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Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

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Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#191

Post by cmonnow »

civilized wrote: post #146
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…

> 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…

it's called bias vs. variance tradeoff, or over-fitting, in stats/machine learning lingo.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#192

Post by Jtsummers »

rticesterp wrote: post #174
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 declin…

At some point you must choose your bottlenecks. Excess physical capacity doesn't have to be used all the time (that is, there's no "currency" for a bed, and other equipment can be rotated through use and maintenance cycles). If you choose to constrain yourself with the number of beds needed for your 99% situation, then you can't expand beyond that without great difficulty. If you have physical capacity for your 99% situation x 2 or even just one or two extra beds, then you don't have to maintain full-time staff for it. You could extend staff hours, or bring part-time staffers to full-time hours, or bring in (with supervision) students from a nearby medical or nursing school to handle what they can and offload the burden for that 1% situation.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#193

Post by BeatLeJuce »

cmonnow wrote: post #191
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…

it's called bias vs. variance tradeoff, or over-fitting, in stats/machine learning lingo.

No, it isn't. The b/v tradeoff is not the same thing. The efficiency of an estimator is a different from its bias.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#195

Post by api »

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…

Reminds me of something six sigma manufacturing types call "building monuments." This refers to over-investing in optimization and automation to the point that there is too much sunk cost. As soon as something changes you're in trouble and all that sunk cost is gone, or even worse you can be stuck and unable to produce until you've retooled significantly.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#196

Post by harikb »

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…

Similar to your argument, but another way to think is that efficiency adds dependency on a higher form of skill (ability to multi-task) or a complicated system.

I dread the day when Google Maps, Traffic stats, Uber has actually delivered us the "perfect people transporter system" maximizing the heck out of existing infrastructure (cities, roads) and then the inevitable happens.

Systems become too big to fail.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#197

Post by smabie »

pchristensen wrote: post #96
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…

My favorite story about unintended consequences of process improvement is the Vienna Sausage Factory: https://medium.com/dangerous-kitchen/vienna-sausages-a-guy-n... Punch line - Sausages coming from a new modern factory didn't taste the same. The new, more efficient building removed a long transportation step where the partially finished sausages picked up flavors and scents coming from different parts of the factor…

I wasn't aware Vienna sausage had any flavor in the first place. In my view, Vienna sausage is in the same category of food as spam, baloney, and wonder bread: total garbage.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#198

Post by xwdv »

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 isn’t really too correct. A lot of things are neither stable nor efficient.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#199

Post by Jtsummers »

throwaway815190 wrote: post #186
jjoonathan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> It is a fundamental law . > Systems theory I'm confused. Is it a law or a theory? And no, it can't be both. Laws are proved. Theories are unproven.

Well, those two statements aren't referring to the same thing. The law they reference is something found in Systems Theory.

It may be useful, also, for you to read these two pages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory

The difference between Law and Theory (in scientific discourse) is not what you believe it to be.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#200

Post by rdtwo »

Jtsummers wrote: post #172
rdtwo wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 planni…

funny that you mention shitty agile we do that too
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