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Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

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Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#291

Post by whatshisface »

RandomLensman wrote: post #287
whatshisface wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

You said you have a hospital selected you trust (by whatever your metric is). Hospitals tend not be all equal for all things, so trust should probably be differential - how do you assess yourself as a patient then to decide on where to go? And if you do not differentiate the trust any further than to a single hospital regardless of what the issue is: why is that sufficient? I think it is fine to have some preferences…

Sinply replace hospital with any other service, take your own answers and then translate it back. In economic terms I researched medical facilities until the expected marginal benefit of the information fell below the marginal cost. There are a lot of reasons to reform the US healthcare system but you can't argue that consumer choice is too complex to be realized.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#292

Post by [deleted] »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #286

I noticed an example of this rule at my local hardware superstore. Around a decade ago, the store installed anti-theft cages. At first they only kept high-dollar items in the cages. It was a bit of an inconvenience, but not so bad. If a customer is dropping $200+ on some fancy power tool, he or she likely doesn't mind waiting five minutes. But a few years later, there was a change - almost certainly a 'data-driven' c…

[deleted]

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#293

Post by tshaddox »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #286

I noticed an example of this rule at my local hardware superstore. Around a decade ago, the store installed anti-theft cages. At first they only kept high-dollar items in the cages. It was a bit of an inconvenience, but not so bad. If a customer is dropping $200+ on some fancy power tool, he or she likely doesn't mind waiting five minutes. But a few years later, there was a change - almost certainly a 'data-driven' c…

It’s much more convenient to buy from Amazon than to try to find someone to unlock a glass case at the pharmacy. Especially since any pharmacy with glass cases for basic items will also be understaffed.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#294

Post by crazygringo »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #286

I noticed an example of this rule at my local hardware superstore. Around a decade ago, the store installed anti-theft cages. At first they only kept high-dollar items in the cages. It was a bit of an inconvenience, but not so bad. If a customer is dropping $200+ on some fancy power tool, he or she likely doesn't mind waiting five minutes. But a few years later, there was a change - almost certainly a 'data-driven' c…

> they lock up the items that cumulatively lose the hardware store the most money, due to theft.

> I doubt the optimization helped their bottom-line

These seem to be in direct contradiction, unless you really think people have stopped going there because of it, to such an extent it outweighs the thefts. Especially when, if they stop going there, the competing local hardware superstore is probably doing the exact same thing. And remember, retail margins aren't usually huge -- for every item stolen, how many more do they need to sell to recoup the loss? Even if some people go to Amazon instead, it can still be worth it to avoid the theft.

It's much more likely that it has indeed had the biggest impact on reducing theft, and that your "discernable logic" simply doesn't have experience with these things -- that theft often isn't about item value, but rather about reliable resellability. A single expensive niche power tool takes a long time to resell; laundry detergent and razor blades can be unloaded in quantity the same day. People go through detergent and razors a lot faster than light bulbs.

I understand you dislike the inconvenience. But I really think you should be blaming the thieves or the factors behind theft, not the stores.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#295

Post by RandomLensman »

whatshisface wrote: post #291
RandomLensman wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said you have a hospital selected you trust (by whatever your metric is). Hospitals tend not be all equal for all things, so trust should probably be differential - how do you assess yourself as a patient then to decide on where to go? And if you do not differentiate the trust any further than to a single hospital regardless of what the issue is: why is that sufficient? I think it is fine to have some preferences…

Sinply replace hospital with any other service, take your own answers and then translate it back. In economic terms I researched medical facilities until the expected marginal benefit of the information fell below the marginal cost. There are a lot of reasons to reform the US healthcare system but you can't argue that consumer choice is too complex to be realized.

I don't know the US system well enough to say much about it.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#296

Post by fwungy »

Efficiency means minimizing the use of the costliest components. It's installing fault points into a system on purpose.

Robust systems minimize fault points. Efficient systems come at the cost of robustness, and vice versa given a fixed definition of what is being conserved, i.e. costs or energy.

For example, a four cylinder engine that gets 15mpg will have a longer life than one that gets 30mpg, given the same cost.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#297

Post by naasking »

jampekka wrote: post #127
ahartmetz wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that something similar to Adam Smith happened to the Austrians: their ideas have been cherry-picked. According to German Wikipedia, their main things were / are a focus on individual preferences, marginal utility, and a rejection of mathematical modeling(!) There was also something about lower state expenditures (...taxes...) giving better results for the people - that's the one that seems to be very p…

Austrian economics also rejects empirical assesment of its claims. Instead, universal thruths are derived "logically" (formal logic banned though) from "obviously true" axioms using a method called praxeology. It seems a lot like Scientology: the more you learn about it, the more bizarre it gets. And of course it's used to extract a lot of money for few benefactors.

Unlike scientology, Austrian economics made some important contributions to mainstream economic understanding.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#298

Post by fragmede »

bmicraft wrote: post #162
fragmede wrote: post #68

Earlier 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…

That’s not remotely what I’m saying. I live in a city and don’t drive most days because I can walk and take public transit and there’s never any parking. What I’m saying is that in the bigger picture, approaching life as a set of problems to be optimized is the wrong way to approach life.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#299

Post by naasking »

netcan wrote: post #176

Another example of this approximate law is in exercise physiology. To a normal person, there are a lot of good proxy indicators of fitness. You could train sprinting. You could hop up and down. Squat. Clean and jerk.. etc. Running faster,hopping higher, squatting heavier... all indicators of increasing fitness... and success of your fitness training. Two points: 1 - The more general your training methodology, the mor…

I think that's more an indication that "general fitness" is not a rigorous metric. It's fine as a vague notion of "physical ability" up to a point, and past that it loses meaning because improvements in ability are task-specific and no longer translate to other tasks.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#300

Post by tacitusarc »

hyperadvanced wrote: post #82
tacitusarc wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a fundamental tension between efficiency and resilience, you are completely correct. And yea, it’s a systems problem, not limited to tech. There is an odd corollary, which is that capitalistic systems which reward efficiency gains and put downward pressure to incentivize efficiency, deal with the resilience problem by creating entirely new subsystems rather than having more robust subsystems, which is fundam…

This is exactly the subthread of this conversation I’m interested in. Is what you’re saying that capitalism breaks down resilience problems into efficiency problems? I think that’s an extremely motivating line of thinking, but I’ll have to do some head scratching to figure out exactly what to make of it. On one hand, I think capitalism is really good at resilience problems (efficient markets breed resilience, there’s…

To understand the effects, we first have to take a step back and recognize that efficiency and resiliency problems are both subsets of optimization problems. Efficiency is concerned with maximizing the ratio of inputs to outputs, and resiliency is concerned with minimizing risk.

The fundamental tension arises because risk mitigation increases input costs. Over a given time horizon, there is an optimal amount of risk mitigation that will result in maximum aggregate profit (output minus input, not necessarily monetary). The longer the time horizon, the more additional risk mitigation is required, to prevent things like ruin risk.

But here’s the rub: competition reduces the time horizon to “very very short” because it drives down the output value. So in a highly competitive market, we see companies ignore resiliency (they cannot afford to invest in it) and instead they get lucky until they don’t (another force at work here is lack of skin in the game). The market deals with this by replacing them with another firm that has not yet been subject to the ruinous risks of the previous firm. This cycle repeats again and again.

Most resilient firms have some amount of monopolistic stickiness that allows them to invest more in resiliency, but it is also easy to look at those firms and see they are highly inefficient.

The point is that the cycle of firms has a cost, and it is not a trivial one: capital gets reallocated, businesses as legal entities are created, sold, and destroyed, contracts have to be figured out again, supply chains are disrupted, etc. Often, the most efficient outcome for the system is if the firms had been more resilient.

So there is an inefficient Nash equilibrium present in those sort of competitive markets.

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