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Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

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Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#141

Post by charliemil4 »

roughly wrote: post #128
yt-sdb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Fragile systems are often very successful for a long time because they ignore hidden risks and then collapse due to the unexpected. There's another interesting aspect to this in that things that are failures from some perspectives may not be from others. If stripping resiliency out of a company nets enough savings in the short term, it may still be profitable to the owners it even if it's long-term fatal. As a hypo…

Behold! Private Equity

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#142

Post by SubuSS »

nitrogen wrote: post #31
alexpetralia wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's an engineering version of "stable" that might be useful here to draw lines between the three or so different concepts being discussed. A "stable" system is one that will return to the same resting state when perturbed. One can have "equilibrium" in an unstable system, e.g. balancing a broomstick on one's hand, but the system will not return to that equilibrium if perturbed.

I think you mean resilient when you say stable: A stable system NEED not get back to resting state by itself. A resilient one does.

Along these terms, I think equilibrium doesn't really make sense - it means stability in many definitions. From the top google result:

> Equilibrium is defined as a state of balance or a stable situation where opposing forces cancel each other out and where no changes are occurring. An example of equilibrium is in economics when supply and demand are equal. An example of equilibrium is when you are calm and steady.

Another take on this: (Stable vs unstable equilibrium) https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/davis/375/popecol/lec9/equil....

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#144

Post by paulsutter »

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…

The best efficiency arises from simplicity. Yes, haste makes waste, and a system that's constantly changing will be unstable.

But efficiency itself is nether haste nor churn, in fact the opposite.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#145

Post by marcosdumay »

MadSudaca wrote: post #20
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?

That's a much more reasonable statement.

Add to that that if you optimize one from a set of orthogonal values, the other ones tend to decrease. And so you get to all the people claiming there's an intrinsic relation between them, on the face of a world of evidence.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#146

Post by civilized »

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…

> efficiency as the opposite of stability

In statistics, there is a slight variant of this thesis that is true in a precise formal sense: the tradeoff between efficiency and "robustness" (stability in a non-ideal situation).

For example, if you have a population sample, the most efficient way to estimate the population mean from your sample is the sample mean. But if some of the data are corrupted, you're better off with a robust estimator - in this case, a trimmed mean, where the extreme N% of high and low values are discarded.

The trimmed mean is less efficient in the sense that, if none of the data are corrupted, it discards information and is less accurate than the full mean. But it's more robust in the sense that it remains accurate even when a small-to-moderate % of the data are corrupted.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#147

Post by Jtsummers »

mcguire wrote: post #53
neogodless wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Rather than stability, think of it as robustness or flexibility. Past a certain point, efficiency is an enemy of robustness. Buying in bulk is cool. If you buy a big package of paper towels, it's cheaper and you don't have to worry about running out. The fact that you have a cabinet full of paper towels isn't a big deal. But suppose you find a really great deal on a semi-trailer load of towels and stock up. Now you h…

JIT isn't the problem in your last example, it's a weak supply chain. If you have a singular source for some critical or necessary thing, you have a risk whether you're using JIT concepts or not. Though higher if you take JIT to an extreme. Your sources need to be that, sources, and ideally geographically separated. See the various industry crises following natural disasters in Taiwan for why.

The proper, though not easy, thing to do is have some primary sources of your materials and secondary sources to handle surges and supply issues with your primes. You may still have a production slowdown, but hopefully not a shutdown. And like with backup, if you don't use them you don't have them. You have to place orders with all sources, and use materials from all sources to ensure that they are in fact up to snuff. It'd suck to buy your RAM from Foo until a flood, and then find that BAR's RAM doesn't actually work (or doesn't work with your motherboards).

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#149

Post by hansvm »

Retric wrote: post #131
hansvm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not making my application more fragile by rewriting an O(n^2) operation over a large dataset to an O(n log(n)) operation that provides the same output. It's a win without tradeoffs. Hopefully not nitpicking too much: it's a win without _many_ tradeoffs. E.g., in the usual places where you'd accidentally get an O(n^2) operation rather than O(n log(n)), the O(n^2) operation is constant-space. In a sufficiently an…

Plenty of n log n operations are in constant space. Average Quicksort performance being perhaps the classic example. But most often you see these kinds of improvements by simply removing steps. Net result is less code, less memory use age, less of everything.

Yep, I'm not arguing that it's always a good idea (or even usually...or even that I've seen it be a good idea in the wild), just that it could be. Taking quicksort as an example, it's only constant space if you're allowed/able to mutate in-place. If you need (for some bizarre reason) to stream sorted results in constant space without mutating the underlying data then you'll need some other tool.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#150

Post by Jtsummers »

richeyrw wrote: post #132
yt-sdb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I wrote a post very much on this subject: https://wearenotsaved.com/2020/03/27/the-fragility-of-effici...

That'd be a good post for HN, especially since the topic of efficiency/robustness has come up a few times recently.
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