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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

#121

Post by skybrian »

SlavikCA wrote: post #72
shoo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this way of framing things is only valid if outcomes of events are somewhat linear, but in real life this isn't true at all: some uninsured bad events can wipe you out completely, whereas insured bad events might not wipe you out. it doesn't matter if your expected value of not being wiped out was predicted to be 0.1 if you've gotten wiped out. the decision of purchasing insurance or not depends more on how many reso…

> for individuals with limited resources who will be wiped out if uninsured Usually, individuals with limited resources can't really be wiped out: there is not much to wipe out. Here is my perspective: I consider myself typical individual with limited resources: I'm mostly live on the my salary (Software dev), I don't really have major assets (20k car bought for cash, renting a house), have some savings (~30k cash).…

That depends on how much avoiding bankruptcy is worth to you. It might be worth learning more about what the experience is like?

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#122

Post by SlavikCA »

rdtwo wrote: post #119
SlavikCA wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for individuals with limited resources who will be wiped out if uninsured Usually, individuals with limited resources can't really be wiped out: there is not much to wipe out. Here is my perspective: I consider myself typical individual with limited resources: I'm mostly live on the my salary (Software dev), I don't really have major assets (20k car bought for cash, renting a house), have some savings (~30k cash).…

Usually they have wipeout problems that can’t be insured for. Medical conditions or unemployment being the most common.

Can't be insured for?

I find that ironic, because we actually have medical insurance and unemployment insurance here in USA, but we often see "individuals with limited resources" wiped out for reasons you mentioned.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#123

Post by hansvm »

Taek wrote: post #77
milesskorpen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tru…

There are obvious cases where you are improving efficiency without eliminating slack. I'm not making my application more fragile by rewriting an n^2 operation over a large dataset to an n*log(n) operation that provides the same output. It's a win without tradeoffs. This type of example exists in all industries. For example, finding a new alloy that has strictly superior properties across all dimensions for a specific…

> I'm not making my application more fragile by rewriting an O(n^2) operation over a large dataset to an O(n log(n)) operation that provides the same output. It's a win without tradeoffs.

Hopefully not nitpicking too much: it's a win without _many_ tradeoffs. E.g., in the usual places where you'd accidentally get an O(n^2) operation rather than O(n log(n)), the O(n^2) operation is constant-space. In a sufficiently anomalous computing environment with a low enough priority on fast results you might still consciously opt for the O(n^2) solution.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#124

Post by skybrian »

Note that in situations where exponential growth is possible, lower latency means much faster growth, and this can easily happen faster than you have time to react to.

Exponential growth at 5% a week is a lot different than 5% a day or 5% a minute. Social media would be less dangerous if there were more automatic delays before a message you post appears to others.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#126

Post by triceratops »

SlavikCA wrote: post #99
triceratops wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should've specified, I meant collision and comprehensive insurance. Liability insurance is legally required, as you said, and I personally take the maximum my insurer offers. 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. (If there's an outstanding loan on the car, the lender requires collision a…

> 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…

If you're rich enough to not need collision & comprehensive insurance (i.e. you can put down a few thousand dollars to buy a car at short notice) you probably have assets worth protecting with liability insurance.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#127

Post by dllthomas »

milesskorpen wrote: post #52
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 tru…

In some scenarios, the process fails if all of the steps fail. In that case, redundancy is more stable, and you have a tension between stability and efficiency.

In other scenarios, the process fails if any of the steps fail. In that case, redundancy is less stable, and you can improve both stability and efficiency by eliminating unnecessary steps.

In either case, there may be other considerations involved as well (flexibility, visibility, recoverability...) but sometimes we just didn't see a better way to do something.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#128

Post by roughly »

yt-sdb wrote: post #11
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…

That's a nice way to think about, and it reminds me of Nassim Taleb's "antifragile" thesis [1]. Basically, the world is more random than you think, and to operate rationally under uncertainty, you need to be open-minded about opportunities and risks with huge asymmetries. Fragile systems are often very successful for a long time because they ignore hidden risks and then collapse due to the unexpected. [1] https://en.…

> Fragile systems are often very successful for a long time because they ignore hidden risks and then collapse due to the unexpected.

There's another interesting aspect to this in that things that are failures from some perspectives may not be from others.

If stripping resiliency out of a company nets enough savings in the short term, it may still be profitable to the owners it even if it's long-term fatal.

As a hypothetical example, let's say you take a company making $1M a year and trim $19M a year of costs out of it. The company lasts another 10 years and then collapses. You've netted an extra $190M out of that company, or nearly 200 years at their previous rate.

In that case, it's in your local interest to strip the company bare, even if it's not necessarily optimal for your partners, workers, society, or any other stakeholder in this wonderful interconnected world of ours. The benefits are concentrated, the costs are distributed, and there's no mechanism for connecting the two.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#129

Post by roughly »

not2b wrote: post #112

The article repeats a commonly believed myth about money being invented as a replacement for barter. Adam Smith thought so, as do many economists, but they forgot to ask anthropologists. See https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-...

Strongly recommend "Debt: The First 5000 Years" by David Graeber - https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781612194196 - solid treatment of economic history from an anthropological viewpoint.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#130

Post by didibus »

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…

We do have a word, it's efficiency and productivity.

Efficiency produces the same output with less input.

Productivity produces more output with the same input.

So efficiency is a measure of input to target output, and productivity is a measure of output to target input.

To make a process more efficient, you figure out how to get to some X output while using as little input as possible.

To make a process more productive, you figure out how given some Y input, you can maximize your output.

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