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Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

psyche.co

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Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#111

Post by naavis »

allenu wrote: post #89
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.

The problem could be twofold: 1) our tools push us towards multitasking. Notifications pop up and there's a sense of immediacy where you need to deal with it now (texting back) or it will get "lost" in the stream of new notifications, never to be dealt with. 2) people today expect everything, even communications, to be responsive, leading to a low content response immediately as opposed to a high quality one later. F…

You can at least click on the context menu of a message and select ”Remind me” to set a reminder about the it. But yeah, I do agree with you. Slack messages are less ”manipulable”.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#113

Post by smabie »

> The creation of ‘option markets’ means that you don’t have to go to the trouble of buying a stock that you’re going to be selling soon anyway. You can just promise to buy it, and then sell it at a price and date specified by the option contract.

Options, like their name implies, aren't a promise to do anything, they provide the right but not obligation to buy or sell at a certain price.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#114

Post by xapata »

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'd say resilience instead of stability, but I agree that it's worth thinking about in many contexts.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#115

Post by skybrian »

yathern wrote: post #38
david_draco wrote: post #27

Insurance is the opposite of a lottery. If you think buying lottery tickets are a waste of money because you lose out in the long run, the same argument should lead you to think having insurance is a good thing.

I think you have it backwards - insurance and lottery are (sort of) equal. In the long term, you'll lose money in the lottery. You'll also lose money paying for insurance. If you have extraordinary "good luck", you may come out ahead in the lottery. And if you have extraordinary "bad luck" you may come out ahead in insurance. Insurance of course has a more practical value, and a much better return on investment (even…

Insurance increases equality by reducing the financial penalties of bad luck. A lottery increases inequality by creating rich lotto winners who by definition are no more deserving than anyone else.

If you're interested in equality and justice, you should be in favor of insurance (and insurance-like government schemes like social security) and against lotteries.

On the other hand, the good thing about lotteries is that they can be used to raise money for a good cause with entirely voluntary contributions, and even for most people who don't win, it can still be considered pretty cheap entertainment.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#116

Post by kazinator »

Taek wrote: post #46

This comment thread is making me realize we don't have a good word to distinguish between efficiency as in "we only have 7 hospital beds because that's all we need on 99% of each day" and efficiency as in "we replaced steps X,Y,Z with just step X', because we found that X' could accomplish everything that XYZ could accomplish but it's faster, more accurate, and cheaper". One makes a tradeoff by reducing overheads and…

There are always tradeoffs. The discovery that X, Y, Z could be replaced by X required investigation, which is a cost, and then changes to be deployed which disruptions that also have a cost. If the deployment of the optimization doesn't recover the costs, then it ends up not worth it. Usually the cost is recouped because the optimization is discovered once, and then deployed on a large scale; but that is not always the case.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#118

Post by Dumblydorr »

Doesn't the author miss that efficiency and deceleration (i.e. slow down) are in some respects orthogonal? It is possible to more efficiently go the same distance at the same speed, but use less resources. It is also possible to both slow down and increase efficiency which can synergistically decrease resource use.

Take the aluminum can. Beverage companies heavily innovated, reduced aluminum use, saved resources, emissions, and consumers get a win with lighter cans and less environmental pollution and carbon emission.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#119

Post by rdtwo »

SlavikCA wrote: post #72
shoo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this way of framing things is only valid if outcomes of events are somewhat linear, but in real life this isn't true at all: some uninsured bad events can wipe you out completely, whereas insured bad events might not wipe you out. it doesn't matter if your expected value of not being wiped out was predicted to be 0.1 if you've gotten wiped out. the decision of purchasing insurance or not depends more on how many reso…

> for individuals with limited resources who will be wiped out if uninsured Usually, individuals with limited resources can't really be wiped out: there is not much to wipe out. Here is my perspective: I consider myself typical individual with limited resources: I'm mostly live on the my salary (Software dev), I don't really have major assets (20k car bought for cash, renting a house), have some savings (~30k cash).…

Usually they have wipeout problems that can’t be insured for. Medical conditions or unemployment being the most common.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#120

Post by Jtsummers »

grasshopperpurp wrote: post #110
Jtsummers wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple steps don't always add redundancy, sometimes they're just noise or artifacts. I had a colleague who, when opening a file, would first click on the Windows desktop, then "My Computer", then navigate to the directory, open the file, and close the Explorer window. There was zero redundancy versus leaving the directory open so they could open the next file (or using the application's "Open File" dialog). That is…

Lots of good examples in sports, where wasted movements lead to failure, particularly at the higher levels

Yep. Not even just sports games, but athletics and movement in general. Learning to avoid certain movements when running, swimming, or rowing is very important especially if the goal shifts from complete a short distance as fast as possible to complete a long distance in a reasonable time (and often the more efficient form for long distance translates into faster short distance results as well).
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