Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
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Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
1–10 of 377 posts
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#2perfect reminder that when you focus too hard on the proxy, you might win the battle and lose the war
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#3"If you do not build the slack into the system, the system will take the slack out of you."
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#4I don't think it's unintuitive at all. 100% optimized means 100% without slack. No slack means any hitch at all will destroy you.
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#5I don’t think the author understands what efficiency measures.
All of the examples involve a bad proxy metric, or the flawed assumption that spending less improves the ratio of price to performance.
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#6The author is a very sharp individual but is there a reason he insists on labelling overfitting as a phenomenon from machine learning instead of from classical statistics?
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#7I don’t think the author understands what efficiency measures. All of the examples involve a bad proxy metric, or the flawed assumption that spending less improves the ratio of price to performance.
My take was that initially the metric is appropriate, but then with overfitting, it’s not enough.
It eventually becomes a bad proxy metric.
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#8This reminds me of Eli Goldratt's quote: "Tell me how you measure me, I will tell you how I behave."
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#9I don't think it's unintuitive at all. 100% optimized means 100% without slack. No slack means any hitch at all will destroy you.
Indeed, the more efficient you become the more brittle you will be. You must depend upon the present being static and the future being perfectly predictable based on the events of the past. The present and the future don't merely need to be dependable within your own domain but also in the entire world.
The flexibility necessary to succeed in a real world requires a certain level of inefficiency.
Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
#10I don’t think the author understands what efficiency measures. All of the examples involve a bad proxy metric, or the flawed assumption that spending less improves the ratio of price to performance.
Accusing these examples of involving "bad proxy metric" is identical to the no true scotsman fallacy.