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The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

annehelen.substack.com

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Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#61

Post by jseban »

t-3 wrote: post #50
jseban wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Blaming communist sympathies is unfair when wage labor offers the exact same incentives to slack, and nothing could be more capitalistic.

Blaming the technology is what's unfair. You can go back in history and see the luddite movement or Marx's theory of alienation to describe exactly the same issues in the industrial revolution, do you think we should have used that to stop technological progress in 1896?

Of course you always want a job that's easy and physical and natural, but you also want all the niceties of modern society.

There are also many choices available if you want to live in a low tech world of the past, you actually have a lot of influence on how much technology you want in your life, work wise as well, it's just that people of course don't want to make any sacrifices on the good things that tech and modern society brings. Just eat the cake and have it too, how hard can it be.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#62

Post by randomsearch »

spoonjim wrote: post #40
esaym wrote: post #4

>Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break. There's an experience that lives rent free in my mind as well. As a teen, I worked at a bait shop that was on the Gulf coast. They sold mostly live shrimp but had other live stuff for bait as well. Salt water was pumped from the ne…

There are startups today that automate this process with machine learning. They record the vibrations from your equipment and notify you when something changes or is likely to fail given historic patterns for similar equipment.

Many, many, many startups - this seems to be a very popular idea!

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#63

Post by noduerme »

a_t48 wrote: post #57
noduerme wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this. It holds true for looking at code to some extent - what people call "code smell". But the main difference would be that failure modes in CS tend to be binary - a piece of code produces the expected result or it doesn't. And unless you do something to the environment, it doesn't wear down over time. Whereas your car's brakes don't go out all at once (hopefully), and yet it's guaranteed to happen eventuall…

> And unless you do something to the environment, it doesn't wear down over time. Disagree here (at least in spirit?) - code smell can also point to maintainability issues - if the codebase is continually changed some code is more likely to break than others.

I'm kinda coming from a do-it-once, do-it-right background. Usually code I write just runs untouched for 10 years. So I'd classify any breaking changes to the codebase a change in the environment. But either way, something breaks or it doesn't. It's not like some non-obvious wear and tear is going to happen over a year or two on its own, if no human messes with it.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#64

Post by j7ake »

systemvoltage wrote: post #45
j7ake wrote: post #44

Diminishing returns on productivity is obvious (eg working 80 hours a week outputs productivity somewhere between 1 to 2 times the productivity of 40 hours a week). However, rewards for work is also highly nonlinear, and usually rank based. For example, Usain Bolt is not twice as fast as the second fastest runner but Bolt is rewarded many multiples more than the second fastest runner. What is rational is to think of…

Olympics is an extremely atypical competition. Cooperative culture amongst humans is why we are where we are technologically. Without the spirit of collaboration, we have no MRIs and modern medicine, no transistors and semiconductors, no airplanes and bridges. I wish HN wasn’t so damn depressing. Reading some of cynical stuff here is sometimes harmful for my own mental health.

Maybe I’ll give a tech related example instead.

I sometimes browse local shops websites to buy products, but if the page loads too slowly or there are some hiccups, I tend to quickly search on Amazon to see if I can buy with a single click.

The total amount of time spent shopping at local website may be only a tiny bit more than if I browsed Amazon, but the improved experience at Amazon is enough to tilt my spending away from local websites.

Amazon probably spends multi millions to shave off fractions of seconds off their page loads, and the rewards pay off handsomely.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#65

Post by zhdc1 »

Research is starting to suggest that productivity gains are linear instead of exponential.

So, whenever there is a shift, such as industrialization, that facilitates productivity growth, the bulk of the gains compared against economic growth will come early on and comparatively diminish over time.

It’s not that productivity growth declines, but that we’re comparing something that grows linearly (productivity) with something that grows exponentially (GDP).

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#67

Post by noduerme »

dymk wrote: post #51
noduerme wrote: post #46

Funny. I just had this conversation about ennui, probably not an original one, with a colleague who told me she wrote a thesis on ennui in college: Why did George Jetson go to work every day? Was it just to have a reason get away from his family? Wasn't the goal of that society that no one had to work, and everyone could be creative and leisureful all the time? Did George want to buy a newer robot? Was he cheating on…

I like the Culture series take on post scarcity societies. Sure, the super AI ship could build and maintain and plan everything, but what’s the point in that if all the humans are bored to tears?

Orson Scott Card had that whole "Ships of Earth" cycle where the ancients built an AI in the sky that could distract people every time they thought of developing certain technologies. So people went around trading camels and building empires but anytime they thought about nuclear power, for instance, they just suddenly lost their train of thought. I guess one way to guarantee a certain degree of personal value in human lives is to create insurmountable obstacles, but then once you know they're insurmountable that sorta takes away the fun.

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#68

Post by hef19898 »

spoonjim wrote: post #40
esaym wrote: post #4

>Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break. There's an experience that lives rent free in my mind as well. As a teen, I worked at a bait shop that was on the Gulf coast. They sold mostly live shrimp but had other live stuff for bait as well. Salt water was pumped from the ne…

There are startups today that automate this process with machine learning. They record the vibrations from your equipment and notify you when something changes or is likely to fail given historic patterns for similar equipment.

Ah, selling ML to the predictive maintainance market!

Re: The diminishing returns of productivity culture (2021)

#70

Post by koonsolo »

j7ake wrote: post #44

Diminishing returns on productivity is obvious (eg working 80 hours a week outputs productivity somewhere between 1 to 2 times the productivity of 40 hours a week). However, rewards for work is also highly nonlinear, and usually rank based. For example, Usain Bolt is not twice as fast as the second fastest runner but Bolt is rewarded many multiples more than the second fastest runner. What is rational is to think of…

Most studies on the topic indicate that >50 hours has https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-wo...
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