist) and you increase the risk of error.
xondono 6y ago
Since when multitasking is efficient? There’s a big difference between being productive and being busy.
hosh 6y ago
It something I learned recently about ecologies, and permaculture design. And then I started applying it to my personal life. Instead of heroically finishing things, to instead, work on them in a way that is more like the regenerative and resilient processes from permaculture design.
- r00fus 6y ago
  I'd love to hear you elaborate on this in more detail.
  - hosh 6y ago
    I'm still working it out myself, so this is all work in progress. I have a teenage stepdaughter doing online schooling. I had been working remote for years now. It took a long time to work out how things work with my wife -- she is a stay-at-home mom. Work and family life intrude on each other, and even more so this year with the pandemic. I used to burn out big time, and then, I burn out in smaller doses. In the last burnout cycle, my wife miscarried, and that spent both my wife spinning. So I am not entire sure at this point how much of this is like when I functioned at peak. The things that I have been doing: - I try to have a few tasks I think I can accomplish and try to do them. But because the family life can be so disruptive, I've learned that I'm not really going to be as productive as I am at the peak, and just be ok with it. - I try not to be a blocker for either my teammates or for my family. - I have a garden. I enjoy it. I mainly do work with it in the morning and evening. Sometimes I am exhausted (especially in Phoenix summer hell season). In general, though, it recharging. - I practice neigong, and I finally got to the point where I can reliably cycle something (which I will not get into technical details about unless you're also a practitioner. It is a rabbit hole). But suffice it to say, it rebalances the vital energy being distributed among my physical, emotional, and mental states. Part of the burnout was exhausting everything mentally, repeatedly, until there is just nothing left. - When I push through something, it is for small things. Those small things might chain together. Past a certain point, it is better to go for a walk. - I can tell when my brain is just exhausted. It is better to take a nap. I'll warn my wife that I'm not really present during grocery shopping. She doesn't always like that (it is one of the times we go out to do something together that is not in the house). I might take MCT with some mixed nuts. - I don't use caffeine -- no coffee or tea. The closest I get is with roiboos, and even its 1mg caffeine can affect me. Fortunately, the caffiene content of chocolate does not affect me as much. The part I am working out is how to live in a way that follows the permaculture ethics -- care of earth, care of people, and fair share. It is the last of these that has made me realize that the ambition of unbounded growth, whether for society, or for myself, is simply impractical. It may be strange to say it on a forum that was created for people who were or are interested in doing a Ycombinator startup and getting rich from winning the startup lottery ... but I've come to realize that it is not how I want to live or relate to the world. I used to practice minimalism ... but now I realize that is just a stepping stone. It's investing in regenerative and resilient systems. The garden is part of my long-term effort to create a perennial food forest on my property. There is a lot of tech and "shiny" that I realize I don't really need to get. And while I know that recently, I would keep comparing other people's cars as status / wealth symbols, it is ultimately meaningless. And fortunately, I know what I need to do to get my mind to cease doing that. This is a very unusual way for me to approach this subject. I usually start out with a radical position: inequality and the wealth gap is _intrinsic_ to modern civilizations, and it rests upon the notion that wealth is something to be extracted from the earth, and access controlled. "Efficiency" is how you maximize profit, as if that is the only way to optimize things. Therefore, there will never be any system of economics and free market (or command economy) that will ever take the well-being of the earth and the people into account. From this perspective, I think it is insanity. Why would anyone want to participate in a system where there will be guaranteed losers? (Because the few exceptions give the false hope that you might be the exception). It therefore follows that, if I want to participate in a different kind of a "game", then I will have to live my life by those other principles. And so, I'm trying that with my current work. To give an receive my fair share. To reinvest capital gained from extractive wealth and convert it to regenerative wealth. To not tie my personal sense of self-worth into status or wealth symbols.
hinkley 6y ago
I think we need more hobbies. Maybe some anthropology classes as well. There is, for instance, a certain give-and-take in classical Japanese garden aesthetics. In a formal English or French garden, almost all you can see, everywhere you look, is evidence of human hands. Since no plant is in anything you could mistake for its natural state, you are practically beaten over the head by the presence of the unseen gardener. Look at what I made nature do. What piece of work is a man. It's a dynamically unstable system. Meanwhile the Japanese garden is a dynamically stable system. The plants are allowed to 'win' in many cases that either support the gardener's goals, or are simply not worth the effort required to win the argument. It's more efficient to let the system do what is in its nature than to try and stop it.. If you know how to look, you can see the gardener everywhere, over-emphasizing what would have happened without them, in such a way that you see the plant first, and the work second. It is organic, with an editor. You might see a similar philosophy in Judo. You are steering what is there, letting the subject of your efforts do most of the heavy lifting for you. It is quite efficient, but not in the antiseptic way we sometimes imagine that efficiency should possess. TL;DR: most of us have no idea what efficiency looks like, and we make a mockery of it while trying to pursue it.
noisy_boy 6y ago
Having moved from an inefficient setting to an efficient environment, I have noticed a reduction of tolerance and threshold for getting stressed when things don't go smoothly. There is something to be said for the buffer that "inefficiency" provides.
- rhizome 6y ago
  All you have to do is look to history for the movements and societies that have put "efficiency" on a pedestal to gauge the value and practicality. There was a major one in the 20th century. It did not go well.
swayvil 6y ago
Striving for efficiency is bad science. The dream takes precedence over the reality.
trappist 6y ago
This article suffers from a misconception of efficiency. A car that gets more miles per gallon than another is more fuel-efficient, not more efficient. A system of local optimums is an inefficient system. The author asks us to make life more efficient by considering efficiency in a broader scope. Efficiency is still good.
kevrone 6y ago
TL;DR.
AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
The author writes, > Arguably, a little friction to slow us down would have enabled both institutions and individuals to make better financial decisions. But the article fails to bring up the US's rate of interest. If interest rates were allowed to have risen, this would have been just the sort of "slowdown" that the author is looking for. I find it remarkable that this article could be so insightful, yet lack even a single mentioning of this simple and fundamental fact. Rising interest rates are the market's implementation of precisely what the author is looking for.
kazinator 6y ago
Same-day delivery isn't efficiency; it's made possible by inefficiency, like using more delivery people and vehicles who cover inefficient routes, and using more warehouses closer to delivery areas. Actually we can't discuss efficiency without making it clear what parameter we are optimizing, at the cost of what (if any) other parameters. However, usually, if we reduce the time something takes not by cleverly eliminating, rearranging or otherwise streamlining the steps, but rather by some brute force method that requires more resources (more people, more equpiment, more energy), it is hard to frame that as efficiency.
- iak8god 6y ago
  Right. Same-day delivery is fast, not usually efficient. Neither is multitasking using three different devices at the same time efficient. Again in this example the author seems to be confusing rush with efficiency. I didn't make it past those first few incoherent lines, so I don't know whether this confusion persists into the rest of the article.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- semaj111 6y ago
  I agree. For me, the article absolutely did not deliver on what was said in the title. They declare efficiency as itself dangerous, where it is the narrow application of efficiency that really results in problens.
- kovac 6y ago
  As the customer, it would be more efficient for me to receive what I need today than after one month. I think same day delivery is more about that than optimising a company's operations. They are selling efficiency to their customers.
not2b 6y ago
The article repeats a commonly believed myth about money being invented as a replacement for barter. Adam Smith thought so, as do many economists, but they forgot to ask anthropologists. See https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-society-myth/471051/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-...
- roughly 6y ago
  Strongly recommend "Debt: The First 5000 Years" by David Graeber - https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781612194196 https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781612194196 - solid treatment of economic history from an anthropological viewpoint.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  I thought there were some hints of barter of sorts in palace economies from shipwrecks - no currency but incoming exotic commodities they couldn't produce and outgoing ships of commodities well beyond any personal use implies some trade relationships. The fact Palace Economies all died out doesn't mean a barter economy never existed, just that it wasn't stable enough to leave any isolated "time capsule cultures". Granted palace economy commerce isn't on a personal level unless you count the ruler who allocates everything.
smabie 6y ago
> The creation of ‘option markets’ means that you don’t have to go to the trouble of buying a stock that you’re going to be selling soon anyway. You can just promise to buy it, and then sell it at a price and date specified by the option contract. Options, like their name implies, aren't a promise to do anything, they provide the right but not obligation to buy or sell at a certain price.
stretchwithme 6y ago
Efficiency is for machines. Effectiveness and creativity are for people. And the more machines do laundry, the more effective and creative people can choose to be. Or they can choose to watch TV.
Dumblydorr 6y ago
Doesn't the author miss that efficiency and deceleration (i.e. slow down) are in some respects orthogonal? It is possible to more efficiently go the same distance at the same speed, but use less resources. It is also possible to both slow down and increase efficiency which can synergistically decrease resource use. Take the aluminum can. Beverage companies heavily innovated, reduced aluminum use, saved resources, emissions, and consumers get a win with lighter cans and less environmental pollution and carbon emission.
skybrian 6y ago
Note that in situations where exponential growth is possible, lower latency means much faster growth, and this can easily happen faster than you have time to react to. Exponential growth at 5% a week is a lot different than 5% a day or 5% a minute. Social media would be less dangerous if there were more automatic delays before a message you post appears to others.
CurtHagenlocher 6y ago
This reminds me of Frank Herbert's Bureau of Sabotage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Sabotage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Sabotage).
m3kw9 6y ago
They should say “Efficiency” is dangerous. Actual efficiency is not bad at all. Say focusing on one task till is done is sometimes the most efficient way to do a task.
acd 6y ago
I think life is about having good experiences! That is why traveling and visiting new places and food is great, your mind gets to experience news things. Running around in 80 mph+ well you tend too miss things is my experience. Life is usually not about maximum efficiency unless you are a 100m sprint runner. Robots and programs can run as fast as they want and automation do us favors, however us humans should not strive to do the same. Compare Junk food, you get full quickly, nutrients in junk food is usually bad. You can instead choose to have the experience of slowly cooking a nutritious meal. Eating slowly cooked food with your family and friends is often better. Usually stress comes with running around too fast so you tend to consume not healthy food and you then after a while gain weight. I am not saying consuming junk food, or running fast is bad every now and then but doing so all the time you might miss slower better experiences... Same goes for buying local vs buying cheap stuff which does not last long. Often buying local is better for the environment.
zerop 6y ago
Efficiency would not create any big invention. It's a big problem.
patja 6y ago
Reminds me of the book Slack by Tom DeMarco
gmuslera 6y ago
Systems in real life are complex. Limiting them to just one dimension on which they are efficient may leave out factors that make them work at all, or just better. But if you really know every and all components and criteria that may be applied to them, you might improve efficience. Good luck with that.
AcerbicZero 6y ago
TL;DR Author who is paid to write words, gets confused when a word has more than one meaning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency =/= "efficiency"
ShapesOfEmpathy 6y ago
I study empathy, and have often said that efficiency is the opposite of empathy. Whatever we want to call it, the human element is overlooked when we strive for the single dimension of efficiency. Hannah Arendt famously talked about the banality of evil. During the Holocaust, the counting and categorizing of people was flattening or reducing to that important human element we all share.
Tepix 6y ago
I came across this related blog post the other day: „in the name of taking it slow“ https://www.voyageofthezephyr.com/blog/takingitslow https://www.voyageofthezephyr.com/blog/takingitslow
cblconfederate 6y ago
And what's the most efficient way to slow down?
shard 6y ago
The mix of font styles in the PSYCHE title strip on top really bothers me. Are there any typography experts in the house that can explain what concepts could be behind that choice?
alexchamberlain 6y ago
I feel like a lot of conversations and articles recently speak to an inadequate understanding of risk, and planning for risk. Risk is made up of at least 2 or 3 components: what is the probability something will happen? And, if it does happen, what is the impact and how will you mitigate that impact? For example, you may believe that a change to a website you are deploying has a low probability of taking the website offline. If it is taken offline, it may cost £X per hour in lost revenue, but you’ll leave the old version running on a standby server, so it only takes a few minutes to switch back. That’s a much more thorough understanding to 1 aspect of risk than “this rollout is low risk”. Once you have that understanding, it’s reasonable to discuss how to reduce the probability of an outage (better testing?), as well as how to reduce the impact (staged rollout?) or to speed up the fix if it were to happen (practise?). In COVID terms, we should be discussing the impact of decisions in the light of future pandemics. Could we invest now in reusable PPE, so that next time we don’t have a global rush on the disposable stuff? Do we need to educate the public more readily about reducing disease transmission to reduce the likelihood of a pandemic in the first place? I’m not a doctor, so I have no idea on the specifics, but the likelihood of any given pandemic will always be low, so what is the impact of the decision if there is one and does that impact need to be mitigated? (even if it is less efficient to do so...)
- hahajk 6y ago
  You say risk has 2 or 3 components. The two you list, liklihood and severity, are the two I usually hear. What is the third?
johnjj257 6y ago
This all sounds more like a preference than a fact.
aaron695 6y ago
> We worship efficiency. <> Multitask; text on one device while emailing on a second, and perhaps conversing on a third. Efficiency is seen as good. Inefficiency as wasteful. The premise is total bullshit. No one thinks multitasking is good. Barry Schwartz consistently doesn't get it, but he's good at presenting "Unpopular opinion's" style articles. People say multi-tasking is great! But it's not! Upvote if you agree. Efficiency is why your baby doesn't get stuck in the womb killing two people. Bot sniping on GrubHub is scary, this is an efficiency that actually worries me. But it's not within this articles scope.
vonwoodson 6y ago
This is the most important lesson on 2020. But, how do I find an employer who will agree with me?...
eointierney 6y ago
Oh dear, I want to rant. Efficiency is a dimensionless ratio of energy in to energy out. Economics, as formulated, has little to say about efficiency and lots to say about preference relations on utility functions (the texts do tend to hand-wavingly waffle about how markets attain "efficiency" through hypothetically rational actors maximizing utility functions etc., if you want a giggle check out the "fundamental theorems of welfare"). I actually read the fine article, and didn't give up after the first couple of paragraphs. And in paragraph the third is introduced friction. I dunno, maybe it's because I actually study science, but friction is a well defined thing and the coefficient of same is another _dimensionless_ variable. It seems every time economists want to incorporate a notion from science proper they go for the dimensionless stuff because that way they don't have to go through the whole tiresome rigmarole of ... dimensional analysis. It makes me feel like Tantacrul criticising UI's (check him out on youtube, he's both funny and informative). Anyway, efficiency is not dangerous, efficiency will actually allow the survivors of the Anthropocene Disaster make it through the coming disaster. Slowing down is not a bad notion because it means most humans can spend more time thinking (quite efficient actually) and less time haring around the planet distracting themselves from the vapidity of their vanity. However life is not better because it is slower, it's better because humans appreciate what an extraordinary (literally and figuratively) opportunity it is to be alive. As insurance policy against disaster stop listening to economists because they observably don't have a clue (they can't make accurate and meaningful predictions), instead study science, especially physics, because these meanings are measured against reality and the resulting predictions are highly reliable (TANSTAAFL < 2TD). /rant
grawprog 6y ago
I think this article is missing something. What it talks about is efficiency of systems, which I think is different than efficiency in process. Most of what the article talks about is making large systems more efficient for the benefit of the system at large. I agree, this makes individual components of the system more stressed and prone to catastrophic failure at any one point in the system. People within that kind of efficient system are pushed to their limits and breaking points. However, making individual processes efficient i've found reduces stress on the individuals involved in that process and allows for that slowing down time. The examples I can think of to back my points up Previously I worked at a job where the actual process was incredibly inefficient. I ended up working long hours and twice as hard as I needed to. By the time I left that job, I'd increased the efficiency of the process to the point where I was working reasonable hours, had some good downtime to relax or take care of other things I'd had to neglect before. The overall system at the place though was fairly inefficient, which was a good thing. It meant we were usually a little ahead and could account for things that went wrong. Another recent example at my current job, we were working with a person who tried to overhaul our inefficient, yet working system. Our processes were efficient enough that we always got what we needed to do done. The person we were working with tried to over engineer an 'efficient' schedule and system for us that in the end caused far too much friction and they ended up losing money and the business relationship between the company I work for and them ended.
- rhizome 6y ago
  > I think this article is missing something. The first word of the essay is "we," and it goes downhill from there.
annoyingnoob 6y ago
The author lost me at the end with the car analogy. Who drives fast on icy roads? I try to drive the right speed for conditions. I use the right amount of efficiency for the job.
SethMurphy 6y ago
As an "Engineer" by job title, I strive for efficiency at work, and it certainly creeps into my daily personal life also. With this pandemic I have learned to realize that efficiency is not the end game for everything, and the things you do efficiently should be chosen wisely. I have seen the the toll it takes on those in my daily life more clearly, but have also seen how it can lead to a safer less risky life during these times (i.e. shopping habits). It is also clear that efficiencies built into our supply chains (i.e. food) have become a liability as of recently. I do see this as a time of great reflection on efficiency for both individuals and corporations or markets. I think this re-evaluation will lead to some of the longest lasting changes to come out of this pandemic.
WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
It’s an interesting definition of „efficient”. In my book, you are efficient if you did 8 hours worth of work in 4, did it right on the first try, went home early, and had enough mental capacity left for hobbies and family. 60 hour weeks are not efficient. Busywork is not efficient. So called „productivity” software is more than often not.
leoh 6y ago
>Why hadn’t we stockpiled key supplies and machines, built up hospital capacity, or ensured the robustness of our supply chains? The reason, of course, is that it would have been seen as inefficient and profit-robbing. >Seen in this light, at least some inefficiency is like an insurance policy. Think about your own situation. Every year that you don’t get into a car accident and your house doesn’t burn down and you stay healthy, you could think to yourself that you have ‘wasted’ your money on various pointless insurance products, and that you’d be financially better off without all those insurance premiums to pay. This is a faulty claim. Traditional economic efficiency would say we _should_ stockpile medical supplies if it were more efficient for the markets in the long-term, which it would have been. The issue here is that _governments_ and experts didn't work together effectively (despite experts regularly noting the possibility of a pandemic, for example, Gates et al.) and the fact that our government generally isn't Keynesian. A quote (source: IMF https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2014/09/basics.htm https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2014/09/basics.ht...): >Keynes argued that governments should solve problems in the short run rather than wait for market forces to fix things over the long run, because, as he wrote, “In the long run, we are all dead.” As it relates to Global Warming, for example, we have various options. We could solve it by being "less efficient" (extracting less from the earth — and in fact, a Keynesian approach to that would be taxation to slow growth in harmful industries) but zoomed out, if we deal with global warming, we are more efficient over the long run. Moreover, we want to be _efficient_ in our development of green technologies. The trouble isn't so much efficiency, it's zeroing in on making particular processes efficient to the detriment of the whole across time and in the present moment.
markus_zhang 6y ago
I think we need to think about long time efficiency instead of short period ones.
throWaythxMod 6y ago
Say you use the tips here( https://efficiencyiseverything.com/time/ https://efficiencyiseverything.com/time/) to save time, particularly the first example about shoes. You are going to have more time to do anything, relax, think, clean, whatever. Why would spending more time putting on shoes be better?
voidhorse 6y ago
It’s telling that ancient philosophers didn’t include many of the things we value in our hyper-corporate society in their definitions of a good life. Leisure (N.B. not entertainment) is dead in America, and it has significant consequences. I wish it weren’t the case, but I really do find that I do my best thinking when I give myself time to do nothing or go for an aimless walk. Efficiency as a virtue should be reserved for machines, not human beings.
roenxi 6y ago
This article is badly mid-attributing why these systems are 'efficient' in the way they are. The lessons in the '08 crisis were crystal clear - anyone who planned for difficult times and left a contingency lost out. Then look at 2020 - one of the first thing the US government did was bail out the financial system. Bailing out banks is almost a pavlovian response at this point. That is why there is no robustness built in; because the capitalists have correctly identified that the they will not be allowed to go broke. Businesses are optimising based on an expected government response. What use is contingency planning when the contingency isn't allowed to eventuate? Excessively risky ventures are promoted in the good time and buffered in the bad.
KrishMunot 6y ago
Can someone explain what this means?
sidhu1f 6y ago
There was a time when GCC had to be installed by compiling from source. Doing so involved compiling the GCC source with the native compiler, and then using the resulting binary to compile the GCC source again. I remember the install instructions advising "festina lente". The Latin phrase translates to "make haste slowly".
zelly 6y ago
Reads like GPT-3. Lots of words to say nothing.
eafkuor 6y ago
> We worship efficiency. Use less to get more. Same-day delivery. Multitask; text on one device while emailing on a second, and perhaps conversing on a third. Efficiency is seen as good. Inefficiency as wasteful. Is this a US thing? I've lived in three different European countries and nobody thinks this way. Efficiency and productivity are things I mostly just read about on HN.
- rusty-rust 6y ago
  I agree with your observation. From my observation Dutch startups live by the motto “steady wins the race” and to a larger extent I think it speaks to the risk aversion ingrained in their culture - both in their startup and VC mentalities. They would rather bootstrap and grow with stability then pull a softbank and use/give massive capital injections in the hopes of getting market efficient domination.
- Tade0 6y ago
  It spills over to countries(like mine) enamoured of the American way of life, but in a twisted manner. I've worked for companies that saw overburdening people with responsibilities as "efficient". On paper it was.
b0rsuk 6y ago
Transcript of a Calvin&Hobbes strip: Calvin's Dad, sitting at his desk: "It used to be that if a client wanted something done in a week, it was considered a rush job and he'd be lucky to get it." CD: "Now, with modems, faxes, and car phones, everyone wants everything instantly! Improved technology just increases expectations." CD: "These machines don't make life easier - they make life more harassed." Calvin, in the background: "Six minutes to microwave this?? Who's got that kind of time?!" CD: "If we wanted more leisure, we'd invent machines that do things less efficiently." https://pics.me.me/it-used-to-be-that-if-a-non-with-modems-33836445.png https://pics.me.me/it-used-to-be-that-if-a-non-with-modems-3...
lowracle 6y ago
I think this is confusing efficiency with overfitting. A lot of the problems described in the article arise due to overfitting models to the historical data. We overfited supply chain management because covid doesn't happen often, we overfited credit modeling because chain reaction of default doesn't happen often... We actually weren't efficient enough, we ignored tail events.
neycoda 6y ago
It appears the definition of efficiency here is just "fast" which is not just what efficiency is. I've worked with plenty of inefficient codebases, that were intrinsicly fragile, and difficult to work with... and cleaning them up made them more efficient and robust. Efficiency is about doing the most amount of things in the least amount of steps, not just minimizing features and making things fast at the expense of stability.
known 6y ago
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" -Knuth
josefrichter 6y ago
Aren’t these ideas well known in the field of economy? They also don’t sound too alien for anyone marginally acquainted with psychology (e.g. by means of watching any of Mr. Schwartz’s talks).
mchusma 6y ago
This article has a horrible title, and some highly misleading content. It represents "efficiency" as things like "not buying insurance" in a dangerous fashion. There are VERY few serious people who think that. "All things being equal" efficiency is always good. (e.g. if an identical task can be done for 1/2 the energy - good) "All things being equal" slowing down does not necessarily make life better. (Cleaning up after an oil spill is something we probably want fast.) All things are not equal, and you have to make a series of tradeoffs. How much risk are you willing to take? How much enjoyment do you get out of a task? The author is of course correct that optimizing efficiency at the sake of all else is typically a problem. But to misrepresent efficiency (the key to our modern age) is not quite fair to the term.
Pick-A-Hill2019 6y ago
"... what of the COVID-19 pandemic? Why hadn’t we stockpiled key supplies and machines, built up hospital capacity, or ensured the robustness of our supply chains? The reason, of course, is that it would have been seen as inefficient and profit-robbing. Money spent on masks and gowns gathering dust in a warehouse could always be put to more ‘productive’ use in the marketplace." This is what matters right now.

745 points by joubert 6y ago

Why not move fast and break things? I think it is a trade-off between being efficient and breaking something and being stable.

ssivark 6y ago

The fundamental problem is the inverted-U shape of payoffs to “optimizing” any one factor (or a small subset of key focus areas). Beyond a point, you’re just “overfitting” to the incorrect metric and underperforming in the truer sense. Yeah, you might not have a metric for the “deeper value”... c’est la vie! Any decision making approach that tries to ignore that problem/limitation is simply stupid. The other problem with prizing efficiency is that we often optimize for efficiency under an incorrect model of the situation (model-reality-mismatch) — underweighting the likelihood of upsetting possibilities. That’s essentially what the idea of “black swan”/“fat tails” is about. It’s not really about statistics, unless you’re using a flawed and over-simplified statistical model to ground your metric of efficiency. IMHO the same problem underlies the approach/framework of behavioral economics. In many situations, observed human behavior might be “irrational” only because your model of reality is naively simplistic. It shouldn’t be surprising that a satisficing approach works better in reality than an optimizing approach; if it does sound surprising, consider that your intuitions might be biased by an incorrect model of reality!

bschne 6y ago

I've found "efficiency as the opposite of stability" a very powerful concept to think about - even though it's fairly simple, it seems to be almost a fundamental law. Whether it's about the economy at large, your own household, a supply chain, what have you - as soon as you optimize for efficiency by removing friction, you take all the slack/damping out of the system and become instantly more liable to catastrophic failure if some of your basic conditions change. Efficiency gives you a speed bonus, at the cost of increased risk / less resilience to unforeseen events. Stewart Brand's concept of "Pace Layering" comes to mind for how to deal with this at a systemic level - https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2 https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2

MadSudaca 6y ago
Maybe the problem is that efficiency and robustness are orthogonal?
- maxerickson 6y ago
  They at least aren't in direct tension.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    Up to a point, being inefficient conflicts with robustness. If you're profligately wasting a resource, you are in for a hard time if that resource dries up. On the other hand, past a point, efficiency conflicts with robustness. To maximize efficiency, you become tightly coupled to some resource and again have a hard time if that resource dries up.
- aaron-santos 6y ago
  If you think about the two-dimensional efficiency/robustness space you can pretty easily see how it's isomorphic to the return/volatility space by way of simple transformations. If yourself to be convinced that such a bridge exists you can also bring tools in the return/volatility space back into the efficiency/robustness space by applying the appropriate inverse transformations. Maybe the conclusions are common sense, but I'd still read a blog framing that process by way of analogy.
  - aaron-santos 6y ago
    EDIT: If you allow yourself.. :/
  - MadSudaca 6y ago
    Interesting idea, thanks for sharing.
- Double_Cast 6y ago
  They're orthogonal for non-trivial decisions. Once you hit the efficient frontier of anything, you need to start making trade-offs.

CincinnatiMan 6y ago

The problem is you can only slow down if everyone else does too, unless you're willing to step down in "class" which a lot of people have trouble with.

acephal 6y ago
And in a number of different domains in life at that
TuringTest 6y ago
> The problem is you can only slow down if everyone else does too That's a myth propagated by people with a stake in the pie. Nature shows us that you only need to be hyper-efficient and in a constant arms race if you're competing for the same resources. Otherwise, you can adopt an opportunistic survival strategy that trades efficiency for variety and a diversity of useable resources. Of course, efficiency is the only option when there are companies trying to grab all the resources available, as in our current business setting. But that's definitely not a healthy environment.

FpUser 6y ago

>"Multitask; text on one device while emailing on a second, and perhaps conversing on a third." Result - shitty content of texting, emails and shitty conversation. I am not sure who in their right mind actually advocates that.

imafish 6y ago
I think no one advocates it but many practice it.
allenu 6y ago
The problem could be twofold: 1) our tools push us towards multitasking. Notifications pop up and there's a sense of immediacy where you need to deal with it now (texting back) or it will get "lost" in the stream of new notifications, never to be dealt with. 2) people today expect everything, even communications, to be responsive, leading to a low content response immediately as opposed to a high quality one later. For #1, modern tools like Slack favor immediate responses since it's not set up to treat conversations or requests as manipulable items. With email you can drag and drop into folders and deal with them one by one. With slack, once you've "seen" a message, there's really no way to put it somewhere to remind yourself to respond. (If there is, it's not obvious to me.)
- naavis 6y ago
  You can at least click on the context menu of a message and select ”Remind me” to set a reminder about the it. But yeah, I do agree with you. Slack messages are less ”manipulable”.

jlarocco 6y ago

I think the article is drawing the wrong conclusions. In every example given, the problem isn't "too much efficiency", but failing to plan for unlikely situations. Making something inefficient doesn't magically increase preparedness.

mcguire 6y ago
No, but maximizing efficiency doesn't necessarily increase preparedness either. Being prepared has costs.
- jlarocco 6y ago
  Sure, preparedness has costs, but the article makes the point poorly, IMO. Many of the arguments are non sequiturs. The last example is particularly bad. On an icy road, it doesn't matter if a car gets 100 mpg or 10 mpg - speed and traction are far more important factors.

Taylor_OD 6y ago

Of course not trying cram as much in as possible makes life better. However tell that to a CEO who has built a business off an unsustainable, for a normal person who wants to have a life outside of work, efficiency mindset.

1123581321 6y ago
Or a CEO who is keenly aware of the benefit of what they do. It would be difficult, for example, to convince a solar manufacturer that panel costs should decrease slowly when they know how many fossil fuel plants will be built because of that.
r00fus 6y ago
This was me a few years ago. Hyper-efficient, doing 60+h weeks + workouts + family. Couldn't imagine it differently. Then I had a medical condition that required me to slow down, changing my lifestyle completely. Only in retrospect do realize my situation was extremely fragile.
082349872349872 6y ago
The CEO gets it from above. Investors want to hold a portfolio with a particular risk/return profile. In order to do that, the individual components of the portfolio need to be running at higher risk, higher return profiles. (Portfolio theory is why I am in favour of social safety nets. A worker wishes a relatively safe risk/return profile will voluntarily choose a much higher risk job when they can combine it with a low-risk backstop.)

chasd00 6y ago

the article doesn't make sense to me when making decisions: "we should be asking which option will give us good-enough results under the widest range of future states of the world" doesn't that lead you right back to the struggle for the most efficient way to determine the optimal "good-enough" answer? Also, the article talks about efficiency but efficiency of what exactly? What if you're very efficient at a maintaining a relaxed and happy lifestyle?

Double_Cast 6y ago
Suppose you're playing a videogame. Your character just leveled up. You can upgrade either Attack or HP. * "Upgrade Attack" is more efficient. It allows you to beat the game faster. But since your HP is low, you can't afford to make mistakes (get hit). * "Upgrade HP" is more robust. It increases your damage-buffer, which allows you to absorb more mistakes without dying. But if you make zero mistakes, you won't beat the game as quickly as if you'd upgraded Attack. IRL the dichotomy is often "income vs wealth", "velocity vs displacement", "throughput vs latency", "strength vs endurance", etc.
zackmorris 6y ago
As it relates to hacking, I think of it as: clients can be fickle because they don't even know what they want sometimes. So I picture next steps as coalescing, like a wave collapsing. Uncertainty comes to dominate the process, so it works more like evolution than planning (stochastic vs deterministic). My problem solving algorithm is to look up to 7 steps ahead, along up to 7 different branches in the tree of possibilities (I'd like to examine more choices but my brain can't hold them all). In practice this is always at least 2 and 2, so this task or its alternative, and then looking at the next step along each branch. Then I prune the tree, selecting for the steps that work across as many branches as possible, without rewrites or duplication. I'm often working on a common dependency several steps out that other people aren't aware of yet. This could be thought of as a breadth-first search or parallel search. Unfortunately on an individual level, the tech industry seems to be going the opposite direction, exploring deeply down very long and linear branches of the tree. Coders are expected to implement an idea and be ready to scrap it without hesitation, iterating over and over again until finished, rather than simulating the outcome in their minds. More of a depth-first, serial search. I think the split is due to programming moving from an individual endeavor towards teams. We can't see inside each other's heads, so we plot the course and divvy up steps among the members. The cost of this is that serial searches will almost always turn up suboptimal results, because the resources to do broader searches get withheld so we miss elegant solutions and even perceive them as more costly. To answer your question, the serial approach works best for individual tasks, but misses the big-picture view that might have let us see that the task didn't need to be done in the first place. So my vote would be to see more quiet reflection and less spinning and churning. But I'm mostly outvoted, so it probably comes down to personality, with junior developers being more sought-after than senior developers like me who might be perceived as reserved/overcautious/conservative.

brentjanderson 6y ago

Reminds me of this piece from Seth Godin on the importance of building slack into our lives: https://seths.blog/2019/06/investing-in-slack/ https://seths.blog/2019/06/investing-in-slack/ (Not the chat app)

r00fus 6y ago
One of my RSS feeds is Seth's Blog. Nice mindfulness tips and perspective tehre.

david_draco 6y ago

Insurance is the opposite of a lottery. If you think buying lottery tickets are a waste of money because you lose out in the long run, the same argument should lead you to think having insurance is a good thing.

mkoubaa 6y ago
If insurance was cost effective in the long run, insurance companies wouldn't be profitable
- tehjoker 6y ago
  Insurance schemes do not have to be run for a profit. It's not a law of nature.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  That is only true in a zero sum system. If insurance can get say 3% profit margin but allows for others to take a riskier approach which overall produces 7% more profit by allowing slimmer margins both can profit. There are risks to that sort of leverage for both parties, especially in black swan events. It is akin to loans essentially - the one taking them may be giving profits to others but that doesn't mean it isn't cost effective.
- ska 6y ago
  You aren't protecting against the expected value though, you are protecting against variance.
  - mkoubaa 6y ago
    No argument there
geewee 6y ago
Why? I'd think the whole point of insurance is that everyone (as an average) loses out in the long run?

devilduck 6y ago

Pace is relative and I think teams will generally average out in terms of pace. Finding a pace that fits you and your style would be an essential factor in having better work efficacy. My boss works really fast, works constantly and is probably a workaholic, a pace which I can not and will not try to match, so I have to work at my own pace and this throws off how project planning goes because the PMs are used to his pace and don't give me an optimal amount of time on projects, so I will find myself rushing which of course makes me feel bad and triggers my impostor syndrome. Eventually this pace will break down and become unmanageable for me and I'll have to quit, which will hurt their production even more. Pace and efficiency are definitely linked, but I don't necessarily know that I think faster = more efficient. And there are folks mentioning stability, also definitely linked here, but i think max efficiency would lean more into stability than pace. Linking pace with efficiency also seems to create the idea that "faster will be the winner" which, you know, that's a whole thing, introducing competition in an arguably healthy way. I generally tend to find that emotion will usually come before logic. Building something that could be considered efficient, but a feeling says "This could be more efficient" and then logic jumps in and does the work. Just some stream of consciousness writing here, food for thought maybe, or extremely poor quality ideas!

austinl 6y ago

One of my favorite quotes on this topic comes from Aurelius' description of his adopted father in Meditations. [Y]ou would never say of him that he "broke out a sweat": but everything was allotted its own time and thought, as by a man of leisure - his way was unhurried, organized, vigorous, consistent in all. I feel like I spend a lot of time rushing from one thing to the next, constantly questioning whether I'm spending time wisely. And then I end up accomplishing less because I lack focus in one area. I've instead been trying to relax, slow down, and take tasks one at a time until completion. I'd also recommend Cal Newport's book, Deep Work, on this.

agumonkey 6y ago
I'm still stumped over the fact that humans are behind Antique Roma existentialism on average.
vishnugupta 6y ago
> but everything was allotted its own time and thought, as by a man of leisure As an extreme example; watching Schumacher at his peak perform during a qualifying lap or during race, in treacherous rainy conditions, while everyone was absolutely struggling, and him out front, half a lap ahead of everyone was like watching poetry in motion. You could tell he was very relaxed just by the way his hands operated the steering wheel, hitting the apex every time in a single motion, no twitching or tossing around the car. It seemed he just had more time, as in the time had just slowed down for him compared to everyone else. Edit: Typo; damn you Mac OS auto-correct!
- austinl 6y ago
  as by a man of leisure is my favorite phrase in the passage. I think it's the key to the whole thing. It's implies what kind of mindset you should try to adopt: relax, enjoy what you're doing and appreciate the moment (if you're able to). Aurelius' adopted father was a consul three times, which is certainly not a stress-free job! But he apparently was able to keep cool by the way he approached his work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_consul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_consul
- 6y ago

Taek 6y ago

This comment thread is making me realize we don't have a good word to distinguish between efficiency as in "we only have 7 hospital beds because that's all we need on 99% of each day" and efficiency as in "we replaced steps X,Y,Z with just step X', because we found that X' could accomplish everything that XYZ could accomplish but it's faster, more accurate, and cheaper". One makes a tradeoff by reducing overheads and buffers, and the other doesn't have any tradeoffs, it's just a better way of doing things based on novel techniques.

milesskorpen 6y ago
I don’t know if those two things are as different as you suggest. Multiple steps add redundancy, if you fail one step you can get much of the value from other steps. More steps are frequently added in response to edge cases. Could be a Chesterton’s Fence scenario Instead of bemoaning efficiency, it’d be interesting to reward/value redundancy and antifragility, at least at the system level. I think this could mean trust busting, regulation, and general cultural shifts.
- r00fus 6y ago
  As long as those steps Y & Z are actually adding redundancy/antifragility, then yes. If the purpose is some deprecated feature or dependency that simply serves no purpose or is now an anti-feature, it would be more efficient to remove. It would be good to have proof of a Chesteron's Fence analysis to say "yes, we know that Y & Z purposes and have analized the cost/benefit to removing them and the populations/systems impacted" - would this be an impact analysis?
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  Multiple steps don't always add redundancy, sometimes they're just noise or artifacts. I had a colleague who, when opening a file, would first click on the Windows desktop, then "My Computer", then navigate to the directory, open the file, and close the Explorer window. There was zero redundancy versus leaving the directory open so they could open the next file (or using the application's "Open File" dialog). That is a perfect example of wasteful motion (in their case due to a poor mental model of how computers worked, as I learned through later discussions) that could be simplified significantly without loss of quality or redundancy in the system. Contrast this with: The surgical office called me this morning and stated, "The surgery is for a ganglion cyst on your left wrist." Which I confirmed. When I go in on Tuesday for the surgery this will be repeated, and a mark will be made on the area to be cut open (though in this case it'd be really hard to screw up and open the right wrist, as there is no, quite visible, cyst there). That is useful redundancy of the sort you describe. Removing any step (the initial visit a week ago, the call today, the check when I arrive, the mark on the wrist) and you increase the risk of error.

xondono 6y ago

Since when multitasking is efficient? There’s a big difference between being productive and being busy.

hosh 6y ago

It something I learned recently about ecologies, and permaculture design. And then I started applying it to my personal life. Instead of heroically finishing things, to instead, work on them in a way that is more like the regenerative and resilient processes from permaculture design.

r00fus 6y ago
I'd love to hear you elaborate on this in more detail.
- hosh 6y ago
  I'm still working it out myself, so this is all work in progress. I have a teenage stepdaughter doing online schooling. I had been working remote for years now. It took a long time to work out how things work with my wife -- she is a stay-at-home mom. Work and family life intrude on each other, and even more so this year with the pandemic. I used to burn out big time, and then, I burn out in smaller doses. In the last burnout cycle, my wife miscarried, and that spent both my wife spinning. So I am not entire sure at this point how much of this is like when I functioned at peak. The things that I have been doing: - I try to have a few tasks I think I can accomplish and try to do them. But because the family life can be so disruptive, I've learned that I'm not really going to be as productive as I am at the peak, and just be ok with it. - I try not to be a blocker for either my teammates or for my family. - I have a garden. I enjoy it. I mainly do work with it in the morning and evening. Sometimes I am exhausted (especially in Phoenix summer hell season). In general, though, it recharging. - I practice neigong, and I finally got to the point where I can reliably cycle something (which I will not get into technical details about unless you're also a practitioner. It is a rabbit hole). But suffice it to say, it rebalances the vital energy being distributed among my physical, emotional, and mental states. Part of the burnout was exhausting everything mentally, repeatedly, until there is just nothing left. - When I push through something, it is for small things. Those small things might chain together. Past a certain point, it is better to go for a walk. - I can tell when my brain is just exhausted. It is better to take a nap. I'll warn my wife that I'm not really present during grocery shopping. She doesn't always like that (it is one of the times we go out to do something together that is not in the house). I might take MCT with some mixed nuts. - I don't use caffeine -- no coffee or tea. The closest I get is with roiboos, and even its 1mg caffeine can affect me. Fortunately, the caffiene content of chocolate does not affect me as much. The part I am working out is how to live in a way that follows the permaculture ethics -- care of earth, care of people, and fair share. It is the last of these that has made me realize that the ambition of unbounded growth, whether for society, or for myself, is simply impractical. It may be strange to say it on a forum that was created for people who were or are interested in doing a Ycombinator startup and getting rich from winning the startup lottery ... but I've come to realize that it is not how I want to live or relate to the world. I used to practice minimalism ... but now I realize that is just a stepping stone. It's investing in regenerative and resilient systems. The garden is part of my long-term effort to create a perennial food forest on my property. There is a lot of tech and "shiny" that I realize I don't really need to get. And while I know that recently, I would keep comparing other people's cars as status / wealth symbols, it is ultimately meaningless. And fortunately, I know what I need to do to get my mind to cease doing that. This is a very unusual way for me to approach this subject. I usually start out with a radical position: inequality and the wealth gap is _intrinsic_ to modern civilizations, and it rests upon the notion that wealth is something to be extracted from the earth, and access controlled. "Efficiency" is how you maximize profit, as if that is the only way to optimize things. Therefore, there will never be any system of economics and free market (or command economy) that will ever take the well-being of the earth and the people into account. From this perspective, I think it is insanity. Why would anyone want to participate in a system where there will be guaranteed losers? (Because the few exceptions give the false hope that you might be the exception). It therefore follows that, if I want to participate in a different kind of a "game", then I will have to live my life by those other principles. And so, I'm trying that with my current work. To give an receive my fair share. To reinvest capital gained from extractive wealth and convert it to regenerative wealth. To not tie my personal sense of self-worth into status or wealth symbols.

hinkley 6y ago

I think we need more hobbies. Maybe some anthropology classes as well. There is, for instance, a certain give-and-take in classical Japanese garden aesthetics. In a formal English or French garden, almost all you can see, everywhere you look, is evidence of human hands. Since no plant is in anything you could mistake for its natural state, you are practically beaten over the head by the presence of the unseen gardener. Look at what I made nature do. What piece of work is a man. It's a dynamically unstable system. Meanwhile the Japanese garden is a dynamically stable system. The plants are allowed to 'win' in many cases that either support the gardener's goals, or are simply not worth the effort required to win the argument. It's more efficient to let the system do what is in its nature than to try and stop it.. If you know how to look, you can see the gardener everywhere, over-emphasizing what would have happened without them, in such a way that you see the plant first, and the work second. It is organic, with an editor. You might see a similar philosophy in Judo. You are steering what is there, letting the subject of your efforts do most of the heavy lifting for you. It is quite efficient, but not in the antiseptic way we sometimes imagine that efficiency should possess. TL;DR: most of us have no idea what efficiency looks like, and we make a mockery of it while trying to pursue it.

noisy_boy 6y ago

Having moved from an inefficient setting to an efficient environment, I have noticed a reduction of tolerance and threshold for getting stressed when things don't go smoothly. There is something to be said for the buffer that "inefficiency" provides.

rhizome 6y ago
All you have to do is look to history for the movements and societies that have put "efficiency" on a pedestal to gauge the value and practicality. There was a major one in the 20th century. It did not go well.

swayvil 6y ago

Striving for efficiency is bad science. The dream takes precedence over the reality.

trappist 6y ago

This article suffers from a misconception of efficiency. A car that gets more miles per gallon than another is more fuel-efficient, not more efficient. A system of local optimums is an inefficient system. The author asks us to make life more efficient by considering efficiency in a broader scope. Efficiency is still good.

kevrone 6y ago

TL;DR.

AndrewUnmuted 6y ago

The author writes, > Arguably, a little friction to slow us down would have enabled both institutions and individuals to make better financial decisions. But the article fails to bring up the US's rate of interest. If interest rates were allowed to have risen, this would have been just the sort of "slowdown" that the author is looking for. I find it remarkable that this article could be so insightful, yet lack even a single mentioning of this simple and fundamental fact. Rising interest rates are the market's implementation of precisely what the author is looking for.

kazinator 6y ago

Same-day delivery isn't efficiency; it's made possible by inefficiency, like using more delivery people and vehicles who cover inefficient routes, and using more warehouses closer to delivery areas. Actually we can't discuss efficiency without making it clear what parameter we are optimizing, at the cost of what (if any) other parameters. However, usually, if we reduce the time something takes not by cleverly eliminating, rearranging or otherwise streamlining the steps, but rather by some brute force method that requires more resources (more people, more equpiment, more energy), it is hard to frame that as efficiency.

iak8god 6y ago
Right. Same-day delivery is fast, not usually efficient. Neither is multitasking using three different devices at the same time efficient. Again in this example the author seems to be confusing rush with efficiency. I didn't make it past those first few incoherent lines, so I don't know whether this confusion persists into the rest of the article.
- deleted 6y ago
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semaj111 6y ago
I agree. For me, the article absolutely did not deliver on what was said in the title. They declare efficiency as itself dangerous, where it is the narrow application of efficiency that really results in problens.
kovac 6y ago
As the customer, it would be more efficient for me to receive what I need today than after one month. I think same day delivery is more about that than optimising a company's operations. They are selling efficiency to their customers.

not2b 6y ago

The article repeats a commonly believed myth about money being invented as a replacement for barter. Adam Smith thought so, as do many economists, but they forgot to ask anthropologists. See https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-society-myth/471051/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-...

roughly 6y ago
Strongly recommend "Debt: The First 5000 Years" by David Graeber - https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781612194196 https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781612194196 - solid treatment of economic history from an anthropological viewpoint.
Nasrudith 6y ago
I thought there were some hints of barter of sorts in palace economies from shipwrecks - no currency but incoming exotic commodities they couldn't produce and outgoing ships of commodities well beyond any personal use implies some trade relationships. The fact Palace Economies all died out doesn't mean a barter economy never existed, just that it wasn't stable enough to leave any isolated "time capsule cultures". Granted palace economy commerce isn't on a personal level unless you count the ruler who allocates everything.

smabie 6y ago

> The creation of ‘option markets’ means that you don’t have to go to the trouble of buying a stock that you’re going to be selling soon anyway. You can just promise to buy it, and then sell it at a price and date specified by the option contract. Options, like their name implies, aren't a promise to do anything, they provide the right but not obligation to buy or sell at a certain price.

stretchwithme 6y ago

Efficiency is for machines. Effectiveness and creativity are for people. And the more machines do laundry, the more effective and creative people can choose to be. Or they can choose to watch TV.

Dumblydorr 6y ago

Doesn't the author miss that efficiency and deceleration (i.e. slow down) are in some respects orthogonal? It is possible to more efficiently go the same distance at the same speed, but use less resources. It is also possible to both slow down and increase efficiency which can synergistically decrease resource use. Take the aluminum can. Beverage companies heavily innovated, reduced aluminum use, saved resources, emissions, and consumers get a win with lighter cans and less environmental pollution and carbon emission.

skybrian 6y ago

Note that in situations where exponential growth is possible, lower latency means much faster growth, and this can easily happen faster than you have time to react to. Exponential growth at 5% a week is a lot different than 5% a day or 5% a minute. Social media would be less dangerous if there were more automatic delays before a message you post appears to others.

CurtHagenlocher 6y ago

This reminds me of Frank Herbert's Bureau of Sabotage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Sabotage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Sabotage).

m3kw9 6y ago

They should say “Efficiency” is dangerous. Actual efficiency is not bad at all. Say focusing on one task till is done is sometimes the most efficient way to do a task.

acd 6y ago

I think life is about having good experiences! That is why traveling and visiting new places and food is great, your mind gets to experience news things. Running around in 80 mph+ well you tend too miss things is my experience. Life is usually not about maximum efficiency unless you are a 100m sprint runner. Robots and programs can run as fast as they want and automation do us favors, however us humans should not strive to do the same. Compare Junk food, you get full quickly, nutrients in junk food is usually bad. You can instead choose to have the experience of slowly cooking a nutritious meal. Eating slowly cooked food with your family and friends is often better. Usually stress comes with running around too fast so you tend to consume not healthy food and you then after a while gain weight. I am not saying consuming junk food, or running fast is bad every now and then but doing so all the time you might miss slower better experiences... Same goes for buying local vs buying cheap stuff which does not last long. Often buying local is better for the environment.

zerop 6y ago

Efficiency would not create any big invention. It's a big problem.

patja 6y ago

Reminds me of the book Slack by Tom DeMarco

gmuslera 6y ago

Systems in real life are complex. Limiting them to just one dimension on which they are efficient may leave out factors that make them work at all, or just better. But if you really know every and all components and criteria that may be applied to them, you might improve efficience. Good luck with that.

AcerbicZero 6y ago

TL;DR Author who is paid to write words, gets confused when a word has more than one meaning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency =/= "efficiency"

ShapesOfEmpathy 6y ago

I study empathy, and have often said that efficiency is the opposite of empathy. Whatever we want to call it, the human element is overlooked when we strive for the single dimension of efficiency. Hannah Arendt famously talked about the banality of evil. During the Holocaust, the counting and categorizing of people was flattening or reducing to that important human element we all share.

Tepix 6y ago

I came across this related blog post the other day: „in the name of taking it slow“ https://www.voyageofthezephyr.com/blog/takingitslow https://www.voyageofthezephyr.com/blog/takingitslow

cblconfederate 6y ago

And what's the most efficient way to slow down?

shard 6y ago

The mix of font styles in the PSYCHE title strip on top really bothers me. Are there any typography experts in the house that can explain what concepts could be behind that choice?

alexchamberlain 6y ago

I feel like a lot of conversations and articles recently speak to an inadequate understanding of risk, and planning for risk. Risk is made up of at least 2 or 3 components: what is the probability something will happen? And, if it does happen, what is the impact and how will you mitigate that impact? For example, you may believe that a change to a website you are deploying has a low probability of taking the website offline. If it is taken offline, it may cost £X per hour in lost revenue, but you’ll leave the old version running on a standby server, so it only takes a few minutes to switch back. That’s a much more thorough understanding to 1 aspect of risk than “this rollout is low risk”. Once you have that understanding, it’s reasonable to discuss how to reduce the probability of an outage (better testing?), as well as how to reduce the impact (staged rollout?) or to speed up the fix if it were to happen (practise?). In COVID terms, we should be discussing the impact of decisions in the light of future pandemics. Could we invest now in reusable PPE, so that next time we don’t have a global rush on the disposable stuff? Do we need to educate the public more readily about reducing disease transmission to reduce the likelihood of a pandemic in the first place? I’m not a doctor, so I have no idea on the specifics, but the likelihood of any given pandemic will always be low, so what is the impact of the decision if there is one and does that impact need to be mitigated? (even if it is less efficient to do so...)

hahajk 6y ago
You say risk has 2 or 3 components. The two you list, liklihood and severity, are the two I usually hear. What is the third?

johnjj257 6y ago

This all sounds more like a preference than a fact.

aaron695 6y ago

> We worship efficiency. <> Multitask; text on one device while emailing on a second, and perhaps conversing on a third. Efficiency is seen as good. Inefficiency as wasteful. The premise is total bullshit. No one thinks multitasking is good. Barry Schwartz consistently doesn't get it, but he's good at presenting "Unpopular opinion's" style articles. People say multi-tasking is great! But it's not! Upvote if you agree. Efficiency is why your baby doesn't get stuck in the womb killing two people. Bot sniping on GrubHub is scary, this is an efficiency that actually worries me. But it's not within this articles scope.

vonwoodson 6y ago

This is the most important lesson on 2020. But, how do I find an employer who will agree with me?...

eointierney 6y ago

Oh dear, I want to rant. Efficiency is a dimensionless ratio of energy in to energy out. Economics, as formulated, has little to say about efficiency and lots to say about preference relations on utility functions (the texts do tend to hand-wavingly waffle about how markets attain "efficiency" through hypothetically rational actors maximizing utility functions etc., if you want a giggle check out the "fundamental theorems of welfare"). I actually read the fine article, and didn't give up after the first couple of paragraphs. And in paragraph the third is introduced friction. I dunno, maybe it's because I actually study science, but friction is a well defined thing and the coefficient of same is another _dimensionless_ variable. It seems every time economists want to incorporate a notion from science proper they go for the dimensionless stuff because that way they don't have to go through the whole tiresome rigmarole of ... dimensional analysis. It makes me feel like Tantacrul criticising UI's (check him out on youtube, he's both funny and informative). Anyway, efficiency is not dangerous, efficiency will actually allow the survivors of the Anthropocene Disaster make it through the coming disaster. Slowing down is not a bad notion because it means most humans can spend more time thinking (quite efficient actually) and less time haring around the planet distracting themselves from the vapidity of their vanity. However life is not better because it is slower, it's better because humans appreciate what an extraordinary (literally and figuratively) opportunity it is to be alive. As insurance policy against disaster stop listening to economists because they observably don't have a clue (they can't make accurate and meaningful predictions), instead study science, especially physics, because these meanings are measured against reality and the resulting predictions are highly reliable (TANSTAAFL < 2TD). /rant

grawprog 6y ago

I think this article is missing something. What it talks about is efficiency of systems, which I think is different than efficiency in process. Most of what the article talks about is making large systems more efficient for the benefit of the system at large. I agree, this makes individual components of the system more stressed and prone to catastrophic failure at any one point in the system. People within that kind of efficient system are pushed to their limits and breaking points. However, making individual processes efficient i've found reduces stress on the individuals involved in that process and allows for that slowing down time. The examples I can think of to back my points up Previously I worked at a job where the actual process was incredibly inefficient. I ended up working long hours and twice as hard as I needed to. By the time I left that job, I'd increased the efficiency of the process to the point where I was working reasonable hours, had some good downtime to relax or take care of other things I'd had to neglect before. The overall system at the place though was fairly inefficient, which was a good thing. It meant we were usually a little ahead and could account for things that went wrong. Another recent example at my current job, we were working with a person who tried to overhaul our inefficient, yet working system. Our processes were efficient enough that we always got what we needed to do done. The person we were working with tried to over engineer an 'efficient' schedule and system for us that in the end caused far too much friction and they ended up losing money and the business relationship between the company I work for and them ended.

rhizome 6y ago
> I think this article is missing something. The first word of the essay is "we," and it goes downhill from there.

annoyingnoob 6y ago

The author lost me at the end with the car analogy. Who drives fast on icy roads? I try to drive the right speed for conditions. I use the right amount of efficiency for the job.

SethMurphy 6y ago

As an "Engineer" by job title, I strive for efficiency at work, and it certainly creeps into my daily personal life also. With this pandemic I have learned to realize that efficiency is not the end game for everything, and the things you do efficiently should be chosen wisely. I have seen the the toll it takes on those in my daily life more clearly, but have also seen how it can lead to a safer less risky life during these times (i.e. shopping habits). It is also clear that efficiencies built into our supply chains (i.e. food) have become a liability as of recently. I do see this as a time of great reflection on efficiency for both individuals and corporations or markets. I think this re-evaluation will lead to some of the longest lasting changes to come out of this pandemic.

WesolyKubeczek 6y ago

It’s an interesting definition of „efficient”. In my book, you are efficient if you did 8 hours worth of work in 4, did it right on the first try, went home early, and had enough mental capacity left for hobbies and family. 60 hour weeks are not efficient. Busywork is not efficient. So called „productivity” software is more than often not.

leoh 6y ago

>Why hadn’t we stockpiled key supplies and machines, built up hospital capacity, or ensured the robustness of our supply chains? The reason, of course, is that it would have been seen as inefficient and profit-robbing. >Seen in this light, at least some inefficiency is like an insurance policy. Think about your own situation. Every year that you don’t get into a car accident and your house doesn’t burn down and you stay healthy, you could think to yourself that you have ‘wasted’ your money on various pointless insurance products, and that you’d be financially better off without all those insurance premiums to pay. This is a faulty claim. Traditional economic efficiency would say we _should_ stockpile medical supplies if it were more efficient for the markets in the long-term, which it would have been. The issue here is that _governments_ and experts didn't work together effectively (despite experts regularly noting the possibility of a pandemic, for example, Gates et al.) and the fact that our government generally isn't Keynesian. A quote (source: IMF https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2014/09/basics.htm https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2014/09/basics.ht...): >Keynes argued that governments should solve problems in the short run rather than wait for market forces to fix things over the long run, because, as he wrote, “In the long run, we are all dead.” As it relates to Global Warming, for example, we have various options. We could solve it by being "less efficient" (extracting less from the earth — and in fact, a Keynesian approach to that would be taxation to slow growth in harmful industries) but zoomed out, if we deal with global warming, we are more efficient over the long run. Moreover, we want to be _efficient_ in our development of green technologies. The trouble isn't so much efficiency, it's zeroing in on making particular processes efficient to the detriment of the whole across time and in the present moment.

markus_zhang 6y ago

I think we need to think about long time efficiency instead of short period ones.

throWaythxMod 6y ago

Say you use the tips here( https://efficiencyiseverything.com/time/ https://efficiencyiseverything.com/time/) to save time, particularly the first example about shoes. You are going to have more time to do anything, relax, think, clean, whatever. Why would spending more time putting on shoes be better?

voidhorse 6y ago

It’s telling that ancient philosophers didn’t include many of the things we value in our hyper-corporate society in their definitions of a good life. Leisure (N.B. not entertainment) is dead in America, and it has significant consequences. I wish it weren’t the case, but I really do find that I do my best thinking when I give myself time to do nothing or go for an aimless walk. Efficiency as a virtue should be reserved for machines, not human beings.

roenxi 6y ago

This article is badly mid-attributing why these systems are 'efficient' in the way they are. The lessons in the '08 crisis were crystal clear - anyone who planned for difficult times and left a contingency lost out. Then look at 2020 - one of the first thing the US government did was bail out the financial system. Bailing out banks is almost a pavlovian response at this point. That is why there is no robustness built in; because the capitalists have correctly identified that the they will not be allowed to go broke. Businesses are optimising based on an expected government response. What use is contingency planning when the contingency isn't allowed to eventuate? Excessively risky ventures are promoted in the good time and buffered in the bad.

KrishMunot 6y ago

Can someone explain what this means?

sidhu1f 6y ago

There was a time when GCC had to be installed by compiling from source. Doing so involved compiling the GCC source with the native compiler, and then using the resulting binary to compile the GCC source again. I remember the install instructions advising "festina lente". The Latin phrase translates to "make haste slowly".

zelly 6y ago

Reads like GPT-3. Lots of words to say nothing.

eafkuor 6y ago

> We worship efficiency. Use less to get more. Same-day delivery. Multitask; text on one device while emailing on a second, and perhaps conversing on a third. Efficiency is seen as good. Inefficiency as wasteful. Is this a US thing? I've lived in three different European countries and nobody thinks this way. Efficiency and productivity are things I mostly just read about on HN.

rusty-rust 6y ago
I agree with your observation. From my observation Dutch startups live by the motto “steady wins the race” and to a larger extent I think it speaks to the risk aversion ingrained in their culture - both in their startup and VC mentalities. They would rather bootstrap and grow with stability then pull a softbank and use/give massive capital injections in the hopes of getting market efficient domination.
Tade0 6y ago
It spills over to countries(like mine) enamoured of the American way of life, but in a twisted manner. I've worked for companies that saw overburdening people with responsibilities as "efficient". On paper it was.

b0rsuk 6y ago

Transcript of a Calvin&Hobbes strip: Calvin's Dad, sitting at his desk: "It used to be that if a client wanted something done in a week, it was considered a rush job and he'd be lucky to get it." CD: "Now, with modems, faxes, and car phones, everyone wants everything instantly! Improved technology just increases expectations." CD: "These machines don't make life easier - they make life more harassed." Calvin, in the background: "Six minutes to microwave this?? Who's got that kind of time?!" CD: "If we wanted more leisure, we'd invent machines that do things less efficiently." https://pics.me.me/it-used-to-be-that-if-a-non-with-modems-33836445.png https://pics.me.me/it-used-to-be-that-if-a-non-with-modems-3...

lowracle 6y ago

I think this is confusing efficiency with overfitting. A lot of the problems described in the article arise due to overfitting models to the historical data. We overfited supply chain management because covid doesn't happen often, we overfited credit modeling because chain reaction of default doesn't happen often... We actually weren't efficient enough, we ignored tail events.

neycoda 6y ago

It appears the definition of efficiency here is just "fast" which is not just what efficiency is. I've worked with plenty of inefficient codebases, that were intrinsicly fragile, and difficult to work with... and cleaning them up made them more efficient and robust. Efficiency is about doing the most amount of things in the least amount of steps, not just minimizing features and making things fast at the expense of stability.

known 6y ago

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" -Knuth

josefrichter 6y ago

Aren’t these ideas well known in the field of economy? They also don’t sound too alien for anyone marginally acquainted with psychology (e.g. by means of watching any of Mr. Schwartz’s talks).

mchusma 6y ago

This article has a horrible title, and some highly misleading content. It represents "efficiency" as things like "not buying insurance" in a dangerous fashion. There are VERY few serious people who think that. "All things being equal" efficiency is always good. (e.g. if an identical task can be done for 1/2 the energy - good) "All things being equal" slowing down does not necessarily make life better. (Cleaning up after an oil spill is something we probably want fast.) All things are not equal, and you have to make a series of tradeoffs. How much risk are you willing to take? How much enjoyment do you get out of a task? The author is of course correct that optimizing efficiency at the sake of all else is typically a problem. But to misrepresent efficiency (the key to our modern age) is not quite fair to the term.

Pick-A-Hill2019 6y ago

"... what of the COVID-19 pandemic? Why hadn’t we stockpiled key supplies and machines, built up hospital capacity, or ensured the robustness of our supply chains? The reason, of course, is that it would have been seen as inefficient and profit-robbing. Money spent on masks and gowns gathering dust in a warehouse could always be put to more ‘productive’ use in the marketplace." This is what matters right now.