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Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

psyche.co

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Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#21

Post by neogodless »

ghaff wrote: post #17
neogodless wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#22

Post by ssivark »

The fundamental problem is the inverted-U shape of payoffs to “optimizing” any one factor (or a small subset of key focus areas). Beyond a point, you’re just “overfitting” to the incorrect metric and underperforming in the truer sense. Yeah, you might not have a metric for the “deeper value”... c’est la vie! Any decision making approach that tries to ignore that problem/limitation is simply stupid.

The other problem with prizing efficiency is that we often optimize for efficiency under an incorrect model of the situation (model-reality-mismatch) — underweighting the likelihood of upsetting possibilities. That’s essentially what the idea of “black swan”/“fat tails” is about. It’s not really about statistics, unless you’re using a flawed and over-simplified statistical model to ground your metric of efficiency.

IMHO the same problem underlies the approach/framework of behavioral economics. In many situations, observed human behavior might be “irrational” only because your model of reality is naively simplistic. It shouldn’t be surprising that a satisficing approach works better in reality than an optimizing approach; if it does sound surprising, consider that your intuitions might be biased by an incorrect model of reality!

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#23

Post by shoo »

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #3
bschne wrote: post #2

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 f…

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.

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

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#25

Post by datenwolf »

bschne wrote: post #2

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 f…

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-reduc...

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#26

Post by shoo »

alexpetralia wrote: post #4
bschne wrote: post #2

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 f…

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.

"efficiency erodes resilience" is a good line, at a loss of symmetry. resilience also erodes efficiency.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#28

Post by TuringTest »

CincinnatiMan wrote: post #5

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

> The problem is you can only slow down if everyone else does too

That's a myth propagated by people with a stake in the pie. Nature shows us that you only need to be hyper-efficient and in a constant arms race if you're competing for the same resources.

Otherwise, you can adopt an opportunistic survival strategy that trades efficiency for variety and a diversity of useable resources.

Of course, efficiency is the only option when there are companies trying to grab all the resources available, as in our current business setting. But that's definitely not a healthy environment.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#29

Post by devilduck »

Pace is relative and I think teams will generally average out in terms of pace. Finding a pace that fits you and your style would be an essential factor in having better work efficacy. My boss works really fast, works constantly and is probably a workaholic, a pace which I can not and will not try to match, so I have to work at my own pace and this throws off how project planning goes because the PMs are used to his pace and don't give me an optimal amount of time on projects, so I will find myself rushing which of course makes me feel bad and triggers my impostor syndrome. Eventually this pace will break down and become unmanageable for me and I'll have to quit, which will hurt their production even more.

Pace and efficiency are definitely linked, but I don't necessarily know that I think faster = more efficient. And there are folks mentioning stability, also definitely linked here, but i think max efficiency would lean more into stability than pace.

Linking pace with efficiency also seems to create the idea that "faster will be the winner" which, you know, that's a whole thing, introducing competition in an arguably healthy way.

I generally tend to find that emotion will usually come before logic. Building something that could be considered efficient, but a feeling says "This could be more efficient" and then logic jumps in and does the work.

Just some stream of consciousness writing here, food for thought maybe, or extremely poor quality ideas!

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#30

Post by mkoubaa »

david_draco wrote: post #27

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

If insurance was cost effective in the long run, insurance companies wouldn't be profitable
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