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I recently heard a clever man argue (can’t remember who), that process does make things more efficient. Starting at chaos, the more things are defined, the more
by gherkinnn 5y ago
I recently heard a clever man argue (can’t remember who), that process does make things more efficient. Starting at chaos, the more things are defined, the more you get done.
Until it doesn’t, at which point the relation inverts and you eventually end up stagnant.
The problem is that because adding ever more processes worked so far, and now that you’ve hired process people, you continue adding more and more and ever more.
The process machine feeds itself.
- joakleaf 5y agoI heard Jim Keller (the chip-designer) say this (or something similar) recently in a podcast with Lex Fridman. It is at the 24.40 mark in "Jim Keller: The Future of Computing, AI, Life, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast" https://youtu.be/G4hL5Om4IJ4?t=1480 https://youtu.be/G4hL5Om4IJ4?t=1480 "So there is a graph. Y-axis is productivity. X-axis at 0 is chaos and infinity is complete order. As you improve order, you increase productivity. And at some point productivity peaks, and it goes down again. Too much order -- Nothing can happen... Once you start moving towards order, the force vector that drives you towards order is unstoppable."
- Xunjin 5y agoHoly Molly, loved this point of view, really makes sense. Ty for the reference :)
- biomcgary 5y agoI would extend your point to say that any system with infinite chaos or infinite order necessarily lacks information about the world. Any system encoding information about reality necessarily looks like a mix of chaos and order. Unfortunately, any system that perfectly encodes / decodes information about reality has to be more complicated than reality itself.
- josephg 5y agoYes. At complete chaos you can't see the world, because of information overload. And with complete order, you're no longer acting in response to the world. You're only acting in response to the order you've created. (In practice, models, metrics and beliefs). And at some point that can become self reinforcing if you don't ground your choices out by talking to real humans in the real world. This happens all the time with ideology. If you get too steeped in any particular ideology, you no longer react to the world. You're only reacting to the ideology. (Or the world framed through the ideology). You see this all the time in the blockchain world. So much effort is going into making software and tools that nobody outside of the blockchain world wants or cares about; because it only makes sense from the perspective of other blockchain stuff. And of course, it happens all the time with twitter style politics. "We have a problem! How do I solve it?" "Make the metrics go up! Use a blockchain! Acknowledge your privilege!" "Wait! I haven't told you what my problem is yet!" There's a great quote from Bill Clinton: "The problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence."
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago> There's a great quote from Bill Clinton: "The problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence." Great quote, thanks!
- tremon 5y agothat process does make things more efficient. In my experience, process is to make things predictable, not efficient. Nothing scares a middle manager more than having to say "I don't know". They'd much rather say "this will take my team 8 months" than "this will take between 3 weeks and 6 months to complete".
- miltondts 5y agoI suspect one of the reasons things become more predictable is that overheads start to dominate the time it takes to do things, and overheads seems to be much more predictable.