Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

psyche.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 314 posts

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#51

Post by aaron-santos »

MadSudaca wrote: post #20
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…

Maybe the problem is that efficiency and robustness are orthogonal?

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.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#52

Post by milesskorpen »

Taek wrote: post #46

This comment thread is making me realize we don't have a good word to distinguish between efficiency as in "we only have 7 hospital beds because that's all we need on 99% of each day" and efficiency as in "we replaced steps X,Y,Z with just step X', because we found that X' could accomplish everything that XYZ could accomplish but it's faster, more accurate, and cheaper". One makes a tradeoff by reducing overheads and…

I don’t know if those two things are as different as you suggest. Multiple steps add redundancy, if you fail one step you can get much of the value from other steps. More steps are frequently added in response to edge cases.

Could be a Chesterton’s Fence scenario

Instead of bemoaning efficiency, it’d be interesting to reward/value redundancy and antifragility, at least at the system level.

I think this could mean trust busting, regulation, and general cultural shifts.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#53

Post by mcguire »

neogodless wrote: post #10
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…

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…

Rather than stability, think of it as robustness or flexibility. Past a certain point, efficiency is an enemy of robustness.

Buying in bulk is cool. If you buy a big package of paper towels, it's cheaper and you don't have to worry about running out. The fact that you have a cabinet full of paper towels isn't a big deal. But suppose you find a really great deal on a semi-trailer load of towels and stock up. Now you have your guest bedroom full of paper towels. The next week, your cousin Edgar's house burns down; you'd like to offer him and his wife a room to stay in temporarily, but you have all this paper in the way. You have lost some flexibility.

A bigger problem is, say, corporate supply chains. With just-in-time supply, you don't have to store inputs and can focus on producing outputs; it's very efficient. But then there's a pandemic or a fire in a factory somewhere, and the supply chain falls apart. Now your outputs are perhaps in greater demand, but you can't take advantage because you have no inputs. You're out of business for the duration. You can't flexibly respond.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#54

Post by jjoonathan »

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…

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.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#55

Post by mcguire »

maxerickson wrote: post #44
MadSudaca wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the problem is that efficiency and robustness are orthogonal?

They at least aren't in direct tension.

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.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#56

Post by wayoutthere »

Taek wrote: post #46

This comment thread is making me realize we don't have a good word to distinguish between efficiency as in "we only have 7 hospital beds because that's all we need on 99% of each day" and efficiency as in "we replaced steps X,Y,Z with just step X', because we found that X' could accomplish everything that XYZ could accomplish but it's faster, more accurate, and cheaper". One makes a tradeoff by reducing overheads and…

"Efficiency" can only be defined in terms of something else -- you can be optimizing throughput or optimizing costs and you'll end up at very different solutions. One is efficient with respect to waiting times, the other is efficient with respect to costs.

In your latter example, it could very well be the case that steps Y and Z had purposes you didn't take into account that makes the new process less efficient in some cases with respect to the target metric.

Either way, overoptimization and focus on specific metrics to the exclusion of others is a real problem. Circumstances change over time and high levels of optimization make processes more brittle and likely to fail when circumstances change.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#57

Post by cmehdy »

nitrogen wrote: post #31
alexpetralia wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#58

Post by jcims »

Taek wrote: post #46

This comment thread is making me realize we don't have a good word to distinguish between efficiency as in "we only have 7 hospital beds because that's all we need on 99% of each day" and efficiency as in "we replaced steps X,Y,Z with just step X', because we found that X' could accomplish everything that XYZ could accomplish but it's faster, more accurate, and cheaper". One makes a tradeoff by reducing overheads and…

I agree it can get ambiguous but I think most of the time it's just framed differently and (to your point) are focused on different dimensions of efficiency.

For example, if your first statement was 'We only have seven beds because we tightened up our discharge workflow and that's all we need 99% of the time' and your second statement was 'We only have seven admins because we replaced steps X,Y,Z with just step X and that's all we need 99% of the time' they start to line up.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#59

Post by mcguire »

maest wrote: post #39
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.

This does not sit nicely with the fact that there are many large and successful insurance companies.

Most insurance companies make their money on their float: the time between money coming in and money going out.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#60

Post by georgeecollins »

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…

See also "Slack", a book about this very issue.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/39276/slack-by-tom-...

Post reply on HN