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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

#281

Post by esarbe »

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…

This efficiency vs. resilience trade off seems to be a general pattern, also for organic systems.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduc...

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#282

Post by goatinaboat »

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…

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 failure if some of your basic conditions change

I would hope that the fragility of JIT supply chains was laid bare for everyone in the Covid crisis but I expect that lesson will soon be forgotten.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#283

Post by tjpnz »

yt-sdb wrote: post #11
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.…

One of my main takeaways from Antifragile was that the people often involved with making processes efficient have no business being in that position. He was right to label management science as quackery and practitioners as charlatans.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#284

Post by vulpesx2 »

throwaway815190 wrote: post #183
clairity wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i stumbled on "stability' too, because it's a static quality. rather than robustness, i prefer to use the term resilience, a dynamic quality, since efficiency is also a dynamic quality. you can trade efficiency for resilience and vice versa (as the parent poster switched to later). edit: i should add that i don't entirely agree with the thesis of the article, which exhorts us to slow down, thereby trading efficiency…

I'm completely ignorant on this topic, so I apologize for asking what must be an extremely stupid question to you, but: what makes stability a static quality whereas resilience is a dynamic quality? Are these statistical definitions that I can look up somewhere?

Not OP, but my take is that stability is usually defined as a base-state that will continue onto perpetuity unless some outside force disrupts it. Resiliency is more closely defined as the ability to recover from disruptions back to the base-state quickly.

Since the context here is that efficiency can remove layers of redundancy therefore allowing disruptions to wreck more havoc - I believe that's what OP was getting at.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#285

Post by Infinitesimus »

r00fus wrote: post #65
Xylakant wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly would be stable. A very moderate increase in speed would allow you to make good on a substantial delay for any kind of reason.

It would not be stable as it would significantly increase the risk of accidents, road rage, or being pulled over for going too slow.

That instability is not because of the 5mph but because you're driving 5mph in a 60mph zone.

You could drive 5mph on back roads with less risk of course.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#286

Post by fennecfoxen »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #277
roughly wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Even better, why not get the company to borrow against those 10 years of income, and pay you your profit now? Even better, since you now don't actually even need to keep the company alive for 10 years since you've already got your profit, you can sell the company's assets now and increase your profit! Except there's not a company in the world that this logic doesn't apply to (at some point). Asset-stripping has kille…

The key difference here is that the “communities” are not recognized with any particular ownership interest.

Does the owner of the company have a right to take risks with the business? It is a serious impairment of ownership if not, and will likely lead to more-stagnant societies. The entire engine of America’s superior prosperity (even at the individual level) has been based on risk taking, while stagnant systems have their own problems (Greece, Italy come to mind with pre-covid crises) and can be a vector of corruption as the principal-agent problem remains unsolved and those entrusted with the well being of the community often work to enrich and empower themselves instead.

This is not to say that we cannot say the community ought to have more of a say, this is merely to point out that there is a tradeoff that affects society in general. If we are to succeed in making this tradeoff it will be in part by better aligning the interests of business owners and the community, and we should be aware of how hard a problem that is when we go to attack it.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#287

Post by omginternets »

throwaway815190 wrote: post #225
Jtsummers wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, those two statements aren't referring to the same thing. The law they reference is something found in Systems Theory. It may be useful, also, for you to read these two pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory The difference between Law and Theory (in scientific discourse) is not what you believe it to be.

> The difference between Law and Theory (in scientific discourse) is not what you believe it to be. ELI5?

Jtsummers' explanation is correct, but I wanted to weigh in with an easy rule of thumb, which you may find easier to remember:

1. A law gives you a relationship with no mechanism. It almost always appears as a mathematical formula. You know how the pieces change with respect to another, but not why.

2. A theory gives you a mechanism. It tells you why. On rare occasions, it will not provide quantifiable predictions, in which case it is a qualitative theory.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#288

Post by mchusma »

This article has a horrible title, and some highly misleading content. It represents "efficiency" as things like "not buying insurance" in a dangerous fashion. There are VERY few serious people who think that.

"All things being equal" efficiency is always good. (e.g. if an identical task can be done for 1/2 the energy - good) "All things being equal" slowing down does not necessarily make life better. (Cleaning up after an oil spill is something we probably want fast.)

All things are not equal, and you have to make a series of tradeoffs.

How much risk are you willing to take? How much enjoyment do you get out of a task?

The author is of course correct that optimizing efficiency at the sake of all else is typically a problem. But to misrepresent efficiency (the key to our modern age) is not quite fair to the term.

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#289

Post by war1025 »

jariel wrote: post #273
plutonorm wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

epsilontheory.com I love every article I have read so far. It's really expanding me. Thanks for sharing.

Unfortunately, it's probably quite wrong. He uses the analogy of 'too clever by half' to exemplify his idea that 'financial innovation is always wrong'. Nothing could be further from the truth. Insurance products have changed the world just as much as any technical innovation. Mortgaged backed securities are not a bad thing, far from it, they allow more efficient use of capital by having 'saving Germans and Japanese'…

> He uses the analogy of 'too clever by half' to exemplify his idea that 'financial innovation is always wrong'.

I don't really have a horse in this race, but I think you're misreading the article.

He says: "Every truly disruptive discovery or innovation in history is the work of coyotes. It’s always the non-domesticated schemers who come up with the Idea That Changes Things. We all know the type. Many of the readers of this note ARE the type."

That's not a criticism, that's a point of praise.

He then follows it up immediately by saying: "Financial innovation is no exception. And this is Reason #1 why financial innovation ALWAYS ends in tears, because coyotes are too clever by half. They figure out a brilliant way to win at the mini-game that they’re immersed in, and they ignore the meta-game. Eventually the meta-game blows up on them, and they’re toast."

That isn't saying it's a bad thing, it's saying that the people who come up with the new ideas lose sight of the broader picture and get taken out by "the thieving raccoons" and the State.

He's saying "the coyotes" lose sight of the broader picture, just like in the famed XKCD [1] where the "too-clever-by-half" computer person encrypts all their data, and forgets that the thug who is going to come looking for it will just beat the piss out of them with a wrench until they turn over the key.

The core nugget of the article, in my opinion, is exactly the "meta-game is what always gets you" aspect.

It's the same thing that NN Taleb refers to as "2nd order effects."

[1] https://xkcd.com/538/

Re: Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

#290

Post by chrisweekly »

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…

"stability" strikes me as the wrong word there; maybe "resilience" or "flexibility"?
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