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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

#271

Post by acidbaseextract »

bschne wrote: post #94
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…

Do you happen to know a good introduction to that? I‘d love to read up more on it!

Steve Brunton, a University of Washington professor has a sweet lecture series called the Control Bootcamp that dives deep into control fundamentals while still being approachable. Great production values too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi7l8mMjYVE&list=PLMrJAkhIeN...

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#272

Post by zzz95 »

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…

This also exists in control theory as the tradeoff between performance and robustness!

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#273

Post by jariel »

plutonorm wrote: post #252
war1025 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like it sort of ties in with NN Taleb's idea of "Anti-fragile" [1]. Perhaps also Chesterton's fence [2]. Maybe also the whole premature-optimization thing [3]. And of course the too-clever-by-half coyotes [4]. Really maybe it just comes down to "be wary of making changes that reduce resiliency." I was hoping to come up with something cohesive with this comment, but really I guess I just agree with what you…

epsilontheory.com I love every article I have read so far. It's really expanding me. Thanks for sharing.

Unfortunately, it's probably quite wrong.

He uses the analogy of 'too clever by half' to exemplify his idea that 'financial innovation is always wrong'.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Insurance products have changed the world just as much as any technical innovation.

Mortgaged backed securities are not a bad thing, far from it, they allow more efficient use of capital by having 'saving Germans and Japanese' invest their money where they otherwise would not be able to.

The problem in the 2008 crash was soft systematic corruption and un-ironically a lack of fragility (ie one bank goes down it takes the rest down like dominos) - not necessarily the securities themselves for which he didn't actually even provide any basis of his negative assertion.

Efficiency is usually how we gain productivity and it's borderline absurd to say there is inherently something wrong with it on the whole. Like anything 'it depends'.

If you can have a software algorithm outperform 100 analysts on weather predictions for your fleet of drivers ... that's probably efficient. But cutting down operating margins so that any bump in the economy will leave you flat is maybe 'over optimisation'.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#274

Post by lowracle »

I think this is confusing efficiency with overfitting. A lot of the problems described in the article arise due to overfitting models to the historical data. We overfited supply chain management because covid doesn't happen often, we overfited credit modeling because chain reaction of default doesn't happen often... We actually weren't efficient enough, we ignored tail events.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#275

Post by Tade0 »

eafkuor wrote: post #268

> We worship efficiency. Use less to get more. Same-day delivery. Multitask; text on one device while emailing on a second, and perhaps conversing on a third. Efficiency is seen as good. Inefficiency as wasteful. Is this a US thing? I've lived in three different European countries and nobody thinks this way. Efficiency and productivity are things I mostly just read about on HN.

It spills over to countries(like mine) enamoured of the American way of life, but in a twisted manner.

I've worked for companies that saw overburdening people with responsibilities as "efficient". On paper it was.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#276

Post by MadSudaca »

aaron-santos wrote: post #51
MadSudaca wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the problem is that efficiency and robustness are orthogonal?

If you think about the two-dimensional efficiency/robustness space you can pretty easily see how it's isomorphic to the return/volatility space by way of simple transformations. If yourself to be convinced that such a bridge exists you can also bring tools in the return/volatility space back into the efficiency/robustness space by applying the appropriate inverse transformations. Maybe the conclusions are common sens…

Interesting idea, thanks for sharing.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#277

Post by marcus_holmes »

roughly wrote: post #128
yt-sdb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hypo…

Even better, why not get the company to borrow against those 10 years of income, and pay you your profit now?

Even better, since you now don't actually even need to keep the company alive for 10 years since you've already got your profit, you can sell the company's assets now and increase your profit!

Except there's not a company in the world that this logic doesn't apply to (at some point). Asset-stripping has killed off a few old companies that were ready for it, sure. But it's also destroyed lives and communities that didn't deserve that.

There is more to life than money, and one of the things that this article is talking about is that we need to recognise that.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#278

Post by neycoda »

It appears the definition of efficiency here is just "fast" which is not just what efficiency is. I've worked with plenty of inefficient codebases, that were intrinsicly fragile, and difficult to work with... and cleaning them up made them more efficient and robust. Efficiency is about doing the most amount of things in the least amount of steps, not just minimizing features and making things fast at the expense of stability.
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