Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

It gets worse because even if one had precisely such a word, say the difference between ‘efficiency’ and ‘superlativity’ respectively, it would not necessarily be as simple as to say “efficiency bad, superlativity good.” They morph into each other in complex systems.

Consider the paradox of finding that a factory crew has no inputs—they are playing cards waiting for an order to come in—and yelling at them to go do other things around the shop like clean and assist other operations, rather than loafing. Or, for another solution to the problem, you might pre-order all the stuff and make sure that the team is always 100% loaded and never has the free capacity to play cards.

At first blush these improve superlativity, no? We are accomplishing everything that card-playing does but we are “faster, more accurate, and cheaper” if we are measuring, say, labor cost per part and the technician time averaged over the parts they worked on. Have we not just found a “novel technique” which is “just a better way of doing things?”

But staring at it for longer you may find yourself less sure. That’s what I mean by complex systems they morph into each other. There are more subtle tradeoffs here. For example when people feel free to loaf when they have no work, you can walk into the shop and ask who’s loafing and why and how you can improve their situation so that they again have proper work to do. There is an increase in latency when that shipment finally comes in and all the workers need to be summoned from across the floor to handle it again. There may be mental fatigue from having to context-switch too much or from having to constantly work on just one thing with no breaks. Or maybe the teams that need whatever they are producing cannot finish their work fast enough, so all of the inventory produced by this team slowly grows until it fills 50% of your factory floor, until you only have a certain amount of space because that’s all you need on 99% of each day.

The point is that the greedy algorithm may fail. In a linear circuit, you short out some resistor with some wire, you know that current is going to move faster afterwards. But in a nonlinear circuit, you no longer know this. In the absolute simplest case, the increase in current rapidly breaks a fuse and everything grinds to a halt. In more complicated cases you have a feedback loop and the increased voltage from the short-circuit feeds back to the earlier stages to throttle the current coming through.

Same with weight loss. People think that they will eat fewer calories and they will therefore lose such-and-so amount of weight. Well, probably. But this is a complex system we are talking about. One of the first things that happens when you start burning the fat is that your body burns your muscle too. This is the same reason that you can't burn fat on your stomach by doing crunches, your system is sending the call out to your entire body that it needs to digest surplus material. The loss in muscle mass appears to be the primary culprit which kicks down your basal metabolic rate and you hit what weight-loss folks call a “wall” where you are literally cold all the time and wearing sweaters and feeling too cranky to exercise and all that, feedback mechanisms which will mean that if you keep eating that restricted amount of calories you won’t be losing any more weight unless you can “break through” it by keeping warm through exercising and thereby increasing your muscle mass back up to where it needs to be and so forth. It’s just that it’s a complex system and the greedy algorithm does not always work for such systems.

Reminds me of Machiavelli’s comments on the French state (many small warlords) vs. the Ottoman state (single supreme leader.) The French state was less efficient, but more resilient and difficult to conquer, while the Ottoman state had more efficiency but was highly fragile.

In some cases the old king of the conquered kingdom depended on his lords. 16th century France, or in other words France as it was at the time of writing of The Prince, is given by Machiavelli as an example of such a kingdom. These are easy to enter but difficult to hold.

When the kingdom revolves around the king, with everyone else his servant, then it is difficult to enter but easy to hold. The solution is to eliminate the old bloodline of the prince. Machiavelli used the Persian empire of Darius III, conquered by Alexander the Great, to illustrate this point and then noted that the Medici, if they think about it, will find this historical example similar to the "kingdom of the Turk" (Ottoman Empire) in their time – making this a potentially easier conquest to hold than France would be.

This article suffers from a misconception of efficiency. A car that gets more miles per gallon than another is more fuel-efficient, not more efficient. A system of local optimums is an inefficient system. The author asks us to make life more efficient by considering efficiency in a broader scope. Efficiency is still good.

TL;DR.

> Personal liability in an accident is potentially unbounded. This is an example of an unbearable loss that must be protected against, even if it costs money on average.

Why it is "unbearable loss"?

There is saying about that:

If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.

That may seems unethical, but if you think about it - it's reach people, who lives in our society, who needs to be careful to take care of their risks.

Of course, if you have assets to lose - you need to protect them (by buying insurance), but if you are "individual with limited resources" - it's not much different with / without insurance.

What I often hear is that poor people (with limited resources) needs to buy extra insurance to protect reach people from their risks. I disagree.