Very interesting article. I don't get though for hotspot partitions they didn't use a cache like Redis.
Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
161–170 of 377 posts
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amusingly this is something that I see as being a huge divide in rural and urban politics. Yes, it’s inefficient. Yes, some people want that!
Right. Living is not an optimization problem.
Sorry to put it so bluntly, but you're basically saying:
"I don't care it the climate's fucked, I want to live away from civilization and drive 100 miles a day everywhere"
Of course we shouldn't hyper-optimize everything, but sooner people realize our environment depends on not everyone getting exactly what they want whenever they want the better. Living in a (walkable) city is just one such concession towards the environment we ought to make, even if we don't "want" to.
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#163I recognize the author Jascha as an incredibly brilliant ML researcher, formerly at Google Brain and now at Anthropic. Among his notable accomplishments, he and coauthors mathematically characterized the propagation of signals through deep neural networks via techniques from physics and statistics (mean field and free probability theory). Leading to arguably some of the most profound yet under-appreciated theoretical…
Interesting timing for me! Just a couple of days ago I discovered the work of biologist Olivier Hamant who has been raising exactly this issue. His main thesis is that very high performance (which he defines as efficacy towards a known goal plus efficiency) and very high robustness (the ability to withstand large fluctuations in the system) are physically incompatible. Examples abound in nature. Contrary to common pe…
Giving priority to performance may have made sense in a world of abundant resources, but we are now facing a very different period where instability is the norm.
Why do you think this?
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#164Makes me think of: some of Taleb's ideas about just-in-time manufacturing (no slack eg covid supply shocks)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLLkWMDbC9ZNKbjDG/slack
Also, can't recall it but a long time ago I read a piece about how scheduling a system to 60% of its max capacity is generally about right, to allow for expected but unexpected variations (also makes me think of the concept of stochastic process control and how we can figure out the level of expected unexpected variations, which could give us an even better sense of what %-of-capacity to run a system at)
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is true, these "laws" are approximations and imperfect reductions. Which one is useful or descriptive will depend on the specific example. Optimizing ML VS Optimizing a social media algorithm VS using standardized testing to optimize education systems. There is no perfect abstraction that applies to these different scenarios precisely. We don't need that precision. We just need the subsequent intuition about whe…
I missed the citation on his education point. Has someone proved that “teaching to the test” leads to lower educational outcomes than not having tests?
I saw some professors share the least about their tests to make sure we truly understand the material, sounds to me like a real-life usage of a train/test split. It’s not far fetched to think they employed this technique because teaching to the test didn’t work well by itself.
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#166Lol. Nothing to do with efficiency, just humans recognizing incentives and acting in self interest.
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. Living is not an optimization problem.
Sorry to put it so bluntly, but you're basically saying: "I don't care it the climate's fucked, I want to live away from civilization and drive 100 miles a day everywhere" Of course we shouldn't hyper-optimize everything, but sooner people realize our environment depends on not everyone getting exactly what they want whenever they want the better. Living in a (walkable) city is just one such concession towards the en…
Or we could just compete with each other for resources as we have since forever. I’d rather do that than have no choice but to live in Kowloon.
Just whack an externality tax on fossil fuels and things like cutting down wilderness, job done.
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. Living is not an optimization problem.
Sorry to put it so bluntly, but you're basically saying: "I don't care it the climate's fucked, I want to live away from civilization and drive 100 miles a day everywhere" Of course we shouldn't hyper-optimize everything, but sooner people realize our environment depends on not everyone getting exactly what they want whenever they want the better. Living in a (walkable) city is just one such concession towards the en…
If you think cities don't fuck the climate just as much as suburbs do I have a well you can carry water 40 flights of stairs from.
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#169> Distribution of labor and resources based upon the needs of society
Not a goal for me, and not for evolution. Survival, health, prosperity, thriving and complexity rate higher. Not everyone makes it.
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#170I recognize the author Jascha as an incredibly brilliant ML researcher, formerly at Google Brain and now at Anthropic. Among his notable accomplishments, he and coauthors mathematically characterized the propagation of signals through deep neural networks via techniques from physics and statistics (mean field and free probability theory). Leading to arguably some of the most profound yet under-appreciated theoretical…
Interesting timing for me! Just a couple of days ago I discovered the work of biologist Olivier Hamant who has been raising exactly this issue. His main thesis is that very high performance (which he defines as efficacy towards a known goal plus efficiency) and very high robustness (the ability to withstand large fluctuations in the system) are physically incompatible. Examples abound in nature. Contrary to common pe…
I don’t think it’s smart to proactively back track without being very careful. One thing that’s needed is for corporate death to be allowed to occur. Right now the downsides of risky behavior is bailed out for large enough risk. Then the companies that fail aren’t robust and the ones that don’t are but bailouts let non robust companies keep going. Otherwise “robustness” is a property without a measure which means that you’ll get robustness theater where actions are being taken in the name of being robust but it’s not actually making a difference at best and could be making things worse.
As for society itself being robust, it’s a much harder property. Being robust is nice but no one actually wants to live in a metered society where there’s insufficient resources - they’d generally rather kill for resources greedily and let others fail without helping them. That’s why socialized healthcare struggles - while it guarantees a minimum of care for everybody, the care provided has longer wait times and most people are not willing to wait their turn.