9 ms·

Jevons Paradox

113 points by rememberlenny 5y ago

jasonhansel 5y ago
A theory I've often had: the Jevons paradox explains why desktop software remains so slow despite the massive improvements in hardware speeds. When you improve the efficiency of the hardware, software starts to demand more CPU cycles, since there's less of an incentive to optimize.
- awb 5y ago
  > When you improve the efficiency of the hardware, software starts to demand more CPU cycles, since there's less of an incentive to optimize. Or rather, there’s always more work to be done.
  - gus_massa 5y ago
    For example the orthographic and grammatical correction. When I was young, the browser didn't have it. Now it fix most of my post in HN.
    - awb 5y ago
      *fixes
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- Syonyk 5y ago
  > ...software starts to demand more CPU cycles, since there's less of an incentive to optimize. Node and Electron and crew would agree. A "modern" chat client (Element, Signal, etc) will lag on a quad core 1.5GHz system in terms of "typing into the text input box" (RasPi4, yes, I've set the governor to performance), when a single core 66MHz 486 could manage that trick without any lag in a range of chat clients. Hexchat still works fine, at least. What we need to do is stop letting developers use high end, modern systems, and put them on something a decade old for daily use. Then maybe they'll stop writing crap that only works well on a 1-2 year old Xeon workstation. Google, I'm looking at you. Buy all your devs a Pi4 and make them use it once a week for a day.
  - api 5y ago
    Some of it is explained by bloat but some of it is explained by things like 4K-5K displays, pretty antialiased fonts, support for multiple languages and unicode, support for inline images and videos, emojis, support for all kinds of inline objects like polls or HTML documents, transport encryption everywhere (sometimes multiple layers of it like Signal ratchet over TLS), scrollback history with search going back to the beginning of time, real time sync between devices, and so on. High resolution displays for example impose an exponential cost right out of the gate. Just printing "hello world" requires more pixels as a function of the square of the increase in resolution. That's more memory, more memory bus traffic, larger bitmaps, scalable vector graphics formats that take more processing power to draw, antialiasing, ... Again I am not writing off bloat. We could probably shrink most software by at least 2X and most Electron stuff by 3-4X. I doubt we could shrink it 10-100X though without sacrificing some of the things I listed up there, especially all the eye candy and rich interaction media.
    - Syonyk 5y ago
      In my particular context, it's a Raspberry Pi on a 1920x1200 display, 1:1 pixel scaling, no antialising I know of, and... the rest shouldn't matter that much in terms of how long it takes a key pressed at the keyboard to show up in the input text area. If it does, something is quite wrong in the architecture, IMO, and it's probably 4 layers of nested libraries nobody actually understands down, buried under something else. I don't think pixel density has increased as much as you seem to think it has in the 1x scaling space. I ran some very nice 1600x1200 21" monitors back in the day - ~95 ppi. A 27", 2560x1440 monitor (my preferred native size) is 108 ppi. The 24", 1920x1200, is 94 ppi. I understand the issues with scaling a display, but those are more OS level, and shouldn't impact key-to-screen delays noticeably. It certainly doesn't on more recent Apple hardware, even if you're using some screwball non-integer scaling. But the reality remains, I now have 6GHz of CPU cores, 8GB of RAM, and things are objectively slower than 66MHz with 24MB. That's not progress.
      - genewitch 5y ago
        Part of that is interrupt availability and pre-emption; also see https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
  I think a better explanation of this phenomenon is that most users don’t really really care about performance as long as it is above a certain threshold, and care more about features and cost. Given this as long as your software is efficient “enough” - which is easier to reach as computers get more powerful, you are better off optimizing for developer productivity on the desktop. Now this dynamic is complete different on mobile and server since efficiency directly translates to battery use (mobile) and electricity and hardware costs (server).
- Vetch 5y ago
  This is known as Wirth's law, which the page links to as well as to the ancient quip "what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away." A less cynical take would shift towards the perspective of Gustafson's law. Modern systems attend to more stuff and have more capabilities and affordancies than older trimmer but also simpler software. On Jevon's paradox, a countervailing force is ephemeralization or dematerialization, of which a large aspect is pushing away from resource intensive builds to more energy and information processing intense arrangements.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    New developers optimizes time to get a well paying job, so technologies that are quick to learn are optimal. Companies optimizes for worker replaceability, so technologies with lots of fresh candidates constantly being available is optimal. Those two aren't the only thing those groups optimizes for, but they are two of the main things. Which is why we have software bloat, neither group cares that much about user experience.
- taneq 5y ago
  Desktop software only gets optimized if it's annoyingly slow on the developer's machine. That's why contrary to popular opinion, devs should NOT be testing (only) on the latest greatest machines. It's far to easy to not notice your accidental quadratic or even exponential runtime performance on a lightning fast machine.
- Joker_vD 5y ago
  It's a really old observation, Joel on Software did it too: "you could spend 6 months carefully optimizing your application, or you could spend this time playing in an amateur rock band, the end result would be the same: 6 months later, your application will run significantly faster".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
karmakurtisaani 5y ago
In data science and machine learning you can see this paradox in the fact that no amount of data is enough: once you get enough data to run a simple model, you will want to make the model as complicated as the available data allows and beyond. And you're short on data again.
- kordlessagain 5y ago
  Just optimize the search for interesting!
anodari 5y ago
I imagine the following, if the price of clean energy catches up with the price of fossil fuel, the price of fossil fuel will fall and its use will increase.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Exploration will decline, and drilling, as expectation of demand falls. We can expect substantial fluctuations as numerous structural boundaries are crossed. Coal demand is collapsing, but price is not, because there is no cheaper way to mine coal. At some level of consumption the cheapest existing wells will suffice. But the owners of those wells have got used to spending a great deal more than the natural price for that oil. Meanwhile, people with more expensive wells have debt payments, and have to sell at whatever the market offers. So, it is more complicated than Econ 101, and will stay that way.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  The economic, pricing, and market dynamics are somewhat counterintuitive, though interesting. Note that what we describe with "price" actually encompasses three things: - Consumer value: the benefit derived from consumption. - Producer costs: the actual opportunity costs required to produce some resource. - Market price: the market-clearing price of a good. This is almost always somewhere between cost and value, C <=- P <= V. Where price falls between these values depends on whether we're discussing commodity goods (C ~= P) or rents (P ~= V). That is, for a commodity, price tends toward costs of production (plus some "normal" economic profit), and for rents, the price tends toward all consumer value (think San Francisco apartment rents and start-up / tech-market salaries / compensation). A few years ago, looking at a set of prices for medaeval Britain, one fact that struck me was that the cost of fuelwood and coal was the same, expressed in equivalent energy output. I quickly realised that this was a pretty obvious circumstance: if you could get the same amount of heat at lower cost from the other, with handling and burning characteristics being similar, the two goods were perfect substitutes. It's as easy to burn wood as coal and vice versa. (There's a similar item on HN now: https://medium.com/@zavidovych/what-we-can-learn-by-looking-at-prices-and-wages-in-medieval-england-8dc207cfd20a https://medium.com/@zavidovych/what-we-can-learn-by-looking-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882389) What adjusts instead is the supply of each fuel. Where it's more difficult to provide wood (say, forests are being cut down faster than they're replenished), foresters are less willing to sell wood (presuming they can find alternative income and/or livelihood), and the net balance of fuel switches to coal. If coal becomes more expensive to mine (say, larger pumps and more fuel are required to drain water), then those costs of production mean less coal is included in the mix. Energy is a fundamental physical attribute, and allowing for capital costs of generating plants, the end consumer doesn't care if electrons are motivated by light, wind, water, coal, gas, oil, atoms, or ambitious hamsters. You turn the switch, you get light. Generators and electrical providers are interested in revenues (billing rates per kWh) and costs (capital + fuel + other expenses). And though it takes time to bring new generating capacity online, given time, it's the capital + fuel costs which tend to dominate. The providers of fossil fuels face their own fixed extraction costs, plus other costs of production (usually interest service on debt for initial drilling or mining, or the purchase of a going concern). Moreover there isn't a single extraction price that covers all fossil fuel sources (any of coal, oil, gas, shale, etc.), but rather, each individual well or mine has a cost structure associated with it. Some are very low (Ghawar Oil Field, the Number One Well, Bahrain, say), some are quite high (a recently-fracked well, a deep-water offshore oil platform). Providers who can extract at low cost are receiving a large natural resource rent, effectively, which is the difference between their own extraction cost and the market price. The marginal producer has the problem that if the market price falls, it will be below their own cost of extraction, and they're selling product at a loss. (I'm ignoring externalities of the form of both pollution caused by the combustion of fossile fuels, which most people are well aware of in causing global warming and climate change, and the natural-resource cost of formation, which can be expressed as the difference between the time it's taken to create fossil fuels, and to consume them. This latter would amount to an increase in price of some fossil fuels, such as petroleum, by a factor of about five million. A rational economic system would include such factors, ours does not.) What happens as the cost of renewable resources, most especially solar and wind power, falls over the long term is that these become increasingly viable and competitive with fossil-based energy sources, and increasingly substitute for them, especially in electrical generation. And whilst the price of fossil-fuel-derived energy falls, the cost function for suppliers does not. Instead, high-cost providers are driven from the market, and their extraction operations (wells or mines) are shut down. Depending on the operation, such shut-downs may be reversable or not. Put another way, a falling price for renewables (an increase in their supply function) induces a reduced demand function for energy (the market price paid will fall), and so against a constant supply function for fossil fuels, the quantity provided of fossil fuels ... actually falls. For there to be an increase in the consumption of fossil fuels, either price or demand would have to increase. The demand increase could occur through more efficient applications of energy. This effectively means that a fixed quantity of energy provides more value (equivalent to a price decrease in energy), and hence a demand increase. But that's not what you've described.
ncmncm 5y ago
Yet, domestic electric power use is in sharp decline. It turns out people have as much light as they want. It will be rising again sharply as people start charging their cars, and replacing furnaces with heat pumps.
- api 5y ago
  I'd hypothesize that Jevon's paradox only manifests if there is significant unfulfilled demand or if new uses for something manifest at a lower price point. If neither of these conditions is satisfied I don't see why higher efficiency would increase use. LEDs for example reduce the energy use of lighting very significantly. It has not caused most people to use more lighting. The demand for lighting was already largely satisfied prior to the LED revolution. Transportation on the other hand... I imagine if something created a 10X improvement in the efficiency of rapid long distance travel (bullet trains, electric aircraft, much higher efficiency aircraft, etc.) you'd see quite a bit more of it. People would start taking weekend trips to places they might otherwise visit only rarely, meeting in person more frequently in remote jobs, and so on. There's probably a ton of unfulfilled latent demand for travel.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    And even if people do use more lighting, there's an upper limit on how much lighting is tolerable. LED bulbs are significantly more efficient than the incandescents (based on watts/lumen) they replaced. Someone would have to use 6-10x more LED bulbs to consume as much electricity as the incandescent bulb it replaced, which would make for an unbearably bright space (for most people). I had a friend in college who did exactly that, it was a remarkably unpleasant space to be in as a consequence (not sure if he ever toned it down, rarely went to his home).
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Increased demand here is often exhibited by: - Providing lighting where it wasn't previously. Most especially outdoors, for display lighting, or for advertising. - By operating lighting that would otherwise have been turned off. - By the introduction of lighting to populations or sectors which previously had none. A 1 MW generator might power 20,000 households each with a 50W incandescent light bulb. That same generator could power 200,000 households each with a 5W LED bulb. That's an addtional 180,000 households which would have effective access to lighting. (Other loads, transmission/distribution losses, etc., ignored. The point is that efficiency greatly expands the possible service population.) Now factor in that some fraction of the initial 20k households might still be able to afford an additional 45W of power, say, to charge or operate a tablet or laptop computer and router, and the total power draw will in fact increase.
Frost1x 5y ago
It seems similar to anecdata as the US migrated from dialup to broadband internet services. In theory you could finish downloading everything you needed in a fraction of the time so the bandwidth should remain unused longer. In practice, people started downloading everything. I just need this Linux distribution but here's a dozen more I can now get in minutes and try out that were prohibitive to download before to experiment with but now aren't. People started downloading video game demos like crazy, setup file servers on their home systems, etc. It turns out the new efficiencies tend to be quickly gobbled up by existing processes that were stonewalled before. As long as there are problems bound by some technological constraint, any efficiency gains disappear rapidly as they're quickly integrated into existing or new processes. You didn't use that much bandwidth before because it was scarce but now you have a firehydrant so let's see what we can use. Humans are pretty great at quickly finding ways to gobble up and expand resources whenever they're found. Once you break one of those barriers it may be that the other barriers weren't as unsormountable which leads to rapid rise in demand. That's been my 2 cents.
- slg 5y ago
  I think that would fall under a slightly different but very similar concept know as induced demand. Basically that occurs when an increase in supply leads to an increase in demand. Roads are the most commons example of induced demand. Adding new roads rarely decreases travel times because new roads encourage more people to drive which leads to more traffic that soaks up any benefit the new roads added. The impact is the same regardless of whether the supply increase is real in a quantifiable way or whether the actual amount is fixed but the same quantity is able to satisfy more buyers due to an increase in efficiency. Your example is more induced demand because we weren't making more efficient use of existing bandwidth. More bandwidth was now being supplied which caused demand to also increase.
  - makeworld 5y ago
    It seems like Jevons Paradox is just another example of induced demand, the demand is just induced due to increased efficiency. Roads and bandwidth can be structured as a Jevons Paradox as well, no? The roads were made more efficient by being able to transport more cars. The Internet connection was made more efficient by allowing more bandwidth.
aaron695 5y ago
fernly 5y ago
And in this corner: Braess's Paradox, "the observation that adding one or more roads to a road network can slow down overall traffic flow through it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
- wahern 5y ago
  I can't find the paper now, but when researching mesh networks and onion routing circa 2001-2005 I remember a paper which showed that in a distributed, decentralized mesh network (plus or minus some other constraints that may or may not have mattered, like uniformity) each additional node increased aggregate throughput, but the increase asymptotically approached zero.
  - barathr 5y ago
    I don't know if it was this paper, but this was a classic piece of research on that topic from that era: https://doi.org/10.1145/381677.381684 https://doi.org/10.1145/381677.381684
- BeefWellington 5y ago
  Along a similar vein: https://nautil.us/issue/13/symmetry/want-to-get-out-alive-follow-the-ants https://nautil.us/issue/13/symmetry/want-to-get-out-alive-fo... Essentially, by obstructing emergency exits they can work better to channel people out.
- kypro 5y ago
  They have taken this approach in my city arguing improving the road network will not improve congestion and if anything reducing the number of roads is what's needed. What I don't understand about this argument is that the point surely isn't to solve for congestion or travel time, but for transport efficiency, or at a higher level, economic output, as transport efficiency likely correlates with that. Even if the number of cars on the road would double if you had twice as many roads, if the number of people now able to travel to their destination would also approximately double it would seem to me that this would be preferable? Also does this argument ever get made for any other form of transport? For example when subway systems don't have enough capacity doesn't this paradox apply? Is it therefore pointless to expand the capacity of subway systems because doing so would just increase their use? It's also interesting to me that this logic isn't ever used to argue against building new homes because it seems it would apply far more to that. I can only "consume" one road or subway service at a time, but my consumption potential of real-estate is unlimited. If we follow this logic then as you build more homes the demand for homes will increase without an upper limit, therefore building homes to solve the problem of a housing shortage is always a pointless endeavour and if anything houses should be demolished to reduce the demand for housing. Honestly, I haven't looked into any of this that much so I'm sure I'm demonstrating the Dunning–Kruger effect right now, but how this paradox is used politically always confused me. It just doesn't seem to make much sense to me to argue we need to remove roads to fix congestion, while also arguing to build houses to fix home shortages, but this is what the politicians here do.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kordlessagain 5y ago
Yup, here’s an article talking about this as applied to crypto, like Bitcoin: https://tftc.io/martys-bent/issue-678/ https://tftc.io/martys-bent/issue-678/ > We haven't even touched on the future dynamics of mining, which provides the long-term security that people are so worried about. > As oil and gas companies continue to wake up and realize they can use all of the FREE gas they are currently wasting on their fields to mine bitcoin, this will severely reduce the price at which your average miner can mine profitably. An externality that many are blind to at the moment.
ja3k 5y ago
I believe this explains a modern proliferation of paperwork. Computers made it more efficient to administer and complete but because of Jevon's Paradox we spend more time on it instead of less.
- brutusborn 5y ago
  Yes! Also ease of printing means that even the local tennis club manages to produce a 10 page sign up form. I think this is also caused by the incentives present: the form-designer is incentivised to make sure info isn't "missed". The wasted time from filling in a long form / filling in your name for the Nth time doesn't matter to the form-designer.
narrator 5y ago
I think this is probably why we'll eventually have some sort of carbon rationing if we really want to take limiting carbon emissions seriously. There's only so much making things more efficient can accomplish.
- kmonsen 5y ago
  Right, we have to make energy usage more efficient, and at the same time make it seem less efficient to consumers by adding a tax in between. Like most of Europe does with car fuel. If you want the market to solve the problem you need to give the market the incentives to solve it.
- abyssin 5y ago
  I’m less optimistic. Carbon rationing is the only solution. But what political power is there that would be able to simply declare and enforce a maximum amount of fossil fuels to extract per year in the entire world?
jquery 5y ago
This is why we can’t rely on technological progress alone to stop global warming.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
semireg 5y ago
I’ve given this some thought with regards to small-scale off-grid solar and battery use. Last summer I installed 540Ah (12v) in a houseboat and was able to power a small air conditioning unit overnight to allow our family to sleep comfortably when the temps are >80F/26C. Most nights we would wake with about 40% charge, allowing us to cook breakfast on an induction cook top. At least in my small world of river glamping, having an efficient battery/solar/appliance system leads me to use and rely on it more. If you have it you may as well use it, especially if it’s renewable once it’s installed. This may all seem totally obvious but keep in mind one of the first steps to building out this kind of system is tallying up your intended energy usage. We didn’t “need” to have A/C but it makes the entire experience that much more accessible/enjoyable with small children in small spaces. The spreadsheet of usage can quickly snowball as watt-creep sets in and you think: “well if I’ve got this efficient refrigerator to store breakfast then I’ll probably need a kettle for coffee” etc. Can’t wait for summer!
wilford205 5y ago
As far as all this goes First, there are Timers for power switches. I have one that splits off into 3 I run mine on a 15&15. And I having a second set for 30m&2h. If you thought about the road system, we are yet to be make full advantage of all possibility.. For we are yet to take advantage of our, Up yet. We are still only capable of driving on flat. Yes, we do have planes andvARE able to use about 0.001% of its capabilities. Yes, its does decongest pur roadways but not enough to clear say T.D. NewYork, or L.A.. We are our future. even as slow as we are progressing.. It IS Progression.
known 5y ago
dirtyid 5y ago
Is this really a paradox or acknowledgement that efficiency will adopt the most cost effective inputs.
TulliusCicero 5y ago
This reminds me of programming through the decades: going from binary/punch cards to assembly to high level languages to even higher level languages (and libraries and frameworks): at each jump, programmers can do the same thing as before with less effort and time. Did this mean less demand for programmers? Nope! Actually the opposite: per-programmer productivity rising meant more demand for programmers, because programmers became more useful, and it turns out “manipulate information” is a skill with nearly endless uses.
zqna 5y ago
There is no paradox, if one is familiar with the modus operandi of human species: "given the opportunity to consume the humans will consume to the point when there is anything left to consume"
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Economists don't know how to divide? It appears to be increased consumption, if you don't do it 'per capita'.

113 points by rememberlenny 5y ago

A theory I've often had: the Jevons paradox explains why desktop software remains so slow despite the massive improvements in hardware speeds. When you improve the efficiency of the hardware, software starts to demand more CPU cycles, since there's less of an incentive to optimize.

awb 5y ago
> When you improve the efficiency of the hardware, software starts to demand more CPU cycles, since there's less of an incentive to optimize. Or rather, there’s always more work to be done.
- gus_massa 5y ago
  For example the orthographic and grammatical correction. When I was young, the browser didn't have it. Now it fix most of my post in HN.
  - awb 5y ago
    *fixes
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Syonyk 5y ago
> ...software starts to demand more CPU cycles, since there's less of an incentive to optimize. Node and Electron and crew would agree. A "modern" chat client (Element, Signal, etc) will lag on a quad core 1.5GHz system in terms of "typing into the text input box" (RasPi4, yes, I've set the governor to performance), when a single core 66MHz 486 could manage that trick without any lag in a range of chat clients. Hexchat still works fine, at least. What we need to do is stop letting developers use high end, modern systems, and put them on something a decade old for daily use. Then maybe they'll stop writing crap that only works well on a 1-2 year old Xeon workstation. Google, I'm looking at you. Buy all your devs a Pi4 and make them use it once a week for a day.
- api 5y ago
  Some of it is explained by bloat but some of it is explained by things like 4K-5K displays, pretty antialiased fonts, support for multiple languages and unicode, support for inline images and videos, emojis, support for all kinds of inline objects like polls or HTML documents, transport encryption everywhere (sometimes multiple layers of it like Signal ratchet over TLS), scrollback history with search going back to the beginning of time, real time sync between devices, and so on. High resolution displays for example impose an exponential cost right out of the gate. Just printing "hello world" requires more pixels as a function of the square of the increase in resolution. That's more memory, more memory bus traffic, larger bitmaps, scalable vector graphics formats that take more processing power to draw, antialiasing, ... Again I am not writing off bloat. We could probably shrink most software by at least 2X and most Electron stuff by 3-4X. I doubt we could shrink it 10-100X though without sacrificing some of the things I listed up there, especially all the eye candy and rich interaction media.
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    In my particular context, it's a Raspberry Pi on a 1920x1200 display, 1:1 pixel scaling, no antialising I know of, and... the rest shouldn't matter that much in terms of how long it takes a key pressed at the keyboard to show up in the input text area. If it does, something is quite wrong in the architecture, IMO, and it's probably 4 layers of nested libraries nobody actually understands down, buried under something else. I don't think pixel density has increased as much as you seem to think it has in the 1x scaling space. I ran some very nice 1600x1200 21" monitors back in the day - ~95 ppi. A 27", 2560x1440 monitor (my preferred native size) is 108 ppi. The 24", 1920x1200, is 94 ppi. I understand the issues with scaling a display, but those are more OS level, and shouldn't impact key-to-screen delays noticeably. It certainly doesn't on more recent Apple hardware, even if you're using some screwball non-integer scaling. But the reality remains, I now have 6GHz of CPU cores, 8GB of RAM, and things are objectively slower than 66MHz with 24MB. That's not progress.
    - genewitch 5y ago
      Part of that is interrupt availability and pre-emption; also see https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
I think a better explanation of this phenomenon is that most users don’t really really care about performance as long as it is above a certain threshold, and care more about features and cost. Given this as long as your software is efficient “enough” - which is easier to reach as computers get more powerful, you are better off optimizing for developer productivity on the desktop. Now this dynamic is complete different on mobile and server since efficiency directly translates to battery use (mobile) and electricity and hardware costs (server).
Vetch 5y ago
This is known as Wirth's law, which the page links to as well as to the ancient quip "what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away." A less cynical take would shift towards the perspective of Gustafson's law. Modern systems attend to more stuff and have more capabilities and affordancies than older trimmer but also simpler software. On Jevon's paradox, a countervailing force is ephemeralization or dematerialization, of which a large aspect is pushing away from resource intensive builds to more energy and information processing intense arrangements.
- Jensson 5y ago
  New developers optimizes time to get a well paying job, so technologies that are quick to learn are optimal. Companies optimizes for worker replaceability, so technologies with lots of fresh candidates constantly being available is optimal. Those two aren't the only thing those groups optimizes for, but they are two of the main things. Which is why we have software bloat, neither group cares that much about user experience.
taneq 5y ago
Desktop software only gets optimized if it's annoyingly slow on the developer's machine. That's why contrary to popular opinion, devs should NOT be testing (only) on the latest greatest machines. It's far to easy to not notice your accidental quadratic or even exponential runtime performance on a lightning fast machine.
Joker_vD 5y ago
It's a really old observation, Joel on Software did it too: "you could spend 6 months carefully optimizing your application, or you could spend this time playing in an amateur rock band, the end result would be the same: 6 months later, your application will run significantly faster".

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

karmakurtisaani 5y ago

In data science and machine learning you can see this paradox in the fact that no amount of data is enough: once you get enough data to run a simple model, you will want to make the model as complicated as the available data allows and beyond. And you're short on data again.

kordlessagain 5y ago
Just optimize the search for interesting!

anodari 5y ago

I imagine the following, if the price of clean energy catches up with the price of fossil fuel, the price of fossil fuel will fall and its use will increase.

ncmncm 5y ago
Exploration will decline, and drilling, as expectation of demand falls. We can expect substantial fluctuations as numerous structural boundaries are crossed. Coal demand is collapsing, but price is not, because there is no cheaper way to mine coal. At some level of consumption the cheapest existing wells will suffice. But the owners of those wells have got used to spending a great deal more than the natural price for that oil. Meanwhile, people with more expensive wells have debt payments, and have to sell at whatever the market offers. So, it is more complicated than Econ 101, and will stay that way.
dredmorbius 5y ago
The economic, pricing, and market dynamics are somewhat counterintuitive, though interesting. Note that what we describe with "price" actually encompasses three things: - Consumer value: the benefit derived from consumption. - Producer costs: the actual opportunity costs required to produce some resource. - Market price: the market-clearing price of a good. This is almost always somewhere between cost and value, C <=- P <= V. Where price falls between these values depends on whether we're discussing commodity goods (C ~= P) or rents (P ~= V). That is, for a commodity, price tends toward costs of production (plus some "normal" economic profit), and for rents, the price tends toward all consumer value (think San Francisco apartment rents and start-up / tech-market salaries / compensation). A few years ago, looking at a set of prices for medaeval Britain, one fact that struck me was that the cost of fuelwood and coal was the same, expressed in equivalent energy output. I quickly realised that this was a pretty obvious circumstance: if you could get the same amount of heat at lower cost from the other, with handling and burning characteristics being similar, the two goods were perfect substitutes. It's as easy to burn wood as coal and vice versa. (There's a similar item on HN now: https://medium.com/@zavidovych/what-we-can-learn-by-looking-at-prices-and-wages-in-medieval-england-8dc207cfd20a https://medium.com/@zavidovych/what-we-can-learn-by-looking-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882389) What adjusts instead is the supply of each fuel. Where it's more difficult to provide wood (say, forests are being cut down faster than they're replenished), foresters are less willing to sell wood (presuming they can find alternative income and/or livelihood), and the net balance of fuel switches to coal. If coal becomes more expensive to mine (say, larger pumps and more fuel are required to drain water), then those costs of production mean less coal is included in the mix. Energy is a fundamental physical attribute, and allowing for capital costs of generating plants, the end consumer doesn't care if electrons are motivated by light, wind, water, coal, gas, oil, atoms, or ambitious hamsters. You turn the switch, you get light. Generators and electrical providers are interested in revenues (billing rates per kWh) and costs (capital + fuel + other expenses). And though it takes time to bring new generating capacity online, given time, it's the capital + fuel costs which tend to dominate. The providers of fossil fuels face their own fixed extraction costs, plus other costs of production (usually interest service on debt for initial drilling or mining, or the purchase of a going concern). Moreover there isn't a single extraction price that covers all fossil fuel sources (any of coal, oil, gas, shale, etc.), but rather, each individual well or mine has a cost structure associated with it. Some are very low (Ghawar Oil Field, the Number One Well, Bahrain, say), some are quite high (a recently-fracked well, a deep-water offshore oil platform). Providers who can extract at low cost are receiving a large natural resource rent, effectively, which is the difference between their own extraction cost and the market price. The marginal producer has the problem that if the market price falls, it will be below their own cost of extraction, and they're selling product at a loss. (I'm ignoring externalities of the form of both pollution caused by the combustion of fossile fuels, which most people are well aware of in causing global warming and climate change, and the natural-resource cost of formation, which can be expressed as the difference between the time it's taken to create fossil fuels, and to consume them. This latter would amount to an increase in price of some fossil fuels, such as petroleum, by a factor of about five million. A rational economic system would include such factors, ours does not.) What happens as the cost of renewable resources, most especially solar and wind power, falls over the long term is that these become increasingly viable and competitive with fossil-based energy sources, and increasingly substitute for them, especially in electrical generation. And whilst the price of fossil-fuel-derived energy falls, the cost function for suppliers does not. Instead, high-cost providers are driven from the market, and their extraction operations (wells or mines) are shut down. Depending on the operation, such shut-downs may be reversable or not. Put another way, a falling price for renewables (an increase in their supply function) induces a reduced demand function for energy (the market price paid will fall), and so against a constant supply function for fossil fuels, the quantity provided of fossil fuels ... actually falls. For there to be an increase in the consumption of fossil fuels, either price or demand would have to increase. The demand increase could occur through more efficient applications of energy. This effectively means that a fixed quantity of energy provides more value (equivalent to a price decrease in energy), and hence a demand increase. But that's not what you've described.

ncmncm 5y ago

Yet, domestic electric power use is in sharp decline. It turns out people have as much light as they want. It will be rising again sharply as people start charging their cars, and replacing furnaces with heat pumps.

api 5y ago
I'd hypothesize that Jevon's paradox only manifests if there is significant unfulfilled demand or if new uses for something manifest at a lower price point. If neither of these conditions is satisfied I don't see why higher efficiency would increase use. LEDs for example reduce the energy use of lighting very significantly. It has not caused most people to use more lighting. The demand for lighting was already largely satisfied prior to the LED revolution. Transportation on the other hand... I imagine if something created a 10X improvement in the efficiency of rapid long distance travel (bullet trains, electric aircraft, much higher efficiency aircraft, etc.) you'd see quite a bit more of it. People would start taking weekend trips to places they might otherwise visit only rarely, meeting in person more frequently in remote jobs, and so on. There's probably a ton of unfulfilled latent demand for travel.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  And even if people do use more lighting, there's an upper limit on how much lighting is tolerable. LED bulbs are significantly more efficient than the incandescents (based on watts/lumen) they replaced. Someone would have to use 6-10x more LED bulbs to consume as much electricity as the incandescent bulb it replaced, which would make for an unbearably bright space (for most people). I had a friend in college who did exactly that, it was a remarkably unpleasant space to be in as a consequence (not sure if he ever toned it down, rarely went to his home).
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Increased demand here is often exhibited by: - Providing lighting where it wasn't previously. Most especially outdoors, for display lighting, or for advertising. - By operating lighting that would otherwise have been turned off. - By the introduction of lighting to populations or sectors which previously had none. A 1 MW generator might power 20,000 households each with a 50W incandescent light bulb. That same generator could power 200,000 households each with a 5W LED bulb. That's an addtional 180,000 households which would have effective access to lighting. (Other loads, transmission/distribution losses, etc., ignored. The point is that efficiency greatly expands the possible service population.) Now factor in that some fraction of the initial 20k households might still be able to afford an additional 45W of power, say, to charge or operate a tablet or laptop computer and router, and the total power draw will in fact increase.

Frost1x 5y ago

It seems similar to anecdata as the US migrated from dialup to broadband internet services. In theory you could finish downloading everything you needed in a fraction of the time so the bandwidth should remain unused longer. In practice, people started downloading everything. I just need this Linux distribution but here's a dozen more I can now get in minutes and try out that were prohibitive to download before to experiment with but now aren't. People started downloading video game demos like crazy, setup file servers on their home systems, etc. It turns out the new efficiencies tend to be quickly gobbled up by existing processes that were stonewalled before. As long as there are problems bound by some technological constraint, any efficiency gains disappear rapidly as they're quickly integrated into existing or new processes. You didn't use that much bandwidth before because it was scarce but now you have a firehydrant so let's see what we can use. Humans are pretty great at quickly finding ways to gobble up and expand resources whenever they're found. Once you break one of those barriers it may be that the other barriers weren't as unsormountable which leads to rapid rise in demand. That's been my 2 cents.

slg 5y ago
I think that would fall under a slightly different but very similar concept know as induced demand. Basically that occurs when an increase in supply leads to an increase in demand. Roads are the most commons example of induced demand. Adding new roads rarely decreases travel times because new roads encourage more people to drive which leads to more traffic that soaks up any benefit the new roads added. The impact is the same regardless of whether the supply increase is real in a quantifiable way or whether the actual amount is fixed but the same quantity is able to satisfy more buyers due to an increase in efficiency. Your example is more induced demand because we weren't making more efficient use of existing bandwidth. More bandwidth was now being supplied which caused demand to also increase.
- makeworld 5y ago
  It seems like Jevons Paradox is just another example of induced demand, the demand is just induced due to increased efficiency. Roads and bandwidth can be structured as a Jevons Paradox as well, no? The roads were made more efficient by being able to transport more cars. The Internet connection was made more efficient by allowing more bandwidth.

aaron695 5y ago

fernly 5y ago

And in this corner: Braess's Paradox, "the observation that adding one or more roads to a road network can slow down overall traffic flow through it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox

wahern 5y ago
I can't find the paper now, but when researching mesh networks and onion routing circa 2001-2005 I remember a paper which showed that in a distributed, decentralized mesh network (plus or minus some other constraints that may or may not have mattered, like uniformity) each additional node increased aggregate throughput, but the increase asymptotically approached zero.
- barathr 5y ago
  I don't know if it was this paper, but this was a classic piece of research on that topic from that era: https://doi.org/10.1145/381677.381684 https://doi.org/10.1145/381677.381684
BeefWellington 5y ago
Along a similar vein: https://nautil.us/issue/13/symmetry/want-to-get-out-alive-follow-the-ants https://nautil.us/issue/13/symmetry/want-to-get-out-alive-fo... Essentially, by obstructing emergency exits they can work better to channel people out.
kypro 5y ago
They have taken this approach in my city arguing improving the road network will not improve congestion and if anything reducing the number of roads is what's needed. What I don't understand about this argument is that the point surely isn't to solve for congestion or travel time, but for transport efficiency, or at a higher level, economic output, as transport efficiency likely correlates with that. Even if the number of cars on the road would double if you had twice as many roads, if the number of people now able to travel to their destination would also approximately double it would seem to me that this would be preferable? Also does this argument ever get made for any other form of transport? For example when subway systems don't have enough capacity doesn't this paradox apply? Is it therefore pointless to expand the capacity of subway systems because doing so would just increase their use? It's also interesting to me that this logic isn't ever used to argue against building new homes because it seems it would apply far more to that. I can only "consume" one road or subway service at a time, but my consumption potential of real-estate is unlimited. If we follow this logic then as you build more homes the demand for homes will increase without an upper limit, therefore building homes to solve the problem of a housing shortage is always a pointless endeavour and if anything houses should be demolished to reduce the demand for housing. Honestly, I haven't looked into any of this that much so I'm sure I'm demonstrating the Dunning–Kruger effect right now, but how this paradox is used politically always confused me. It just doesn't seem to make much sense to me to argue we need to remove roads to fix congestion, while also arguing to build houses to fix home shortages, but this is what the politicians here do.

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kordlessagain 5y ago

Yup, here’s an article talking about this as applied to crypto, like Bitcoin: https://tftc.io/martys-bent/issue-678/ https://tftc.io/martys-bent/issue-678/ > We haven't even touched on the future dynamics of mining, which provides the long-term security that people are so worried about. > As oil and gas companies continue to wake up and realize they can use all of the FREE gas they are currently wasting on their fields to mine bitcoin, this will severely reduce the price at which your average miner can mine profitably. An externality that many are blind to at the moment.

ja3k 5y ago

I believe this explains a modern proliferation of paperwork. Computers made it more efficient to administer and complete but because of Jevon's Paradox we spend more time on it instead of less.

brutusborn 5y ago
Yes! Also ease of printing means that even the local tennis club manages to produce a 10 page sign up form. I think this is also caused by the incentives present: the form-designer is incentivised to make sure info isn't "missed". The wasted time from filling in a long form / filling in your name for the Nth time doesn't matter to the form-designer.

narrator 5y ago

I think this is probably why we'll eventually have some sort of carbon rationing if we really want to take limiting carbon emissions seriously. There's only so much making things more efficient can accomplish.

kmonsen 5y ago
Right, we have to make energy usage more efficient, and at the same time make it seem less efficient to consumers by adding a tax in between. Like most of Europe does with car fuel. If you want the market to solve the problem you need to give the market the incentives to solve it.
abyssin 5y ago
I’m less optimistic. Carbon rationing is the only solution. But what political power is there that would be able to simply declare and enforce a maximum amount of fossil fuels to extract per year in the entire world?

jquery 5y ago

This is why we can’t rely on technological progress alone to stop global warming.

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semireg 5y ago

I’ve given this some thought with regards to small-scale off-grid solar and battery use. Last summer I installed 540Ah (12v) in a houseboat and was able to power a small air conditioning unit overnight to allow our family to sleep comfortably when the temps are >80F/26C. Most nights we would wake with about 40% charge, allowing us to cook breakfast on an induction cook top. At least in my small world of river glamping, having an efficient battery/solar/appliance system leads me to use and rely on it more. If you have it you may as well use it, especially if it’s renewable once it’s installed. This may all seem totally obvious but keep in mind one of the first steps to building out this kind of system is tallying up your intended energy usage. We didn’t “need” to have A/C but it makes the entire experience that much more accessible/enjoyable with small children in small spaces. The spreadsheet of usage can quickly snowball as watt-creep sets in and you think: “well if I’ve got this efficient refrigerator to store breakfast then I’ll probably need a kettle for coffee” etc. Can’t wait for summer!

wilford205 5y ago

As far as all this goes First, there are Timers for power switches. I have one that splits off into 3 I run mine on a 15&15. And I having a second set for 30m&2h. If you thought about the road system, we are yet to be make full advantage of all possibility.. For we are yet to take advantage of our, Up yet. We are still only capable of driving on flat. Yes, we do have planes andvARE able to use about 0.001% of its capabilities. Yes, its does decongest pur roadways but not enough to clear say T.D. NewYork, or L.A.. We are our future. even as slow as we are progressing.. It IS Progression.

known 5y ago

dirtyid 5y ago

Is this really a paradox or acknowledgement that efficiency will adopt the most cost effective inputs.

TulliusCicero 5y ago

This reminds me of programming through the decades: going from binary/punch cards to assembly to high level languages to even higher level languages (and libraries and frameworks): at each jump, programmers can do the same thing as before with less effort and time. Did this mean less demand for programmers? Nope! Actually the opposite: per-programmer productivity rising meant more demand for programmers, because programmers became more useful, and it turns out “manipulate information” is a skill with nearly endless uses.

zqna 5y ago

There is no paradox, if one is familiar with the modus operandi of human species: "given the opportunity to consume the humans will consume to the point when there is anything left to consume"

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

Economists don't know how to divide? It appears to be increased consumption, if you don't do it 'per capita'.