Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better • Hacker News Board

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#171

Post by pdonis » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 8:49 PM UTC

choward wrote: post #163

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.

> Only if you put zero value on the peace of mind that comes with having insurance against risks Only if you put zero value into seeing your savings go up with the amount you saved on insurance.

Unless you are saving enough to be able to handle the unexpected loss of the asset being insured (in which case, yes, it doesn't make sense to buy insurance since you are able to self-insure), putting the money into savings instead of insurance means losing the peace of mind that you are buying when you buy insurance. If that peace of mind is worth more to you than the money, then buying insurance is a net gain.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#172

Post by Jtsummers » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 8:49 PM UTC

rdtwo wrote: post #165

unilynx wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

complex stuff like building cars?

I think but you’d have to ask insiders if it works for them or inspite of it. In my industry it the latter where product arrives late and there is enormous recovery costs that are rarely mentioned or properly accounted for, everybody up top just sort of pretends it’s not routine when it actually is. Typically these sorts of things don’t make it out to the general public in press releases though. Holding a bit more pr…

A quality of most JIT systems I've experienced (and texts on the topic) is maintaining a sufficient buffer (alluded to in your last sentence). Taking it to its extreme (that is, essentially 0 inventory buffer) JIT only works if everything else works perfectly. That is an extreme position not endorsed by anyone or any text I have ever encountered. But it does remind me of the shitty takes on Agile I've seen (no planning, in particular). So seeing it in the wild would not surprise me.

"Sufficient" is dependent on a lot of factors, though. No one can tell you a definitive answer without knowing your system (your suppliers, your customers, your rates of production, your supply of capital to withstand a drop in production).

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#173

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 8:49 PM UTC

clairity wrote: post #162

civilized wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> efficiency as the opposite of stability In statistics, there is a slight variant of this thesis that is true in a precise formal sense: the tradeoff between efficiency and "robustness" (stability in a non-ideal situation). For example, if you have a population sample, the most efficient way to estimate the population mean from your sample is the sample mean. But if some of the data are corrupted, you're better off…

i stumbled on "stability' too, because it's a static quality. rather than robustness, i prefer to use the term resilience, a dynamic quality, since efficiency is also a dynamic quality. you can trade efficiency for resilience and vice versa (as the parent poster switched to later). edit: i should add that i don't entirely agree with the thesis of the article, which exhorts us to slow down, thereby trading efficiency…

[deleted]

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#174

Post by rticesterp » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 8:50 PM UTC

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 also not as simple as adding 7 more beds so we have all we need on 99.999% of days. Sure you have 14 beds, but you also need more doctors, nurses, surgeons, OTs, etc. to support those beds. Those health care providers won't get the patient contact they need to maintain their skills as competent providers. I know as a part-time EMT if I don't go on a certain number of calls a month that I have a noticeable decline in my skills

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#175

Post by pdonis » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 8:50 PM UTC

brlewis wrote: post #159

pdonis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe you all can agree that insurance and lottery are the same in that only a fraction of consumers come out ahead, and are opposites in terms of smart vs. stupid.

> Maybe you all can agree that insurance and lottery are the same in that only a fraction of consumers come out ahead

Only a fraction of the consumers come out ahead if we only consider monetary value. But the whole reason insurance and the lottery exist in the first place is that there are other kinds of value besides monetary value. In the case of insurance, it's peace of mind. In the case of the lottery, it's whatever entertainment value comes from being able to visualize yourself winning, even if your chances of actually doing so are tiny.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#176

Post by kibwen » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 8:51 PM UTC

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…

Relieved to learn that other people dwell on this as well. My anxiety stems from the idea that modern corporations are incentivized to ruthlessly optimize for efficiency--short-term gains--thereby outcompeting corporations that are structured for longer-term outlooks by engineering redundancy (which you call stability) into their processes. I don't know how to begin to incentivize the idea that efficiency is not the end-all.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#177

Post by didibus » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 8:51 PM UTC

baddox wrote: post #151

didibus wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 product…

The first example about hospital capacity really just involves tradeoffs around your specific goals, whereas it only makes sense to talk rigorously about efficiency in the context of some specific output goal . So if you fix some goal, say, "we want to be over capacity 1% of the time," then the most efficient way of doing that is probably to have the minimum number of beds that you need according to your predictions…

Yes, efficiency requires a fixed output goal. Because you want to minimize input while sustaining your desired output target.

For example, how can I make all of today's deliveries with less delivery trucks?

While productivity requires a fixed input goal. Because you want to maximize output while sustaining your desired input goal.

For example, how can I deliver more products per day without increasing the size of my delivery truck fleet?

Often time, improving one can improve the other, but not always. For example, someone could ask, how can we grow profit? Okay, one way is to be more efficient, thus spend less money to make the same revenue. Alright, maybe we use cheaper materials, so now produce the same amount and sell the same, but our margin has increased and we make more revenue. Someone else could say, we need to be more productive. Okay, so you invest in better marketing, and scale production to meet increased demand. You are as efficient as before, but more productive.

So I feel like, reducing the process from X,Y,Z to only X is about productivity. You still have the same number of employees, but since they don't need to waste time doing Y and Z anymore, they can produce more output. That said, you could choose to apply the gains to efficiency as well, for example, hey, because I eliminated Y and Z, I can now cut my workforce in half and deliver the same output.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#178

Post by Nasrudith » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 8:51 PM UTC

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 concept of efficency as opposite of stability seems a bit fallacious in the strong case - inefficency itself can and has caused systems to collapse which is the exact opposite of stability.

Cache/reserve and efficency is itself complicated and situational if it helps or hurts efficiency. Overfitting it could make it fragile but it also depends upon relative costs for what a blind pursuit of efficiency goes for. If something is cheap enough like data storage there will be plentiful slack because slimming it down is irrelevant to efficiency - why bother going with custom 4KB chips when economy of scale means a 250 MB one is cheaper and better? It just isn't worth trying to cut corners there.

A laggard damped system would take longer to get into a "bad state" assuming the environment doesn't demand rapid changes as the baseline to survive. Bad state is relative as always - one can doom themselves both by leaping onto the "next big thing" which isn't and by sticking to the buggy whip and musket when others have cars and automatic rifles.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#179

Post by Jtsummers » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 8:56 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #167

Jtsummers wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JIT isn't the problem in your last example, it's a weak supply chain. If you have a singular source for some critical or necessary thing, you have a risk whether you're using JIT concepts or not. Though higher if you take JIT to an extreme. Your sources need to be that, source s , and ideally geographically separated. See the various industry crises following natural disasters in Taiwan for why. The proper, though no…

Right. But, having a single source is more efficient than multiple sources---you can integrate tighter with their ordering system, packaging, product quirks. Until it stops working. Having all of your sources in one country is more efficient. Until it doesn't work. Managing all of your materials just-in-time is more efficient. Until a backhoe hits the gas main in the street outside and you can no longer get trucks in…

I guess my point is that, in everything I've read and experienced, JIT isn't about efficiency to an extreme (drop to 1 supplier, have 1 uberefficient factory, have 1 expert). You still maintain a buffer, and if possible multiple suppliers. The source of JIT (in manufacturing) is primarily Lean or the Toyota Production System. Those do not endorse zero-buffers or sole-sourcing for the purposes of efficiency. The purpose of reducing buffers is to expose inefficiencies elsewhere. And you find the right level of buffering for you based on your suppliers and risk tolerance.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#180

Post by kibwen » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 8:56 PM UTC

Nasrudith wrote: post #178

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 concept of efficency as opposite of stability seems a bit fallacious in the strong case - inefficency itself can and has caused systems to collapse which is the exact opposite of stability. Cache/reserve and efficency is itself complicated and situational if it helps or hurts efficiency. Overfitting it could make it fragile but it also depends upon relative costs for what a blind pursuit of efficiency goes for.…

I think you're both talking about different ideas here. Efficiency is good. But redundancy is also good (necessary, even, for a resilient system), and the problem is that you can always increase efficiency by removing redundancy, so it does get removed by short-sighted efficiency-optimizers.

Topically, in the past week we've seen two giant companies, Adobe and Canon, lose unimaginable amounts of user data. If they had had backups, which are a form of redundancy, this would not have been a problem. But the backups were too expensive--too inefficient--and so now customer trust in their service is absolutely destroyed.