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Efficiency Is the Enemy

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Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#191

Post by rocqua »

hinkley wrote: post #165

One of the uncomfortable conversations we're going to have to have soon is about how 'Flow State' is efficient but ineffective. One of the characteristics of Flow State is a diminished sense of considering the consequences of an action. Exactly the "so busy figuring out if they could do it that they didn't stop to think if they should do it". In particular I've noticed that people get extremely defensive about code t…

Very interesting idea, and honestly quite scary. I love my flow state, but I do recognize the defensiveness. Not sure I have run into making bad decisions "in the flow" yet, but I could see how it happens.

If true, the bad decisions coupled with defensiveness could be a potentially really toxic combination.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#192

Post by lbacaj »

Nearly every system in nature has some slack baked into it.

Take the human brain, pound for pound it packs more neurons in it than any other animals brain on the planet. 20% of the glucose we burn goes to power the brain, in children it’s closer to 50-60%. Yet even though nature powers this incredibly powerful computer, 24/7, we use it’s power, maybe once in a while if we’re lucky. We can’t remember more than 6-7 things at a time, we can never fire every single part at once. You might assume this is a defect, it’s not, it’s a feature.

The brain has so much capacity, they have found people that can literally remember every single thing that happens to them their whole lives. Guess what happened to them? They had no slack for reasoning in abstraction, the things that make us human, they could detail every aspect of a story but couldn’t summarize it, and the list goes on and on. What would happen if we ran our chips at 100% capacity 24/7?

We assume we need to do more, we need more information, we need to squeeze every ounce out of our life and work but in reality this has the opposite of the intended effects.

This article is great because it puts it all into perspective. I recently wrote about the same topic but it’s not as good as this article but still if you are interested:

https://louiebacaj.com/what-happens-if-we-squeeze-too-much/

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#193

Post by joakleaf »

gherkinnn wrote: post #183
allenu wrote: post #79

Something that I've noticed recently is that in my work life, I'm finding there's more bureaucracy in what I do, mostly in the name of "efficiency". When you encounter a problem to solve, there's often a process already defined that is most efficient (or at least thought to be most efficient), when accomplishing tasks, there's a pre-defined way of laying out the tasks (i.e. tickets), updating them, reviewing them, an…

I recently heard a clever man argue (can’t remember who), that process does make things more efficient. Starting at chaos, the more things are defined, the more you get done. Until it doesn’t, at which point the relation inverts and you eventually end up stagnant. The problem is that because adding ever more processes worked so far, and now that you’ve hired process people, you continue adding more and more and ever…

I heard Jim Keller (the chip-designer) say this (or something similar) recently in a podcast with Lex Fridman.

It is at the 24.40 mark in "Jim Keller: The Future of Computing, AI, Life, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast"

https://youtu.be/G4hL5Om4IJ4?t=1480

"So there is a graph. Y-axis is productivity. X-axis at 0 is chaos and infinity is complete order. As you improve order, you increase productivity. And at some point productivity peaks, and it goes down again. Too much order -- Nothing can happen... Once you start moving towards order, the force vector that drives you towards order is unstoppable."

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#194

Post by barrkel »

Laarlf wrote: post #132
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US are quite relaxed in comparison. This is basically a myth at this point, bolstered by how much more we complain about it. The US made the colossal mistake of trying to do regulation at the federal level, basically equivalent to doing it at the EU level, which the EU is now attempting to do more of and discovering what a trash fire it is. And one of the big reasons for that is that the more centrally the regu…

YES YES YES. Policies and laws should be more local to adhere to the local situations in local areas. A politician in Berlin cannot understand the situation in a random town with 500 inhabitants and therefore should rarely have something to say about how life functions there.

Many regulations cannot be local because of basic game theory. Beggar-thy-neighbour policies, for example; if one region allows a little more pollution and attracts industry because of that, then other regions are forced to do the same or lose out. As a result industry socializes the cost of its pollution and takes a private profit. Similar effects occur for safety standards, consumer standards, employment standards, tax, and so on.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#195

Post by Xunjin »

joakleaf wrote: post #193
gherkinnn wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently heard a clever man argue (can’t remember who), that process does make things more efficient. Starting at chaos, the more things are defined, the more you get done. Until it doesn’t, at which point the relation inverts and you eventually end up stagnant. The problem is that because adding ever more processes worked so far, and now that you’ve hired process people, you continue adding more and more and ever…

I heard Jim Keller (the chip-designer) say this (or something similar) recently in a podcast with Lex Fridman. It is at the 24.40 mark in "Jim Keller: The Future of Computing, AI, Life, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast" https://youtu.be/G4hL5Om4IJ4?t=1480 "So there is a graph. Y-axis is productivity. X-axis at 0 is chaos and infinity is complete order. As you improve order, you increase productivity. And at so…

Holy Molly, loved this point of view, really makes sense.

Ty for the reference :)

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#196

Post by pdonis »

barrkel wrote: post #194
Laarlf wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES YES YES. Policies and laws should be more local to adhere to the local situations in local areas. A politician in Berlin cannot understand the situation in a random town with 500 inhabitants and therefore should rarely have something to say about how life functions there.

Many regulations cannot be local because of basic game theory. Beggar-thy-neighbour policies, for example; if one region allows a little more pollution and attracts industry because of that, then other regions are forced to do the same or lose out. As a result industry socializes the cost of its pollution and takes a private profit. Similar effects occur for safety standards, consumer standards, employment standards,…

> industry socializes the cost of its pollution and takes a private profit

Um, isn't this what is happening now, with centralized regulation?

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#197

Post by tsm_sf »

knuthsat wrote: post #78
mauvehaus wrote: post #41

And this is why you schedule flights in the morning: there's so damn little slack in the system that if things go wrong at 10:00 AM at O'Hare, flights for the whole rest of the day are screwed up owing to the cascading delays. At least in the morning the airlines have had the overnight to unsnarl the previous day's mess because of the reduced revenue traffic overnight and the corresponding slack that accrues as a hap…

Yep, I started my programming career optimizing stuff (traveling salesmen, roster, schedules) and the optimizing criteria in academia is very far from reality. The effects of not having slack are disastrous. Although, the effects start showing after the optimization makes people believe they can squeeze even more work. The initial optimized schedules create more slack than handcrafted ones.

The problem imho is that most places want to shed the freed labor rather than redistribute the load. Just slowing hiring a little adds burden.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#198

Post by pfraze »

hinkley wrote: post #165

One of the uncomfortable conversations we're going to have to have soon is about how 'Flow State' is efficient but ineffective. One of the characteristics of Flow State is a diminished sense of considering the consequences of an action. Exactly the "so busy figuring out if they could do it that they didn't stop to think if they should do it". In particular I've noticed that people get extremely defensive about code t…

I think you’re completely right and one way to counteract it is to bake in “non work” or “idle work” time regularly. This doesn’t have to be a vacation, but it does mean staying out of flow and reflecting on the project as a whole. This can also be a good time to fix little boring things like individual UI elements.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#199

Post by periheli0n »

pantalaimon wrote: post #182
periheli0n wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”, where he described the ancient world being so stuck in a set of fixed algorithms for how to do things that made any progress impossible. Only the Babylonian Confusion fixed this deadlock by destroying the ability to communicate (and exchange algorithms). Highly recommended read.

Isaac Asimov describes a similar situation about the downfall of the Galactic Empire in „Foundations“ It's basically the fall of the Roman Empire, but set in the future and with a outpost at the edge of the galaxy to preserve some of the knowledge across the dark ages.

Psychohistory FTW ;)

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#200

Post by pdonis »

jfengel wrote: post #96
TeMPOraL wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the same happened to everyone else too, just with smaller dollar amounts. During my high school and early university years, I was in love with the concept of being able to run errands over the Internet. Why go to the bank when I can order a transfer on-line? Why make orders over the phone when I can choose what I want on a webpage with few clicks? Why ask anyone to do anything, when I could just click or type my…

To me, the web page nearly is always faster than asking a human. Even setting aside the phone trees designed to slow me down, I'm more comfortable with the bloated, user-hostile page than trying to understand a human voice through a 4000 Hz telephone channel. I like not having to try to explain to them what I want. With the web I can do it whenever I want, at my own pace. It feels like a voice call is an admission of…

> There is never anything I want from the phone tree except a human operator. If you could automate my request then you should have done it over the far clearer interface of the web page.

This. It's particularly infuriating that now many phone trees don't even have a built-in "I want to talk to a human, now" option. Hitting "0" used to be a fairly common way to do that, but doesn't appear to be any more. Often I have to wade through three or four levels of phone menus just to get to something that will take me to a human.

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