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Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

sohl-dickstein.github.io

251–260 of 377 posts

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#251
post #235

I think of efficiency as one example where naive economic thinking has poisoned common sense. Economists view inefficiency as a problem. Because a healthy economy is efficient, therefore inefficiency is unhealthy. Any inefficient market is a "market failure". Efficiency is also the primary way a manager can add value. But the problem is, efficiency assumes existence of metrics, and indeed is counter productive if you…

> Efficiency is also the primary way a manager can add value.

That's not right. The primary task of management is alignment.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s smart to proactively back track without being very careful. One thing that’s needed is for corporate death to be allowed to occur. Right now the downsides of risky behavior is bailed out for large enough risk. Then the companies that fail aren’t robust and the ones that don’t are but bailouts let non robust companies keep going. Otherwise “robustness” is a property without a measure which means tha…

The usual cycle for business in a free market is it appears young and fresh, lacking any parasites. It grows rapidly, displacing existing mature businesses. Then, it accumulates bureaucracy and parasites, becoming less and less efficient, strangled by bloat and inability to adapt, and slides into bankruptcy, replaced by the next generation of new businesses. The remains of the business are then reallocated to the nex…

> Even worse are government "businesses". They are not allowed to fail, and the inefficiencies, parasites, corruption, grow and grow. When can you remember a government agency being abolished?

In Commonwealth countries and the UK itself there are plenty of businesses called “crown corporations” which are owned by the government. Change in attitudes towards more liberalism led governments to deregulation and selling off bits and pieces or the entire corporation. Here are some Canadian examples:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-post-it-innovapost-s...

https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/march-2024/mulroney...

America is a relatively young country and has very peculiar philosophies sometimes not found in the rest of the world. Be very careful extrapolating an American perspective abroad or as capturing some elemental truth of the universe.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#253
> Goal: Distribution of labor and resources based upon the needs of society

> Proxy: Capitalism

> Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Massive wealth disparities (with incomes ranging from hundreds of dollars per year to hundreds of dollars per second), with more than a billion people living in poverty

Please, show me a point in all human history when we have less than 90% global population living in poverty, pre-capitalism. Yes, there are 1 billion people (out of 8 billion) living in poverty today. But they were 2 billion (of 4.5 billion total) living in poverty as recently as 1980 (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/poverty-the-past-pres...).

Poverty is steadily going down (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/poverty-the-past-pres...) since we have data. The first countries to get rid of recurrent famines were the same that first adopted capitalism. The same countries where their population started having higher expectations than to live another day.

Paraphrasing Churchill about democracy, "[capitalism] is the worst economic system except for all other systems that has been tried from time to time".

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of the Framework Laptop proves that this is largely an imaginary tradeoff, or at least one badly taken by Apple.

Unfortunately once one company does something and gets away with it, or makes even more money, everyone will follow. I was looking at Thinkpads and was somewhat shocked to see they started doing that too!

This is also why the libertarian solution to bad work environments “just leave” doesn’t work at scale.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#256

I am surprised that the author left out another mitigation. To build solutions (models) that are constructed to be more transferable (amenable to out of domain data). For example, in machine learning, using physics informed models. Perhaps this is simply a sign that the author is a proponent of generic, deep-learning.

Most people in ML, even if they are very proficient, don't understand why models should generalize out of domain. They just don't think about it.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#257
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Living is not an optimization problem.

what it means to not optimise though is that some people end up better off and many others are worse off.

And what it means to optimise is also that some people end up better off and many others are worse off.

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#258

> Goal: Distribution of labor and resources based upon the needs of society > Proxy: Capitalism > Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Massive wealth disparities (with incomes ranging from hundreds of dollars per year to hundreds of dollars per second), with more than a billion people living in poverty Please, show me a point in all human history when we have less than 90% global population living in poverty, p…

There is no such thing as capitalism. “The first countries to get rid of recurrent famine” were those that began using the steam engine and field enclosure. These are not “capitalism”, they are “capital”, in tge jargon of the economist Marx, or, in modern parlance, technology. All of the parts of the world that are not starving are not starving due to their adoption of a variety of technologies, both mechanical and bureaucratic: fertilizer, machine tractors, and centralized governance using telephone lines and now internet. When people claim “capitalism” ended starvation, they ignore places like China and Russia which also ended famine despite adopting state ownership of farms. There was indeed famine during the transition period, but Russia ended famine by the 50s and China ended famine by the 70s, long before many “capitalist” countries in the 3rd world. That’s because the world isn’t about the phony field of “economics,” it’s about technology. Likewise, the other advancements of society that are claimed to be associated with “capitalism”—the end of smallpox and other old high-casualty diseases, the development of reliable air and trans-oceanic transport, instant global communications: all are due to the efforts of scientists working in labs mostly funded by governments and wealthy patrons, not “capitalism.” Capitalist enterprises almost never take major innovative risks. Even the latest glorious advancement that will doubtless be claimed by “capitalism,” Wikipedia-scraping chat bots, was developed by a non-profit.

Everything is about technology—stop letting economists drag you into stupid, poorly formed debates using undefined terms like “capitalism.”

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#259
This certainly tugs at all the right levers of the intuition. Not sure how to "buck the trend" in any established organization/regime to adjust expectations according to the theory. Looks like this might need to be demonstrated in the wild at a new concern or as a turnaround job, where the leaders could have a strong influence on the culture (similar to how Jim Keller steered AMD and is now steering TensTorrent).

Re: Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would develop the "trust" and why would it be correct? How would you diagnose yourself or others before selecting a hospital if those have different trust for different things? How do you balance urgency vs different trust levels if the hospitals are not all the same distance?

You could ask the same questions about grocery shopping or buying a PC.

Just to be clear: You're asserting that the average citizen

  * has the same capacity to research an unknown number of medical procedures and the doctors performing them as they do researching onion prices or CPU specs

  * faces a similar scale of consequences when failing to properly analyze medical procedures as they do when they fail to properly price-compare onions or PC services

  * has the same freedom of choice to "purchase their preference" in an emergency, life-threatening situation as they have when shopping for PCs or groceries
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