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Efficiency Is the Enemy

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Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#241

Post by ehershey »

Litost wrote: post #104

This quote “You’re efficient when you do something with minimum waste. And you’re effective when you’re doing the right something.” reminds me of a Systems Thinking talk Russell Ackoff gave a long time ago [1] where he talks about the difference between doing "the right thing wrong" and the "wrong thing right" and getting more efficient at doing the wrong thing obviously might not be optimal :). This is actually a co…

There’s this, a close match: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

From hbr in 1963. https://hbr.org/1963/05/managing-for-business-effectiveness

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#242

Post by 1ncorrect »

Efficiency becomes a problem when it’s the only thing bestowed with value. Optimising for efficiency by definition removes resiliency. Disproportionately prioritising any narrow goal will produce a brittle monoculture.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#243

Post by dreamcompiler »

Moshe Vardi gave a talk on this idea recently as it applies to the COVID-19 crisis. His word for slack is "resilience" but it's the same concept. He quotes William Galston: "Efficiency comes through optimal adaptation to an existing environment, while resilience requires the capacity to adapt to disruptive changes in the environment." You cannot maximize one without sacrificing the other.

https://learning.acm.org/techtalks/covid

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#244

Post by mjevans »

pdonis wrote: post #200
jfengel wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I absolutely agree, and I also hate the automated chat systems which are even _worse_ than calling on the phone. It's trying to get the 'call tree' scripts out to chat. When if I'm online, a program script should be able to cover 80% of the issues, and the other 20% need a human touch for collecting the correct data or providing features missing; often intentionally from the website.

The local power company does this very well for reporting outages, and takes data that's hard to fit through a human that can recognize what the data means and get it to the correct departments and people.

Cable is the WORST in that respect. With zero transparency on what the root cause or investigation status. Also, insufficient and critically lacking detail (Is it JUST me, or is it my block, or is it the whole neighborhood or city, etc).

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#245

Post by Lionga »

Qwertious wrote: post #224
pdonis wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> industry socializes the cost of its pollution and takes a private profit Um, isn't this what is happening now, with centralized regulation?

No, proper regulation either forces companies to curb their emissions or taxes it. In other words, to internalize it.

No true scottsman

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#246

Post by planet-and-halo »

raman162 wrote: post #13

I've only been working professionally for 5 years and this is something I am only recently beginning to appreciate. Optimizing for efficiency makes you get a lot of work done but it reduces your ability to think creatively which can potentially impact the quality of ones work.

This might even be rooted in human psychology. "The Master and His Emissary" and other books about neuroscience argue that we have brain functions specialized for focus and other brain functions specialized for context. Activating focus reduces contextual thinking.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#247

Post by reader_x »

I’ve observed that to make everything “data driven” and efficient, one must quantify it. Keeping track of ‘stuff’ (copies I made, time I spent, conference rooms I reserved, etc.) requires procedures that can look like bureaucracy.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#248

Post by bhupy »

kbenson wrote: post #212
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Federal regulations prevent a race to the bottom for things like pollution, labor rights, etc. Not really. Local people suffer the most from local pollution and low local wages etc., so they have the most incentive to strike a reasonable balance. Federalizing e.g. minimum wage is just an excuse for high cost of living areas to screw over low cost of living areas by depriving them of their natural cost advantage, pr…

> Not really. Local people suffer the most from local pollution and low local wages etc., so they have the most incentive to strike a reasonable balance. I don't know. On the one hand, you can look at the Kansas Experiment[1] as vindication of the federal and state system, where the states experiment. On the other hand, you could see that as stupid people (or at least some a bit divorced from reality) willing to thro…

At least the damage from those stupid people is well contained, as opposed to the alternative where stupid people come into power at the Federal level every 4-8 years and muck it up for everybody.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#249

Post by kbenson »

bhupy wrote: post #248
kbenson wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not really. Local people suffer the most from local pollution and low local wages etc., so they have the most incentive to strike a reasonable balance. I don't know. On the one hand, you can look at the Kansas Experiment[1] as vindication of the federal and state system, where the states experiment. On the other hand, you could see that as stupid people (or at least some a bit divorced from reality) willing to thro…

At least the damage from those stupid people is well contained, as opposed to the alternative where stupid people come into power at the Federal level every 4-8 years and muck it up for everybody.

I guess that's true. I imagine the less polarized the environment is the more beneficial the Federal approach is, because you get sane checks and balances and consensus on things before accepted. The more polarized it is, the better the compartmentalization of states is at keeping the crazies at each end of the spectrum from causing too much damage to everyone at once.

Re: Efficiency Is the Enemy

#250

Post by Nasrudith »

Laarlf wrote: post #84
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…

Overregulation and bureaucracy are the downfall of the west. The sooner we realise that, the sooner we can fix it.

Bueracracies and overregulation are essentially alternatives to fiefdoms by constraining abusable levels of discretion. Fiefdoms lead to outright open corruption which make the readilly lobbied look like choir boys in comparison. The stereotypical "third world levels of corruption" situations where secured loyalty to the regime matters more than competence.

It is yet another tiresome situation of "sucks but we don't really have anything better". We can and should attempt to streamline them but that is nontrivial, especially politically.

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