I am skeptical of the analogy to overfitting, although I understand where the author is coming from and agree with the sentiment. The basic problem is stupid s

I am skeptical of the analogy to overfitting, although I understand where the author is coming from and agree with the sentiment. The basic problem is stupid simple. Optimizing a process for one specific output necessarily un-optimizes for everything else. Right now much of commerce and labor in the United States is over-optimized for humans because tech businesses are optimizing for specific outcomes (productivity, revenue, etc) in a way that ignores the negative impacts on the humans involved. The optimizations always turn into human goals, eg my manager needs to optimize for productivity if they want a bonus (or not get optimized out themselves), which means they need to measure or estimate or judge or guess each of their employees’ productivity, and stupid MBA shit like Jack Welch’s “fire the lowest 10% every year”) results in horrible human outcomes. Sure there are people who need to be fired, but making it an optimization exercise enshittified it. Same for customer service. Amazon wants to optimize revenue. Customer service and returns are expensive. Return too many things? You’re fired as a customer. Call your mobile providers customer service too often? Fired. Plus let’s not staff customer service with people empowered to do, well, service. Let’s let IVRs and hold times keep the volumes low. All anecdotes but you’ve experienced something similar often enough to know it is the rule, not the exception, and it’s all due to over-optimization.