Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

sohl-dickstein.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 377 posts

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#271

Post by whatshisface »

unethical_ban wrote: post #260
whatshisface wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could ask the same questions about grocery shopping or buying a PC.

Just to be clear: You're asserting that the average citizen * has the same capacity to research an unknown number of medical procedures and the doctors performing them as they do researching onion prices or CPU specs * faces a similar scale of consequences when failing to properly analyze medical procedures as they do when they fail to properly price-compare onions or PC services * has the same freedom of choice to "…

Dietary and metabolic problems are an epidemic that outweights malpractice in terms of quality and quantity of life by more than two orders of magnitude - so yes, I am saying people face "shopping problems" of life or death magnitude every day.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#272

Post by naasking »

tablatom wrote: post #98
refibrillator wrote: post #55

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…

> Contrary to common perception evolution does not optimise for high performance but high robustness.

It does both, eg. if the environment is stable then fitness is correlated with efficiency, if the environment is unstable then it's robustness.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#273

Post by collingreen »

kortilla wrote: post #237
CuriouslyC wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That solution is never going to work when black swan events occur on the order of every 5-10 years and executive vision is focused on the next quarter with little concern paid to anything outside the next 2-3 years. Nobody is going to want to give up short term performance to mitigate risks that probably won't manifest until after they've left for a better job.

That solution is how it already works for the vast majority of companies in the US. “Too big to fail” is a meme that only applied to a tiny handful of companies during the financial crisis. Take a look at SVB for how fast a stalwart huge bank can implode with zero fucks given by the government.

By "zero fucks given by the government" do you mean the government got involved, effectively bought the bank, and took responsibility for 100% of deposits (most of which were the balances of startups, ie venture capital investments)?

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#274

Post by kzz102 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #251
kzz102 wrote: post #235

I think of efficiency as one example where naive economic thinking has poisoned common sense. Economists view inefficiency as a problem. Because a healthy economy is efficient, therefore inefficiency is unhealthy. Any inefficient market is a "market failure". Efficiency is also the primary way a manager can add value. But the problem is, efficiency assumes existence of metrics, and indeed is counter productive if you…

> Efficiency is also the primary way a manager can add value. That's not right. The primary task of management is alignment.

> That's not right. The primary task of management is alignment.

Fair enough.. at least they think they can add value by improving efficiency.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#275

Post by collingreen »

whatshisface wrote: post #232
mikeyouse wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I can't imagine anyone would object to minimum quality standards for anything receiving federal subsidies.

edit: didn't realize I was feeding a troll. Feel free to ignore.

I expect the objections are in how quality is measured and enforced.

It reminds me of education system in the US - most people (project 2025 aside) think it's good to have a public education system; having a pipeline of skilled workers makes it easier to build an economy filled with a diverse set of businesses.

However, the attacks start to fly when there is disagreement about who should be allowed to teach, how they should be measured, and how they should be paid.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#276

Post by jppope »

kortilla wrote: post #237
CuriouslyC wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That solution is never going to work when black swan events occur on the order of every 5-10 years and executive vision is focused on the next quarter with little concern paid to anything outside the next 2-3 years. Nobody is going to want to give up short term performance to mitigate risks that probably won't manifest until after they've left for a better job.

That solution is how it already works for the vast majority of companies in the US. “Too big to fail” is a meme that only applied to a tiny handful of companies during the financial crisis. Take a look at SVB for how fast a stalwart huge bank can implode with zero fucks given by the government.

Pretty sure Boeing should have failed 3 times by my count.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#277

Post by whatshisface »

RandomLensman wrote: post #233
whatshisface wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could ask the same questions about grocery shopping or buying a PC.

A mis-assessment there might be far less consequential and those also do not require a medical diagnosis before making a decision where to go.

I've never needed a medical diagnosis to decide between calling my GP and going to an urgent care. It's just a bit surreal to hear everyone else say my ordinary survival skills are impossible and more than could be asked of anybody!

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#278

Post by yuliyp »

vlovich123 wrote: post #170
tablatom wrote: post #98

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…

The problem with this is principal-agent problems. The owners of the business don't want it to fail. The people working there want to make money. They generally live their life and enjoy what money they make before the chickens come home to roost. It can be hard for the owners to realize the business is fragile before that fragility becomes apparent. In the mean time the people running the business made a bunch of money, potentially jumped to other jobs or retired or died.

And the owners could have sold when the business was propped up by unknown fragility.

Human lives are too short for these kinds of feedback loops to be all that effective.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#279

Post by marcosdumay »

kzz102 wrote: post #274
marcosdumay wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Efficiency is also the primary way a manager can add value. That's not right. The primary task of management is alignment.

> That's not right. The primary task of management is alignment. Fair enough.. at least they think they can add value by improving efficiency.

It's a way they can add value. It's far from their primary way, and it's a task that is not primary done by management.

But yes, there are plenty of managers that focus on it.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#280

Post by 0x1ceb00da »

RadiozRadioz wrote: post #101

This is more a meta comment about the blog itself (as is customary for HN): I like the blog, there has been a lot of work put into it, so it makes me sad that it's hosted on GitHub pages using a subdomain of GitHub.io. When the day comes that GitHub inevitably kills/ruins Pages, because it _will_ happen, there is no question, the links to this blog will be stuck forever pointing to this dead subdomain that the author…

If he hosts his site on his own server, it will go down a few months after his death.
Post reply on HN