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Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

sohl-dickstein.github.io

201–210 of 377 posts

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#201

I 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…

  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.
…what about humans? We’re far more efficacious than any other animal, and far more capable of behavioral adaptation.

Plus, isn’t “physically impossible” a computer science argument, not a biological one? Unless we’re using the OG “physis”==“nature”, I guess

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#202

Upon reading the title at first glance, I thought this was going to be how "effecient" computers nowadays. Such as MacBooks and such, who started this efficient computers thing in the recent times. And they are, but as a result computers are all worse off for it. I mean soldered RAMs and everything is a system on a chip.

That wouldn’t be worthy of the front page of HN. “I don’t like the current tradeoffs that laptop manufacturers make” has been talked through to absolute death. It’s the opposite of interesting.

If anything, there should be more space for this topic in our collective consciousness.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#203
This makes me think of going to chain restaurants. Everything has been focus-grouped and optimized and feels exactly like an overfit proxy for an enjoyable meal. I feel like I'm in a bald-faced machine that is optimized to generate profit from my visit. The fact that it's a restaurant feels almost incidental.

"HI! My name is Tracy! I'm going to be your server this evening!" as she flawlessly writes her name upside down in crayon on the paper tablecloth. Woah. I think this place needs to re-calibrate their flair.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a free market economy we shouldn't demand robustness, we should create a system that promotes and rewards robustness. A strict commitment against bail-outs would certainly be part of that. Companies (and private people) can decide to lower their risk exposure (at the cost of efficiency/profit) or take out insurance against risks. And if they go the insurance route they have to assess how likely their insurance is…

I don't see why people can't comparisons shop for hospitals before they get in a car crash. Unless I am literally unconscious I would go to the hospital in my area that I trust the most, and I have plans for which urgent care, clinics and hospitals I would take someone else to if they needed a driver. In fact I think a pretty small fraction of patients arrive at the ER unconscious.

How would develop the "trust" and why would it be correct? How would you diagnose yourself or others before selecting a hospital if those have different trust for different things? How do you balance urgency vs different trust levels if the hospitals are not all the same distance?

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why people can't comparisons shop for hospitals before they get in a car crash. Unless I am literally unconscious I would go to the hospital in my area that I trust the most, and I have plans for which urgent care, clinics and hospitals I would take someone else to if they needed a driver. In fact I think a pretty small fraction of patients arrive at the ER unconscious.

How would develop the "trust" and why would it be correct? How would you diagnose yourself or others before selecting a hospital if those have different trust for different things? How do you balance urgency vs different trust levels if the hospitals are not all the same distance?

It also ignores that huge swaths of the country have no choice at all and the only hospital within a hundred miles is only viable due to huge Federal subsidies. We’ve been helping a close family member navigate that scenario and sure, he could vote with his dollars but it would involve a three hour drive to a neighboring state for an 80-yr old. I’d rather just enforce minimum quality standards on everyone like most other civilized countries rather then relying on “the free market” which so far in my experience has just led to PE goliaths swallowing entire health systems to focus on bill collection and union busting.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#207

This is why I don’t like focusing on GDP. I think a quarterly poll on life satisfaction and optimism would be a better measure. If you’re curious about GDP. I my car breaks and I get it fixed, that adds to GDP. If a parent stays home to raise kids, that lowers GDP. If I clean my own house that lowers GDP. Etc. Unemployment is another crude metric. Are these jobs people want or do they feel forced to work bad jobs.

Agreed, and that goes for capitalism at large.

Here's a rough outline for one proposed alternative to capitalism and the failed central planning alternatives of the past:

https://jacobin.com/2019/03/sam-gindin-socialist-planning-mo...

Some relevant snippets:

> Though planning and worker control are the cornerstones of socialism, overly ambitious planning (the Soviet case) and overly autonomous workplaces (the Yugoslav case) have both failed as models of socialism. Nor do moderate reforms to those models, whether imagined or applied, inspire. With all-encompassing planning neither effective nor desirable, and decentralization to workplace collectives resulting in structures too economically fragmented to identify the social interest and too politically fragmented to influence the plan, the challenge is: what transformations in the state, the plan, workplaces, and the relations among them might solve this quandary?

> The operating units of both capitalism and socialism are workplaces. Under capitalism, these are part of competing units of capital, the primary structures that give capitalism its name. With socialism’s exclusion of such private units of self-expansion, the workplace collectives are instead embedded in pragmatically constituted “sectors,” defined loosely in terms of common technologies, outputs, services, or simply past history. These sectors are, in effect, the most important units of economic planning and have generally been housed within state ministries or departments such as Mining, Machinery, Health Care, Education, or Transportation Services. These powerful ministries consolidate the centralized power of the state and its central planning board. Whether or not this institutional setup tries to favor workers’ needs, it doesn’t bring the worker control championed by socialists. Adding liberal political freedoms (transparency, free press, freedom of association, habeas corpus, contested elections) would certainly be positive; it might even be argued that liberal institutions should flourish best on the egalitarian soil of socialism. But as in capitalism, such liberal freedoms are too thin to check centralized economic power. As for workplace collectives, they are too fragmented to fill the void. Moreover, as noted earlier, directives from above or competitive market pressures limit substantive worker control even withinthe collectives.

> A radical innovation this invites is the devolution of the ministries’ planning authority and capacities out of the state and into civil society. The former ministries would then be reorganized as “sectoral councils” — structures constitutionally sanctioned but standing outside the state and governed by worker representatives elected from each workplace in the respective sector. The central planning board would still allocate funds to each sector according to national priorities, but the consolidation of workplace power at sectoral levels would have two dramatic consequences. First, unlike liberal reforms or pressures from fragmented workplaces, such a shift in the balance of power between the state and workers (the plan and worker collectives) carries the material potential for workers to modify if not curb the power that the social oligarchy has by virtue of its material influence over the planning apparatus, from information gathering through to implementation as well as the privileges they gain for themselves. Second, the sectoral councils would have the capacity, and authority from the workplaces in their jurisdiction, to deal with the “market problem” in ways more consistent with socialism.

> Key here is a particular balance between incentives, which increase inequality, and an egalitarian bias in investment. As noted earlier, the surpluses earned by each workplace collective can be used to increase their communal or individual consumption, but those surpluses cannot be used for reinvestment. Nationwide priorities are established at the level of the central plan through democratic processes and pressures (more on this later) and these are translated into investment allocations by sector. The sector councils then distribute funds for investment among the workplace collectives they oversee. But unlike market-based decisions, the dominant criteria are not to favor those workplaces that have been most productive, serving to reproduce permanent and growing disparities among workplaces. Rather, the investment strategy is based on bringing the productivity of goods or services of the weaker collectives closer to the best performers (as well as other social criteria like absorbing new entrants into the workforce and supporting development in certain communities or regions).

...

> No one paid greater economic homage to capitalism than the authors of The Communist Manifesto, marveling that capitalism “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.” Yet far from seeing this as representing the pinnacle of history, Marx and Engels identified this as speaking to a new and broader possibility: capitalism was “the first to show what man’s activity can bring about.” The task was to build on this potential by explicitly socializing and reorganizing the productive forces.

> In contrast, for Hayek and his earlier mentor von Mises, capitalism was the teleological climax of society, the historical end point of humanity’s tendency to barter. Hayek considered it a truism that that without private property and no labor and capital markets, there would be no way of accessing the latent knowledge of the population, and without pervasive access to such information, any economy would sputter, drift, and waste talent and resources. Von Mises, after his argument that socialism was essentially impossible was decisively swept aside, turned his focus on capitalism’s genius for entrepreneurship and the dynamic efficiency and constant innovation that it brought.

> Despite Hayek’s claims, it is in fact capitalism that systematically blocks the sharing of information. A corollary of private property and profit maximization is that information is a competitive asset that must be hidden from others. For socialism, on the other hand, the active sharing of information is essential to its functioning, something institutionalized in the responsibilities of the sectoral councils. Further, the myopic individualism of Hayek’s position ignores, as Hilary Wainwright has so powerfully argued, the wisdom that comes from informal collective dialogue, often occurring outside of markets in discussions and debates among groups and movements addressing their work and communities.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#208

I 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…

More importantly, he invented diffusion models:

http://proceedings.mlr.press/v37/sohl-dickstein15.pdf

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Socialized healthcare seems to kind of work in many developed economies - where does it struggle and by what metrics regarding the health outcomes?

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#210
post #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.

Thank you for acknowledging that your goal is to kill people. Now that that has been acknowledged, we can all ignore whatever else you have to say.
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