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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

#81

Post by [deleted] »

pdonis wrote: post #50
yathern wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have it backwards - insurance and lottery are (sort of) equal. In the long term, you'll lose money in the lottery. You'll also lose money paying for insurance. If you have extraordinary "good luck", you may come out ahead in the lottery. And if you have extraordinary "bad luck" you may come out ahead in insurance. Insurance of course has a more practical value, and a much better return on investment (even…

> You'll also lose money paying for insurance. Only if you put zero value on the peace of mind that comes with having insurance against risks that, if they happened, would bankrupt you. But if you put zero value on that, you wouldn't buy insurance.

[deleted]

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#83

Post by tobmlt »

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…

This is also the primary topic of “blue ocean strategy” — with a difference there that running without slack causes the system to grind to a halt and or run in “emergency rush order mode” much of the time. In such a case efficiency and resilience/stability have some linear dependence. Sometimes these “opposites” are actually working together.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#84

Post by Double_Cast »

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?

They're orthogonal for non-trivial decisions. Once you hit the efficient frontier of anything, you need to start making trade-offs.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#85

Post by pdonis »

pottertheotter wrote: post #75
pdonis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'll also lose money paying for insurance. Only if you put zero value on the peace of mind that comes with having insurance against risks that, if they happened, would bankrupt you. But if you put zero value on that, you wouldn't buy insurance.

It's the same with the lottery. If you understand that the cash expected value is lower than the cost of the ticket, but you get some value from having "played" and the net is at least equal to the price of the ticket, it's not irrational to buy a lottery ticket.

This is true, but the kind of value being provided is different. Peace of mind is not the same thing as entertainment.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#87

Post by Double_Cast »

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…

* It's instructive to track the underlying resource. If technology_A saves you time, it's more time-efficient (aka quick). If technology_B saves you money, it's more cost-efficient (aka cheap).

* In game theory, "7 hospital beds" weakly dominates "8 hospital beds". But (x') strictly dominates (x, y, z). This is exactly what Pareto Optimality is about. Though perhaps a more colloquial term would be useful here.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#88

Post by brundolf »

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…

> the other doesn't have any tradeoffs, it's just a better way of doing things based on novel techniques

At least in the case of code, this isn't true. The variability comes in terms of change to the system, rather than the running of the system. i.e., if I simplify a process to be less modular and more monolithic, making it more efficient, that also makes it more purpose-built and less flexible. The "risk" increases of running up against a change that needs to be made but is intractably onerous. There's always a tradeoff.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#89

Post by allenu »

FpUser wrote: post #12

>"Multitask; text on one device while emailing on a second, and perhaps conversing on a third." Result - shitty content of texting, emails and shitty conversation. I am not sure who in their right mind actually advocates that.

The problem could be twofold: 1) our tools push us towards multitasking. Notifications pop up and there's a sense of immediacy where you need to deal with it now (texting back) or it will get "lost" in the stream of new notifications, never to be dealt with. 2) people today expect everything, even communications, to be responsive, leading to a low content response immediately as opposed to a high quality one later.

For #1, modern tools like Slack favor immediate responses since it's not set up to treat conversations or requests as manipulable items. With email you can drag and drop into folders and deal with them one by one. With slack, once you've "seen" a message, there's really no way to put it somewhere to remind yourself to respond. (If there is, it's not obvious to me.)

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#90

Post by vishnugupta »

austinl wrote: post #32

One of my favorite quotes on this topic comes from Aurelius' description of his adopted father in Meditations . [Y]ou would never say of him that he "broke out a sweat": but everything was allotted its own time and thought, as by a man of leisure - his way was unhurried, organized, vigorous, consistent in all . I feel like I spend a lot of time rushing from one thing to the next, constantly questioning whether I'm sp…

> but everything was allotted its own time and thought, as by a man of leisure

As an extreme example; watching Schumacher at his peak perform during a qualifying lap or during race, in treacherous rainy conditions, while everyone was absolutely struggling, and him out front, half a lap ahead of everyone was like watching poetry in motion. You could tell he was very relaxed just by the way his hands operated the steering wheel, hitting the apex every time in a single motion, no twitching or tossing around the car.

It seemed he just had more time, as in the time had just slowed down for him compared to everyone else.

Edit: Typo; damn you Mac OS auto-correct!

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