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

Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

psyche.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 314 posts

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#11

Post by yt-sdb »

bschne wrote: post #2

I'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 a nice way to think about, and it reminds me of Nassim Taleb's "antifragile" thesis [1]. Basically, the world is more random than you think, and to operate rationally under uncertainty, you need to be open-minded about opportunities and risks with huge asymmetries. Fragile systems are often very successful for a long time because they ignore hidden risks and then collapse due to the unexpected.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#13

Post by l_t »

bschne wrote: post #2

I'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 of this as an optimization kind of problem. The word "efficiency" itself is only meaningful in context of what's being made more efficient.

A system could be "more efficient at becoming stable," for example.

But if by "efficiency" we limit ourselves to mean "the time-cost of a set of actions," (as in the most efficient path is the one that takes the least time), we quickly encounter problems with maximizing usage of time and how that conflicts with unexpected work, which leads to the anti-stability you mentioned.

The way I think about it is that a 100% time-efficient process has zero time-flexibility. If you want to gain time-flexibility (e.g. the ability to pivot, or to work on different things too, or to introduce error bars to your calculations), you lose time-efficiency.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#14

Post by imafish »

FpUser wrote: post #12

>"Multitask; text on one device while emailing on a second, and perhaps conversing on a third." Result - shitty content of texting, emails and shitty conversation. I am not sure who in their right mind actually advocates that.

I think no one advocates it but many practice it.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#17

Post by ghaff »

neogodless wrote: post #10
bschne wrote: post #2

I'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…

The two are certainly related but it feels like optimization is a bit different. Maybe the efficiency equivalent for personal finance would be an example like keeping your bank balance at a minimum and immediately transferring any spare cash to paying down a mortgage or otherwise into a fairly illiquid investment because thet's where the best returns are. But now if you have an unexpected expense you have to scramble to come up with funds.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#18

Post by chasd00 »

the article doesn't make sense to me

when making decisions:

"we should be asking which option will give us good-enough results under the widest range of future states of the world"

doesn't that lead you right back to the struggle for the most efficient way to determine the optimal "good-enough" answer?

Also, the article talks about efficiency but efficiency of what exactly? What if you're very efficient at a maintaining a relaxed and happy lifestyle?

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#19

Post by 1123581321 »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #16

Of course not trying cram as much in as possible makes life better. However tell that to a CEO who has built a business off an unsustainable, for a normal person who wants to have a life outside of work, efficiency mindset.

Or a CEO who is keenly aware of the benefit of what they do. It would be difficult, for example, to convince a solar manufacturer that panel costs should decrease slowly when they know how many fossil fuel plants will be built because of that.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#20

Post by MadSudaca »

bschne wrote: post #2

I'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…

Maybe the problem is that efficiency and robustness are orthogonal?
Post reply on HN