Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better
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Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better
#2I've found "efficiency as the opposite of stability" a very powerful concept to think about - even though it's fairly simple, it seems to be almost a fundamental law.
Whether it's about the economy at large, your own household, a supply chain, what have you - as soon as you optimize for efficiency by removing friction, you take all the slack/damping out of the system and become instantly more liable to catastrophic failure if some of your basic conditions change. Efficiency gives you a speed bonus, at the cost of increased risk / less resilience to unforeseen events.
Stewart Brand's concept of "Pace Layering" comes to mind for how to deal with this at a systemic level - https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2
Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better
#3I've found "efficiency as the opposite of stability" a very powerful concept to think about - even though it's fairly simple, it seems to be almost a fundamental law. Whether it's about the economy at large, your own household, a supply chain, what have you - as soon as you optimize for efficiency by removing friction, you take all the slack/damping out of the system and become instantly more liable to catastrophic f…
I think this requires more thorough definition. Obviously you can be inefficient without being stable. E.g. I could drive my car at 5 miles an hour to work which would neither be efficient nor stable.
Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better
#4I've found "efficiency as the opposite of stability" a very powerful concept to think about - even though it's fairly simple, it seems to be almost a fundamental law. Whether it's about the economy at large, your own household, a supply chain, what have you - as soon as you optimize for efficiency by removing friction, you take all the slack/damping out of the system and become instantly more liable to catastrophic f…
I think this is probably better characterized as "efficiency erodes resilience". You can have stability if there are no perturbations. However, if there are, and you have optimized for a regime where there are not, you are very exposed to risk. This is pretty much Table's notion of antifragility as well as the study of resilience engineering.
Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better
#5The problem is you can only slow down if everyone else does too, unless you're willing to step down in "class" which a lot of people have trouble with.
Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better
#6I've found "efficiency as the opposite of stability" a very powerful concept to think about - even though it's fairly simple, it seems to be almost a fundamental law. Whether it's about the economy at large, your own household, a supply chain, what have you - as soon as you optimize for efficiency by removing friction, you take all the slack/damping out of the system and become instantly more liable to catastrophic f…
I think this requires more thorough definition. Obviously you can be inefficient without being stable. E.g. I could drive my car at 5 miles an hour to work which would neither be efficient nor stable.
Right, there has to be some boundaries defined for what's in "reason".
Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better
#7I've found "efficiency as the opposite of stability" a very powerful concept to think about - even though it's fairly simple, it seems to be almost a fundamental law. Whether it's about the economy at large, your own household, a supply chain, what have you - as soon as you optimize for efficiency by removing friction, you take all the slack/damping out of the system and become instantly more liable to catastrophic f…
That’s one of the points of “The Goal”. As in you need slack to be more productive over time. https://www.ebay.com/p/117280427
I leave the eBay link because last I checked used copies on amazon were very pricey.
Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better
#8I've found "efficiency as the opposite of stability" a very powerful concept to think about - even though it's fairly simple, it seems to be almost a fundamental law. Whether it's about the economy at large, your own household, a supply chain, what have you - as soon as you optimize for efficiency by removing friction, you take all the slack/damping out of the system and become instantly more liable to catastrophic f…
I think this requires more thorough definition. Obviously you can be inefficient without being stable. E.g. I could drive my car at 5 miles an hour to work which would neither be efficient nor stable.
It certainly would be stable. A very moderate increase in speed would allow you to make good on a substantial delay for any kind of reason.
Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better
#9The problem is you can only slow down if everyone else does too, unless you're willing to step down in "class" which a lot of people have trouble with.
And in a number of different domains in life at that
Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better
#10I've found "efficiency as the opposite of stability" a very powerful concept to think about - even though it's fairly simple, it seems to be almost a fundamental law. Whether it's about the economy at large, your own household, a supply chain, what have you - as soon as you optimize for efficiency by removing friction, you take all the slack/damping out of the system and become instantly more liable to catastrophic f…
When I think about personal finance, I often think about efficiency. The obvious examples include buying in bulk, avoiding finance charges to optimize what you get for your money, paying insurance up front when the payment options charge extra, and just plain having fewer subscriptions to keep monthly expenses lower and easier to track.
All of this efficiency increases financial stability. I suppose if we argue that I'm only referring to optimization and not efficiency, then perhaps it's not a great argument.