12 ms·

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 fundamenta

by 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.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  That's a much more reasonable statement. Add to that that if you optimize one from a set of orthogonal values, the other ones tend to decrease. And so you get to all the people claiming there's an intrinsic relation between them, on the face of a world of evidence.
neogodless 6y ago
When I think about personal finance, I often think about efficiency. The obvious examples include buying in bulk, avoiding finance charges to optimize what you get for your money, paying insurance up front when the payment options charge extra, and just plain having fewer subscriptions to keep monthly expenses lower and easier to track. All of this efficiency increases financial stability. I suppose if we argue that I'm only referring to optimization and not efficiency, then perhaps it's not a great argument.
- ghaff 6y ago
  The two are certainly related but it feels like optimization is a bit different. Maybe the efficiency equivalent for personal finance would be an example like keeping your bank balance at a minimum and immediately transferring any spare cash to paying down a mortgage or otherwise into a fairly illiquid investment because thet's where the best returns are. But now if you have an unexpected expense you have to scramble to come up with funds.
  - neogodless 6y ago
    Ah yes, I think that makes it more clear. In this case, efficiency might be automating bill payments, but then you don't catch price changes, and depending on your other systems in place, you might miss overdrawing your account.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      The colloquial words may not be the best. It seems like it's a distinction between optimizing things for which there is essentially no meaningful downside except maybe a bit of thought and time. Versus setting things up so that they're the most efficient system in the current environment but may not handle unexpected events well and therefore might not be the best choice.
- bschne 6y ago
  It increases your financial stability under the assumption that your life situation evolves in a predictable way. Say you need to cover unforeseen medical expenses, or you develop an allergy to one of the foods you bought in bulk (sorry, that one was a bit contrived), etc. - well, then you'd suddenly wish you'd held off on buying that pallet of canned soup. On the other hand, if you only buy your food day to day, that is certainly more like JIT logistics, prevents waste & storage space needs, etc., but it screws you if you can't leave your house and the stores get closed due to some... ahem... what might possibly happen that forces you to stay inside. So it's always a matter of your frame of reference, I guess.
ErikVandeWater 6y ago
I think this requires more thorough definition. Obviously you can be inefficient without being stable. E.g. I could drive my car at 5 miles an hour to work which would neither be efficient nor stable.
- Xylakant 6y ago
  It certainly would be stable. A very moderate increase in speed would allow you to make good on a substantial delay for any kind of reason.
  - r00fus 6y ago
    It would not be stable as it would significantly increase the risk of accidents, road rage, or being pulled over for going too slow.
    - Infinitesimus 6y ago
      That instability is not because of the 5mph but because you're driving 5mph in a 60mph zone. You could drive 5mph on back roads with less risk of course.
- meh206 6y ago
  Right, there has to be some boundaries defined for what's in "reason".
- shoo 6y ago
  agreed. the two objectives of efficiency and robustness are not necessarily in conflict in all situations, but if you start trying to optimise a given system focusing on only one objective, the other one may degrade arbitrarily. better to define what tradeoff would be a good deal: how much efficiency would you be willing to lose to gain 1 unit of robustness, etc. then optimise both objectives taking into account your preferred exchange rate. there's plenty examples of this kind of thing in engineering design situations. it's cheaper (i.e. more efficient usage of capital, at least in the short run) to not allocate resources for backups or allocate extra capacity in systems that isn't used 95% of the time. it's much more expensive to dig two spatially separated trenches to lay independent paths of fibre optic cable to a given building, but if you cough up the money for that inefficient redundant connection, your internet will have decreased risk of interruption by rogue backhoes. it's cheaper to not hire enough staff and get individuals in a team to over-specialise in their own areas of knowledge rather than having enough spare capacity and knowledge-sharing to be able to cover if people get sick, go on holiday or quit. ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-objective_optimization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-objective_optimization
alexpetralia 6y ago
I think this is probably better characterized as "efficiency erodes resilience". You can have stability if there are no perturbations. However, if there are, and you have optimized for a regime where there are not, you are very exposed to risk. This is pretty much Table's notion of antifragility as well as the study of resilience engineering.
- shoo 6y ago
  "efficiency erodes resilience" is a good line, at a loss of symmetry. resilience also erodes efficiency.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  There's an engineering version of "stable" that might be useful here to draw lines between the three or so different concepts being discussed. A "stable" system is one that will return to the same resting state when perturbed. One can have "equilibrium" in an unstable system, e.g. balancing a broomstick on one's hand, but the system will not return to that equilibrium if perturbed.
  - cmehdy 6y ago
    This idea also helps when thinking about local/global (I'd argue most of what we do is local optimization of minima, and what challenges us is when the assumptions about locality of the phenomenon are challenged enough that we can't guarantee that stability). And the idea is also applicable to trajectories rather than singular points: if you change your starting point by an epsilon, would the trajectory be vastly similar or a bit different? or very different? cue in Lyapunov fun and Lipschitz continuity[0] as a metric and, to a lesser extent, conditions for chaotic trajectories to emerge. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipschitz_continuity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipschitz_continuity
  - SubuSS 6y ago
    I think you mean resilient when you say stable: A stable system NEED not get back to resting state by itself. A resilient one does. Along these terms, I think equilibrium doesn't really make sense - it means stability in many definitions. From the top google result: > Equilibrium is defined as a state of balance or a stable situation where opposing forces cancel each other out and where no changes are occurring. An example of equilibrium is in economics when supply and demand are equal. An example of equilibrium is when you are calm and steady. Another take on this: (Stable vs unstable equilibrium) https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/davis/375/popecol/lec9/equilib.html#:~:text=Equilibrium%20is%20a%20state%20of%20a%20system%20which%20does%20not%20change.&text=An%20equilibrium%20is%20considered%20stable,then%20the%20equilibrium%20is%20unstable https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/davis/375/popecol/lec9/equil....
genghisjahn 6y ago
That’s one of the points of “The Goal”. As in you need slack to be more productive over time. https://www.ebay.com/p/117280427 https://www.ebay.com/p/117280427 I leave the eBay link because last I checked used copies on amazon were very pricey.
- cinntaile 6y ago
  It's still in print so you can just get a new copy instead.
yt-sdb 6y ago
That's a nice way to think about, and it reminds me of Nassim Taleb's "antifragile" thesis [1]. Basically, the world is more random than you think, and to operate rationally under uncertainty, you need to be open-minded about opportunities and risks with huge asymmetries. Fragile systems are often very successful for a long time because they ignore hidden risks and then collapse due to the unexpected. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility
- roughly 6y ago
  > Fragile systems are often very successful for a long time because they ignore hidden risks and then collapse due to the unexpected. There's another interesting aspect to this in that things that are failures from some perspectives may not be from others. If stripping resiliency out of a company nets enough savings in the short term, it may still be profitable to the owners it even if it's long-term fatal. As a hypothetical example, let's say you take a company making $1M a year and trim $19M a year of costs out of it. The company lasts another 10 years and then collapses. You've netted an extra $190M out of that company, or nearly 200 years at their previous rate. In that case, it's in your local interest to strip the company bare, even if it's not necessarily optimal for your partners, workers, society, or any other stakeholder in this wonderful interconnected world of ours. The benefits are concentrated, the costs are distributed, and there's no mechanism for connecting the two.
  - dependsontheq 6y ago
    Only if you define local interest as purely financially motivated. I am not even talking about the ethics, but even social status is not only dependent on wealth. We are much more than a bank account number, thinking that we are is more or less a pathological disease, because rationally it makes no sense.
    - roughly 6y ago
      > Only if you define local interest as purely financially motivated <...> social status is not only dependent on wealth For an awful lot of people, it basically is - I mean, practically the entire field of finance and professional management would look at the example I gave and say, "that's exactly the right thing to do." Mitt Romney's entire professional career follows that principle, and it's largely seen as a net positive to his political career (as a Republican). I agree with you, I think it's an enormously damaging philosophy, both to the bearer and to the rest of us, but again, it may be locally optimal.
l_t 6y ago
I think of this as an optimization kind of problem. The word "efficiency" itself is only meaningful in context of what's being made more efficient. A system could be "more efficient at becoming stable," for example. But if by "efficiency" we limit ourselves to mean "the time-cost of a set of actions," (as in the most efficient path is the one that takes the least time), we quickly encounter problems with maximizing usage of time and how that conflicts with unexpected work, which leads to the anti-stability you mentioned. The way I think about it is that a 100% time-efficient process has zero time-flexibility. If you want to gain time-flexibility (e.g. the ability to pivot, or to work on different things too, or to introduce error bars to your calculations), you lose time-efficiency.
datenwolf 6y ago
Apparently also the reason why plants forgo green light (i.e. the most abundant part of the solar spectrum): https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduce-the-noise-in-photosynthesis-20200730/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduc...
agumonkey 6y ago
Yes it's basically a myopic under-appreciation of the current system. I was guilty of that, many are I believe, we all strive for better but sometimes our perspective is off. (not to bring him up on every topic but Alan Kay said that perspective was worth a lot of IQ points) In the list of anti-perfection patterns there's mechanical jitter.. a catastrophe avoiding relaxation.
devilduck 6y ago
Pace layering is a very interesting idea here and is almost a conceptually musical composition kind of idea for me. Perhaps conducting working teams as an orchestra, each playing their part, would be an interesting management technique.
jjoonathan 6y ago
It is a fundamental law. Systems theory has the concepts of "gain margin" and "phase margin" -- how much you can amplify feedback or delay feedback, respectively, before your self-adjusting feedback mechanism fails to find equilibrium and turns into an oscillator. Even though most non-engineering systems don't fit the mathematical theory, the idea that only a finite amount of gain + delay is available, and that the two are somewhat inter-convertible, generalizes astoundingly well.
- bschne 6y ago
  Do you happen to know a good introduction to that? I‘d love to read up more on it!
  - dboreham 6y ago
    https://books.google.com/books/about/Modern_Control_Theory.html?id=OPFQAAAAMAAJ&source=kp_book_description https://books.google.com/books/about/Modern_Control_Theory.h... ?
  - p-funk 6y ago
    This youtube channel has (seemingly good quality) Khan Academy style lecture videos on control systems, if you just want a quick introduction to the concepts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThoA4amCAX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThoA4amCAX4
  - acidbaseextract 6y ago
    Steve Brunton, a University of Washington professor has a sweet lecture series called the Control Bootcamp that dives deep into control fundamentals while still being approachable. Great production values too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi7l8mMjYVE&list=PLMrJAkhIeNNR20Mz-VpzgfQs5zrYi085m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi7l8mMjYVE&list=PLMrJAkhIeN...
- throwaway815190 6y ago
  > It is a fundamental law. > Systems theory I'm confused. Is it a law or a theory? And no, it can't be both. Laws are proved. Theories are unproven.
georgeecollins 6y ago
See also "Slack", a book about this very issue. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/39276/slack-by-tom-demarco/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/39276/slack-by-tom-...
markrages 6y ago
The rule holds true for switchmode power supplies. Sometimes you have to add a resistance (inefficiency!) in series with the output capacitor to achieve stability.
- basicplus2 6y ago
  But even more effective and efficient to use a transfer resistor
tobmlt 6y ago
This is also the primary topic of “blue ocean strategy” — with a difference there that running without slack causes the system to grind to a halt and or run in “emergency rush order mode” much of the time. In such a case efficiency and resilience/stability have some linear dependence. Sometimes these “opposites” are actually working together.
ceilingcorner 6y ago
Reminds me of Machiavelli’s comments on the French state (many small warlords) vs. the Ottoman state (single supreme leader.) The French state was less efficient, but more resilient and difficult to conquer, while the Ottoman state had more efficiency but was highly fragile. In some cases the old king of the conquered kingdom depended on his lords. 16th century France, or in other words France as it was at the time of writing of The Prince, is given by Machiavelli as an example of such a kingdom. These are easy to enter but difficult to hold. When the kingdom revolves around the king, with everyone else his servant, then it is difficult to enter but easy to hold. The solution is to eliminate the old bloodline of the prince. Machiavelli used the Persian empire of Darius III, conquered by Alexander the Great, to illustrate this point and then noted that the Medici, if they think about it, will find this historical example similar to the "kingdom of the Turk" (Ottoman Empire) in their time – making this a potentially easier conquest to hold than France would be.
- marcusverus 6y ago
  > The French state was less efficient, but more resilient and difficult to conquer, while the Ottoman state had more efficiency but was highly fragile. Machiavelli is saying the opposite of what you think he's saying. He's saying that France's governmental structure makes it (relatively) easy to conquer. Because there are many quasi-independent, competing fiefs, an invader is not necessarily facing a unified front, and may in fact be able to recruit dissatisfied lords to their cause. But that doesn't make it the kind of place you'd want to rule, because once you've conquered it, it's (relatively) easy for another invader to conquer you for the same reasons. In contrast, there were no fiefdoms in Persia. Unlike the lords in France, the regional rulers in Persia were chosen by the state, and picked for their loyalty. When invading Persia, you are far more likely to face a united front, making it (relatively) difficult to conquer. That said, once you've conquered it, it would be (relatively) easy to hold for the same reasons.
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    French states are not easy to conquer, they are easy to enter, for the reasons you’ve stated. Otherwise, we are saying the same thing.
baxtr 6y ago
Very interesting thought! Although I’d probably call it anti-fragility or resilience instead of stability.
mc32 6y ago
Also in government. It’s really good that they are slow and inefficient (although it would be nicer if they were less wasteful). There is little worse than a very efficient government.
- mistermann 6y ago
  A very efficient singular planetary government (or, excessive international homogenization of approaches) seems like one plausible example. To me, this very conversation is the approach we should be taking to the major problems du jour on the planet (treating it as an incredibly complex system with an infinite number of interacting variables, many of which we do not even know exist). But it seems as if once a system reaches a certain level of complexity, we lose the ability to even realize that it is in fact a complex system, and insist upon discussing it only in simplistic terms. Or maybe it's the fact that we are embedded within the system that makes it impossible to see.
Dumblydorr 6y ago
Efficiency is a broad concept. When it comes to energy, I don't consider stability incongruous with efficiency at all: the less you waste over time, the more stable your electricity demand growth, which saves money and improves QoL for citizens. In general, learning how to do things better can produce efficiency and more stability too, if the way is better all around.
xapata 6y ago
I'd say resilience instead of stability, but I agree that it's worth thinking about in many contexts.
paulsutter 6y ago
The best efficiency arises from simplicity. Yes, haste makes waste, and a system that's constantly changing will be unstable. But efficiency itself is nether haste nor churn, in fact the opposite.
civilized 6y ago
> efficiency as the opposite of stability In statistics, there is a slight variant of this thesis that is true in a precise formal sense: the tradeoff between efficiency and "robustness" (stability in a non-ideal situation). For example, if you have a population sample, the most efficient way to estimate the population mean from your sample is the sample mean. But if some of the data are corrupted, you're better off with a robust estimator - in this case, a trimmed mean, where the extreme N% of high and low values are discarded. The trimmed mean is less efficient in the sense that, if none of the data are corrupted, it discards information and is less accurate than the full mean. But it's more robust in the sense that it remains accurate even when a small-to-moderate % of the data are corrupted.
- clairity 6y ago
  i stumbled on "stability' too, because it's a static quality. rather than robustness, i prefer to use the term resilience, a dynamic quality, since efficiency is also a dynamic quality. you can trade efficiency for resilience and vice versa (as the parent poster switched to later). edit: i should add that i don't entirely agree with the thesis of the article, which exhorts us to slow down, thereby trading efficiency away for resilience. there are a number of ways to add resilience (and trade away efficiency), and in some cases, slowing down might be the best, but it's certainly not the only, or best, option in most cases. for housing, an example used in the article, we could add more housing to create resilience, which requires reducing friction, like increasing the throughput of permitting/inspections while generally reducing zoning/regulations.
  - throwaway815190 6y ago
    I'm completely ignorant on this topic, so I apologize for asking what must be an extremely stupid question to you, but: what makes stability a static quality whereas resilience is a dynamic quality? Are these statistical definitions that I can look up somewhere?
    - vulpesx2 6y ago
      Not OP, but my take is that stability is usually defined as a base-state that will continue onto perpetuity unless some outside force disrupts it. Resiliency is more closely defined as the ability to recover from disruptions back to the base-state quickly. Since the context here is that efficiency can remove layers of redundancy therefore allowing disruptions to wreck more havoc - I believe that's what OP was getting at.
kibwen 6y ago
Relieved to learn that other people dwell on this as well. My anxiety stems from the idea that modern corporations are incentivized to ruthlessly optimize for efficiency--short-term gains--thereby outcompeting corporations that are structured for longer-term outlooks by engineering redundancy (which you call stability) into their processes. I don't know how to begin to incentivize the idea that efficiency is not the end-all.
- kulig 6y ago
  I always wanted to put this into words but couldnt.
Nasrudith 6y ago
That concept of efficency as opposite of stability seems a bit fallacious in the strong case - inefficency itself can and has caused systems to collapse which is the exact opposite of stability. Cache/reserve and efficency is itself complicated and situational if it helps or hurts efficiency. Overfitting it could make it fragile but it also depends upon relative costs for what a blind pursuit of efficiency goes for. If something is cheap enough like data storage there will be plentiful slack because slimming it down is irrelevant to efficiency - why bother going with custom 4KB chips when economy of scale means a 250 MB one is cheaper and better? It just isn't worth trying to cut corners there. A laggard damped system would take longer to get into a "bad state" assuming the environment doesn't demand rapid changes as the baseline to survive. Bad state is relative as always - one can doom themselves both by leaping onto the "next big thing" which isn't and by sticking to the buggy whip and musket when others have cars and automatic rifles.
- kibwen 6y ago
  I think you're both talking about different ideas here. Efficiency is good. But redundancy is also good (necessary, even, for a resilient system), and the problem is that you can always increase efficiency by removing redundancy, so it does get removed by short-sighted efficiency-optimizers. Topically, in the past week we've seen two giant companies, Adobe and Canon, lose unimaginable amounts of user data. If they had had backups, which are a form of redundancy, this would not have been a problem. But the backups were too expensive--too inefficient--and so now customer trust in their service is absolutely destroyed.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  If you are strong everywhere you are weak everywhere. The article is you plain out wrong. The problem is the lack of a strategic reserve, not efficiency in itself.
api 6y ago
Reminds me of something six sigma manufacturing types call "building monuments." This refers to over-investing in optimization and automation to the point that there is too much sunk cost. As soon as something changes you're in trouble and all that sunk cost is gone, or even worse you can be stuck and unable to produce until you've retooled significantly.
harikb 6y ago
Similar to your argument, but another way to think is that efficiency adds dependency on a higher form of skill (ability to multi-task) or a complicated system. I dread the day when Google Maps, Traffic stats, Uber has actually delivered us the "perfect people transporter system" maximizing the heck out of existing infrastructure (cities, roads) and then the inevitable happens. Systems become too big to fail.
xwdv 6y ago
This isn’t really too correct. A lot of things are neither stable nor efficient.
- Florin_Andrei 6y ago
  > A lot of things are neither stable nor efficient. Yes, and those are the shitty things. But when you want to improve them, make them non-shitty, you're facing a choice: stability, or high performance - pick one.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    Life is short and we’re not building generational ships so let’s just go fast and efficient and if it crashes it crashes, but by then the lion’s share of profits will have been made and maybe even spent.
seppel 6y ago
> I've found "efficiency as the opposite of stability" a very powerful concept to think about I think this concept misses capacity. I my opinion, it is crucial that you always leave some over-capacity to have stability (lets say, you are running at most at 80% capacity). If you then increase your efficiency without sacrifying your buffer capacity, everything is fine. But as soon as your try to run at more than 80% capacity to be more efficient, this slightest problem could have devastating effects.
vonwoodson 6y ago
Dr. Richard Hamming said in his lecture series “Life Long Learning” given at the Naval Postgraduate School: a perfectly engineered bridge would collapse if an extra pound was driven across it. I used to think this was a joke, or at least said in jest. Nope.
euske 6y ago
There's a similar relationship between efficiency (convenience) and security (safety). Examples are everywhere. A centralized system (efficient) is a SPOF (not safe). Aggressive caching can be fast but unreliable. Adding a lot of features in a short term makes the code unstable, etc, etc. People often focus on one thing and overlook the sacrifice they're really making. Everything has a tradeoff.
m463 6y ago
I can't help but think of government (or management).
aabbcc1241 6y ago
Following this mindset, blockchain can be described as low efficiency and high stability?
- nnain 6y ago
  There's always someone making weird correlations between Blockchain/Cryptocurrency and some random idea.
esarbe 6y ago
This efficiency vs. resilience trade off seems to be a general pattern, also for organic systems. https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduce-the-noise-in-photosynthesis-20200730/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduc...
goatinaboat 6y ago
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 I would hope that the fragility of JIT supply chains was laid bare for everyone in the Covid crisis but I expect that lesson will soon be forgotten.
chrisweekly 6y ago
"stability" strikes me as the wrong word there; maybe "resilience" or "flexibility"?
lexicality 6y ago
It's funny, I've been sucked into factorio after the 1.0 release announcement and this really rings true. If you make a production line that has perfect throughput with no buffers then you get fantastic efficiency and productivity right up until a single train hits a biter and is delayed by 30s. Then you spend 3 hours trying to deal with every machine being out of sync with every other machine with constant start/stops :(
sriku 6y ago
Another way I like to state this is "bottlenecks are beautiful design devices".
TimJRobinson 6y ago
That makes sense. If efficiency is achieving maximum ROI, then the best ROI activies are generally the highest risk ones, which have the most chance of failing and are thus least stable.
N1H1L 6y ago
But isn't this a subtle diss against capitalism or a purely market based system? A free market results in _efficient_ allocation of capital, resulting in a _fragile_ allocation.

by bschne 6y ago

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.
marcosdumay 6y ago
That's a much more reasonable statement. Add to that that if you optimize one from a set of orthogonal values, the other ones tend to decrease. And so you get to all the people claiming there's an intrinsic relation between them, on the face of a world of evidence.

neogodless 6y ago

When I think about personal finance, I often think about efficiency. The obvious examples include buying in bulk, avoiding finance charges to optimize what you get for your money, paying insurance up front when the payment options charge extra, and just plain having fewer subscriptions to keep monthly expenses lower and easier to track. All of this efficiency increases financial stability. I suppose if we argue that I'm only referring to optimization and not efficiency, then perhaps it's not a great argument.

ghaff 6y ago
The two are certainly related but it feels like optimization is a bit different. Maybe the efficiency equivalent for personal finance would be an example like keeping your bank balance at a minimum and immediately transferring any spare cash to paying down a mortgage or otherwise into a fairly illiquid investment because thet's where the best returns are. But now if you have an unexpected expense you have to scramble to come up with funds.
- neogodless 6y ago
  Ah yes, I think that makes it more clear. In this case, efficiency might be automating bill payments, but then you don't catch price changes, and depending on your other systems in place, you might miss overdrawing your account.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    The colloquial words may not be the best. It seems like it's a distinction between optimizing things for which there is essentially no meaningful downside except maybe a bit of thought and time. Versus setting things up so that they're the most efficient system in the current environment but may not handle unexpected events well and therefore might not be the best choice.
bschne 6y ago
It increases your financial stability under the assumption that your life situation evolves in a predictable way. Say you need to cover unforeseen medical expenses, or you develop an allergy to one of the foods you bought in bulk (sorry, that one was a bit contrived), etc. - well, then you'd suddenly wish you'd held off on buying that pallet of canned soup. On the other hand, if you only buy your food day to day, that is certainly more like JIT logistics, prevents waste & storage space needs, etc., but it screws you if you can't leave your house and the stores get closed due to some... ahem... what might possibly happen that forces you to stay inside. So it's always a matter of your frame of reference, I guess.

ErikVandeWater 6y ago

I think this requires more thorough definition. Obviously you can be inefficient without being stable. E.g. I could drive my car at 5 miles an hour to work which would neither be efficient nor stable.

Xylakant 6y ago
It certainly would be stable. A very moderate increase in speed would allow you to make good on a substantial delay for any kind of reason.
- r00fus 6y ago
  It would not be stable as it would significantly increase the risk of accidents, road rage, or being pulled over for going too slow.
  - Infinitesimus 6y ago
    That instability is not because of the 5mph but because you're driving 5mph in a 60mph zone. You could drive 5mph on back roads with less risk of course.
meh206 6y ago
Right, there has to be some boundaries defined for what's in "reason".
shoo 6y ago
agreed. the two objectives of efficiency and robustness are not necessarily in conflict in all situations, but if you start trying to optimise a given system focusing on only one objective, the other one may degrade arbitrarily. better to define what tradeoff would be a good deal: how much efficiency would you be willing to lose to gain 1 unit of robustness, etc. then optimise both objectives taking into account your preferred exchange rate. there's plenty examples of this kind of thing in engineering design situations. it's cheaper (i.e. more efficient usage of capital, at least in the short run) to not allocate resources for backups or allocate extra capacity in systems that isn't used 95% of the time. it's much more expensive to dig two spatially separated trenches to lay independent paths of fibre optic cable to a given building, but if you cough up the money for that inefficient redundant connection, your internet will have decreased risk of interruption by rogue backhoes. it's cheaper to not hire enough staff and get individuals in a team to over-specialise in their own areas of knowledge rather than having enough spare capacity and knowledge-sharing to be able to cover if people get sick, go on holiday or quit. ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-objective_optimization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-objective_optimization

alexpetralia 6y ago

I think this is probably better characterized as "efficiency erodes resilience". You can have stability if there are no perturbations. However, if there are, and you have optimized for a regime where there are not, you are very exposed to risk. This is pretty much Table's notion of antifragility as well as the study of resilience engineering.

shoo 6y ago
"efficiency erodes resilience" is a good line, at a loss of symmetry. resilience also erodes efficiency.
nitrogen 6y ago
There's an engineering version of "stable" that might be useful here to draw lines between the three or so different concepts being discussed. A "stable" system is one that will return to the same resting state when perturbed. One can have "equilibrium" in an unstable system, e.g. balancing a broomstick on one's hand, but the system will not return to that equilibrium if perturbed.
- cmehdy 6y ago
  This idea also helps when thinking about local/global (I'd argue most of what we do is local optimization of minima, and what challenges us is when the assumptions about locality of the phenomenon are challenged enough that we can't guarantee that stability). And the idea is also applicable to trajectories rather than singular points: if you change your starting point by an epsilon, would the trajectory be vastly similar or a bit different? or very different? cue in Lyapunov fun and Lipschitz continuity[0] as a metric and, to a lesser extent, conditions for chaotic trajectories to emerge. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipschitz_continuity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipschitz_continuity
- SubuSS 6y ago
  I think you mean resilient when you say stable: A stable system NEED not get back to resting state by itself. A resilient one does. Along these terms, I think equilibrium doesn't really make sense - it means stability in many definitions. From the top google result: > Equilibrium is defined as a state of balance or a stable situation where opposing forces cancel each other out and where no changes are occurring. An example of equilibrium is in economics when supply and demand are equal. An example of equilibrium is when you are calm and steady. Another take on this: (Stable vs unstable equilibrium) https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/davis/375/popecol/lec9/equilib.html#:~:text=Equilibrium%20is%20a%20state%20of%20a%20system%20which%20does%20not%20change.&text=An%20equilibrium%20is%20considered%20stable,then%20the%20equilibrium%20is%20unstable https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/davis/375/popecol/lec9/equil....

genghisjahn 6y ago

That’s one of the points of “The Goal”. As in you need slack to be more productive over time. https://www.ebay.com/p/117280427 https://www.ebay.com/p/117280427 I leave the eBay link because last I checked used copies on amazon were very pricey.

cinntaile 6y ago
It's still in print so you can just get a new copy instead.

yt-sdb 6y ago

That's a nice way to think about, and it reminds me of Nassim Taleb's "antifragile" thesis [1]. Basically, the world is more random than you think, and to operate rationally under uncertainty, you need to be open-minded about opportunities and risks with huge asymmetries. Fragile systems are often very successful for a long time because they ignore hidden risks and then collapse due to the unexpected. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility

roughly 6y ago
> Fragile systems are often very successful for a long time because they ignore hidden risks and then collapse due to the unexpected. There's another interesting aspect to this in that things that are failures from some perspectives may not be from others. If stripping resiliency out of a company nets enough savings in the short term, it may still be profitable to the owners it even if it's long-term fatal. As a hypothetical example, let's say you take a company making $1M a year and trim $19M a year of costs out of it. The company lasts another 10 years and then collapses. You've netted an extra $190M out of that company, or nearly 200 years at their previous rate. In that case, it's in your local interest to strip the company bare, even if it's not necessarily optimal for your partners, workers, society, or any other stakeholder in this wonderful interconnected world of ours. The benefits are concentrated, the costs are distributed, and there's no mechanism for connecting the two.
- dependsontheq 6y ago
  Only if you define local interest as purely financially motivated. I am not even talking about the ethics, but even social status is not only dependent on wealth. We are much more than a bank account number, thinking that we are is more or less a pathological disease, because rationally it makes no sense.
  - roughly 6y ago
    > Only if you define local interest as purely financially motivated <...> social status is not only dependent on wealth For an awful lot of people, it basically is - I mean, practically the entire field of finance and professional management would look at the example I gave and say, "that's exactly the right thing to do." Mitt Romney's entire professional career follows that principle, and it's largely seen as a net positive to his political career (as a Republican). I agree with you, I think it's an enormously damaging philosophy, both to the bearer and to the rest of us, but again, it may be locally optimal.

l_t 6y ago

I think of this as an optimization kind of problem. The word "efficiency" itself is only meaningful in context of what's being made more efficient. A system could be "more efficient at becoming stable," for example. But if by "efficiency" we limit ourselves to mean "the time-cost of a set of actions," (as in the most efficient path is the one that takes the least time), we quickly encounter problems with maximizing usage of time and how that conflicts with unexpected work, which leads to the anti-stability you mentioned. The way I think about it is that a 100% time-efficient process has zero time-flexibility. If you want to gain time-flexibility (e.g. the ability to pivot, or to work on different things too, or to introduce error bars to your calculations), you lose time-efficiency.

datenwolf 6y ago

Apparently also the reason why plants forgo green light (i.e. the most abundant part of the solar spectrum): https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduce-the-noise-in-photosynthesis-20200730/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduc...

agumonkey 6y ago

Yes it's basically a myopic under-appreciation of the current system. I was guilty of that, many are I believe, we all strive for better but sometimes our perspective is off. (not to bring him up on every topic but Alan Kay said that perspective was worth a lot of IQ points) In the list of anti-perfection patterns there's mechanical jitter.. a catastrophe avoiding relaxation.

devilduck 6y ago

Pace layering is a very interesting idea here and is almost a conceptually musical composition kind of idea for me. Perhaps conducting working teams as an orchestra, each playing their part, would be an interesting management technique.

jjoonathan 6y ago

It is a fundamental law. Systems theory has the concepts of "gain margin" and "phase margin" -- how much you can amplify feedback or delay feedback, respectively, before your self-adjusting feedback mechanism fails to find equilibrium and turns into an oscillator. Even though most non-engineering systems don't fit the mathematical theory, the idea that only a finite amount of gain + delay is available, and that the two are somewhat inter-convertible, generalizes astoundingly well.

bschne 6y ago
Do you happen to know a good introduction to that? I‘d love to read up more on it!
- dboreham 6y ago
  https://books.google.com/books/about/Modern_Control_Theory.html?id=OPFQAAAAMAAJ&source=kp_book_description https://books.google.com/books/about/Modern_Control_Theory.h... ?
- p-funk 6y ago
  This youtube channel has (seemingly good quality) Khan Academy style lecture videos on control systems, if you just want a quick introduction to the concepts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThoA4amCAX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThoA4amCAX4
- acidbaseextract 6y ago
  Steve Brunton, a University of Washington professor has a sweet lecture series called the Control Bootcamp that dives deep into control fundamentals while still being approachable. Great production values too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi7l8mMjYVE&list=PLMrJAkhIeNNR20Mz-VpzgfQs5zrYi085m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi7l8mMjYVE&list=PLMrJAkhIeN...
throwaway815190 6y ago
> It is a fundamental law. > Systems theory I'm confused. Is it a law or a theory? And no, it can't be both. Laws are proved. Theories are unproven.

georgeecollins 6y ago

See also "Slack", a book about this very issue. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/39276/slack-by-tom-demarco/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/39276/slack-by-tom-...

markrages 6y ago

The rule holds true for switchmode power supplies. Sometimes you have to add a resistance (inefficiency!) in series with the output capacitor to achieve stability.

basicplus2 6y ago
But even more effective and efficient to use a transfer resistor

tobmlt 6y ago

This is also the primary topic of “blue ocean strategy” — with a difference there that running without slack causes the system to grind to a halt and or run in “emergency rush order mode” much of the time. In such a case efficiency and resilience/stability have some linear dependence. Sometimes these “opposites” are actually working together.

ceilingcorner 6y ago

Reminds me of Machiavelli’s comments on the French state (many small warlords) vs. the Ottoman state (single supreme leader.) The French state was less efficient, but more resilient and difficult to conquer, while the Ottoman state had more efficiency but was highly fragile. In some cases the old king of the conquered kingdom depended on his lords. 16th century France, or in other words France as it was at the time of writing of The Prince, is given by Machiavelli as an example of such a kingdom. These are easy to enter but difficult to hold. When the kingdom revolves around the king, with everyone else his servant, then it is difficult to enter but easy to hold. The solution is to eliminate the old bloodline of the prince. Machiavelli used the Persian empire of Darius III, conquered by Alexander the Great, to illustrate this point and then noted that the Medici, if they think about it, will find this historical example similar to the "kingdom of the Turk" (Ottoman Empire) in their time – making this a potentially easier conquest to hold than France would be.

marcusverus 6y ago
> The French state was less efficient, but more resilient and difficult to conquer, while the Ottoman state had more efficiency but was highly fragile. Machiavelli is saying the opposite of what you think he's saying. He's saying that France's governmental structure makes it (relatively) easy to conquer. Because there are many quasi-independent, competing fiefs, an invader is not necessarily facing a unified front, and may in fact be able to recruit dissatisfied lords to their cause. But that doesn't make it the kind of place you'd want to rule, because once you've conquered it, it's (relatively) easy for another invader to conquer you for the same reasons. In contrast, there were no fiefdoms in Persia. Unlike the lords in France, the regional rulers in Persia were chosen by the state, and picked for their loyalty. When invading Persia, you are far more likely to face a united front, making it (relatively) difficult to conquer. That said, once you've conquered it, it would be (relatively) easy to hold for the same reasons.
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  French states are not easy to conquer, they are easy to enter, for the reasons you’ve stated. Otherwise, we are saying the same thing.

baxtr 6y ago

Very interesting thought! Although I’d probably call it anti-fragility or resilience instead of stability.

mc32 6y ago

Also in government. It’s really good that they are slow and inefficient (although it would be nicer if they were less wasteful). There is little worse than a very efficient government.

mistermann 6y ago
A very efficient singular planetary government (or, excessive international homogenization of approaches) seems like one plausible example. To me, this very conversation is the approach we should be taking to the major problems du jour on the planet (treating it as an incredibly complex system with an infinite number of interacting variables, many of which we do not even know exist). But it seems as if once a system reaches a certain level of complexity, we lose the ability to even realize that it is in fact a complex system, and insist upon discussing it only in simplistic terms. Or maybe it's the fact that we are embedded within the system that makes it impossible to see.

Dumblydorr 6y ago

Efficiency is a broad concept. When it comes to energy, I don't consider stability incongruous with efficiency at all: the less you waste over time, the more stable your electricity demand growth, which saves money and improves QoL for citizens. In general, learning how to do things better can produce efficiency and more stability too, if the way is better all around.

xapata 6y ago

I'd say resilience instead of stability, but I agree that it's worth thinking about in many contexts.

paulsutter 6y ago

The best efficiency arises from simplicity. Yes, haste makes waste, and a system that's constantly changing will be unstable. But efficiency itself is nether haste nor churn, in fact the opposite.

civilized 6y ago

> efficiency as the opposite of stability In statistics, there is a slight variant of this thesis that is true in a precise formal sense: the tradeoff between efficiency and "robustness" (stability in a non-ideal situation). For example, if you have a population sample, the most efficient way to estimate the population mean from your sample is the sample mean. But if some of the data are corrupted, you're better off with a robust estimator - in this case, a trimmed mean, where the extreme N% of high and low values are discarded. The trimmed mean is less efficient in the sense that, if none of the data are corrupted, it discards information and is less accurate than the full mean. But it's more robust in the sense that it remains accurate even when a small-to-moderate % of the data are corrupted.

clairity 6y ago
i stumbled on "stability' too, because it's a static quality. rather than robustness, i prefer to use the term resilience, a dynamic quality, since efficiency is also a dynamic quality. you can trade efficiency for resilience and vice versa (as the parent poster switched to later). edit: i should add that i don't entirely agree with the thesis of the article, which exhorts us to slow down, thereby trading efficiency away for resilience. there are a number of ways to add resilience (and trade away efficiency), and in some cases, slowing down might be the best, but it's certainly not the only, or best, option in most cases. for housing, an example used in the article, we could add more housing to create resilience, which requires reducing friction, like increasing the throughput of permitting/inspections while generally reducing zoning/regulations.
- throwaway815190 6y ago
  I'm completely ignorant on this topic, so I apologize for asking what must be an extremely stupid question to you, but: what makes stability a static quality whereas resilience is a dynamic quality? Are these statistical definitions that I can look up somewhere?
  - vulpesx2 6y ago
    Not OP, but my take is that stability is usually defined as a base-state that will continue onto perpetuity unless some outside force disrupts it. Resiliency is more closely defined as the ability to recover from disruptions back to the base-state quickly. Since the context here is that efficiency can remove layers of redundancy therefore allowing disruptions to wreck more havoc - I believe that's what OP was getting at.

kibwen 6y ago

Relieved to learn that other people dwell on this as well. My anxiety stems from the idea that modern corporations are incentivized to ruthlessly optimize for efficiency--short-term gains--thereby outcompeting corporations that are structured for longer-term outlooks by engineering redundancy (which you call stability) into their processes. I don't know how to begin to incentivize the idea that efficiency is not the end-all.

kulig 6y ago
I always wanted to put this into words but couldnt.

Nasrudith 6y ago

That concept of efficency as opposite of stability seems a bit fallacious in the strong case - inefficency itself can and has caused systems to collapse which is the exact opposite of stability. Cache/reserve and efficency is itself complicated and situational if it helps or hurts efficiency. Overfitting it could make it fragile but it also depends upon relative costs for what a blind pursuit of efficiency goes for. If something is cheap enough like data storage there will be plentiful slack because slimming it down is irrelevant to efficiency - why bother going with custom 4KB chips when economy of scale means a 250 MB one is cheaper and better? It just isn't worth trying to cut corners there. A laggard damped system would take longer to get into a "bad state" assuming the environment doesn't demand rapid changes as the baseline to survive. Bad state is relative as always - one can doom themselves both by leaping onto the "next big thing" which isn't and by sticking to the buggy whip and musket when others have cars and automatic rifles.

kibwen 6y ago
I think you're both talking about different ideas here. Efficiency is good. But redundancy is also good (necessary, even, for a resilient system), and the problem is that you can always increase efficiency by removing redundancy, so it does get removed by short-sighted efficiency-optimizers. Topically, in the past week we've seen two giant companies, Adobe and Canon, lose unimaginable amounts of user data. If they had had backups, which are a form of redundancy, this would not have been a problem. But the backups were too expensive--too inefficient--and so now customer trust in their service is absolutely destroyed.
rightbyte 6y ago
If you are strong everywhere you are weak everywhere. The article is you plain out wrong. The problem is the lack of a strategic reserve, not efficiency in itself.

api 6y ago

Reminds me of something six sigma manufacturing types call "building monuments." This refers to over-investing in optimization and automation to the point that there is too much sunk cost. As soon as something changes you're in trouble and all that sunk cost is gone, or even worse you can be stuck and unable to produce until you've retooled significantly.

harikb 6y ago

Similar to your argument, but another way to think is that efficiency adds dependency on a higher form of skill (ability to multi-task) or a complicated system. I dread the day when Google Maps, Traffic stats, Uber has actually delivered us the "perfect people transporter system" maximizing the heck out of existing infrastructure (cities, roads) and then the inevitable happens. Systems become too big to fail.

xwdv 6y ago

This isn’t really too correct. A lot of things are neither stable nor efficient.

Florin_Andrei 6y ago
> A lot of things are neither stable nor efficient. Yes, and those are the shitty things. But when you want to improve them, make them non-shitty, you're facing a choice: stability, or high performance - pick one.
- xwdv 6y ago
  Life is short and we’re not building generational ships so let’s just go fast and efficient and if it crashes it crashes, but by then the lion’s share of profits will have been made and maybe even spent.

seppel 6y ago

> I've found "efficiency as the opposite of stability" a very powerful concept to think about I think this concept misses capacity. I my opinion, it is crucial that you always leave some over-capacity to have stability (lets say, you are running at most at 80% capacity). If you then increase your efficiency without sacrifying your buffer capacity, everything is fine. But as soon as your try to run at more than 80% capacity to be more efficient, this slightest problem could have devastating effects.

vonwoodson 6y ago

Dr. Richard Hamming said in his lecture series “Life Long Learning” given at the Naval Postgraduate School: a perfectly engineered bridge would collapse if an extra pound was driven across it. I used to think this was a joke, or at least said in jest. Nope.

euske 6y ago

There's a similar relationship between efficiency (convenience) and security (safety). Examples are everywhere. A centralized system (efficient) is a SPOF (not safe). Aggressive caching can be fast but unreliable. Adding a lot of features in a short term makes the code unstable, etc, etc. People often focus on one thing and overlook the sacrifice they're really making. Everything has a tradeoff.

m463 6y ago

I can't help but think of government (or management).

aabbcc1241 6y ago

Following this mindset, blockchain can be described as low efficiency and high stability?

nnain 6y ago
There's always someone making weird correlations between Blockchain/Cryptocurrency and some random idea.

esarbe 6y ago

This efficiency vs. resilience trade off seems to be a general pattern, also for organic systems. https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduce-the-noise-in-photosynthesis-20200730/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduc...

goatinaboat 6y ago

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 I would hope that the fragility of JIT supply chains was laid bare for everyone in the Covid crisis but I expect that lesson will soon be forgotten.

chrisweekly 6y ago

"stability" strikes me as the wrong word there; maybe "resilience" or "flexibility"?

lexicality 6y ago

It's funny, I've been sucked into factorio after the 1.0 release announcement and this really rings true. If you make a production line that has perfect throughput with no buffers then you get fantastic efficiency and productivity right up until a single train hits a biter and is delayed by 30s. Then you spend 3 hours trying to deal with every machine being out of sync with every other machine with constant start/stops :(

sriku 6y ago

Another way I like to state this is "bottlenecks are beautiful design devices".

TimJRobinson 6y ago

That makes sense. If efficiency is achieving maximum ROI, then the best ROI activies are generally the highest risk ones, which have the most chance of failing and are thus least stable.

N1H1L 6y ago

But isn't this a subtle diss against capitalism or a purely market based system? A free market results in _efficient_ allocation of capital, resulting in a _fragile_ allocation.