Just Too Efficient

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient

by MindGods • 6 years ago

570 272 6 years ago

Distributism would solve these problems, I'm just not sure we could ever get there with the current vested interests getting in the way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism

sudosysgen9• 6 years ago

So basically, communal ownership of the means of production? Where have I heard about that before...

Not that I disagree with it. I just think that it fits so perfectly into socialist thought (as originally intended, not any of the statist revisions) that it really seems like nothing more but market socialism without the red.

In fact, reading more about it, distributivism is just market socialism without a strong theoretical backing, without philosophical study and without any real praxis, as well as much less developped.

rorykoehler• 6 years ago

We should aim to have distributed systems because they are more resilient. Everyone knows the story about Gorbachev and the US supermarket but we conveniently forget it when it comes to forging our own monopoly.

jtolmar2• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, a lot of people have been told that "socialism" means "state power over the economy" and refuse to engage with enough socialist/communist theory to see what it actually is. Which gets you strange projects like the above.

For that audience, and over-simplifying greatly: all communists are trying to create a decentralized system that evenly spreads power, and the main split among them is how to actually do that. Anarchists think we should build decentralized power structures until they've replaced our current centralized ones. Marxist-Leninists think we should replace the state with one that promises to implement communism later.

Distributism reads a lot like somebody heard of Marxism-Leninism, thought it was dumb, reinvented anarcho-communism in response, and then described the result as opposed to communism, even though it's largely the same idea as one of the main branches of communist theory.

vidarh3• 6 years ago

A lot of Christian democratic ideals basically fits into the description "market socialism without the red", usually sprinkled with socially conservative views.

It's notable that in a lot of Europe, the welfare systems we have today, for example, while they happened under pressure or fear of socialism, were pushed through with the help of Christian democrats.

E.g. Bismarcks pension and healthcare bills that effectively formed the first large-scale welfare system were blatant attempts at stemming the growing support for what he saw as dangerous socialist parties becoming a threat to the established order - while stealing some of their social policies he proceeded to ban dozens of groups and newspapers and arrest their leaders. But he passed those bills with the help of the conservative Christian "Zentrum", the forerunner of Merkel's CDU, by appealing to Christian values.

wrnr• 6 years ago

Their is great irony in the most hierarchical religious intuition in the history of the world arguing in favour of economical decentralisation after having forcefully resisted protestantism for centuries

sudeepj• 6 years ago

This resonates with me a lot.

I chuckle sometimes when I see things like your fridge (or a smart kitchen) will order items for you by predicting things for you need. In future, it seems tech will do transactions with other tech with lesser human involvement, all in the name of efficiency. And then this will trigger another recursive cycle of optimizations.

The rate at which tech is changing and along with it our society is way faster than rate at which humans can find a coping mechanism. We do not know what we are sleepwalking into.

pcstl4• 6 years ago

I feel like I need to plug Zvi Mowshowitz's "Immoral Mazes" series of blogposts here, as it goes pretty in-depth into the whole matter of efficiency, slack, and "how hard should we work".

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS

lixtra• 6 years ago

It would be more efficient if you added the actual link

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS ?

pcstl4• 6 years ago

I actually intended to, but when I finished writing the comment I forgot to paste the link in. Thank you.

mikeklaas• 6 years ago

For a much grimmer and soul-wrenching take on this, read Meditations on Moloch by Scott Alexander:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...

radu_floricica• 6 years ago

And the yin to that yang: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/28/moloch-hasnt-won/

Longer series, but the first post does a good job of summarizing Meditations on Moloch.

Somewhat offtopic, try listenig to the original poem on youtube. It's a treat.

dpc_pw2• 6 years ago

Meditations on Moloch made such an impact on me, that I routinely say aloud "Moloch" when I spot circumstances of competition leading to otherwise irrationally bad outcomes. Sort of in a religious way. :)

I went to comments exactly to see if anyone mentioned it already.

BTW. The efficiency (specialization) vs redundancy (genericity) is a kind of jing-jang, fractal thing and is part of how the universe ... dances... I'd say (inspired by Alan Watts lectures). Systems have cycles where they build specilization up until it becomes so fragile and unstable that it blows up and genericity takes over again. I don't know if that's like some law of cybernetics or something.

Similar to how stability on one level of analysis leads to instability in the one above it (well described in Taleb's book).

oehtXRwMkIs7• 6 years ago

an ancient Carthaginian demon

This shouldn't bother me but it really does. For a community striving to be less wrong, how does someone write a 47-minute long post about Moloch but not know Moloch?

It doesn't really matter since it's about the metaphor not the actual Moloch, but I guess it's because of where it's posted. Not sure if there's a name for it but there's a phenomena where if you say you care about something, you'll get a lot of flak for it compared to if you never mention it. Kind of like how Google always gets a lot of bad press since they claim to care about X when VCs for example have a much worse record but don't really get mentioned. With lesswrong's reputation, I can't help but be really put off by the inaccuracy.

pcstl4• 6 years ago

I guess a big part of it is that Scott just took the name from the Ginsberg poem and probably only did a quick lookup on who Moloch actually was (as he was more interested in Ginsberg's Moloch than in the Canaanite Moloch)?

phreack• 6 years ago

What is the correct definition then?

unethical_ban2• 6 years ago

We should ask a German, they put a noun to everything.

I was thinking the same thing recently, reading a New York Times review panel on Hamilton. Someone said they didn't focus enough on slavery, and that the casual mentioning of Sally Hemings was tasteless. I posed the same thought: If Sally hadn't been mentioned at all, they wouldn't have commented on the lack of focus on her. If they didn't make a point of being a multiracial cast, or had lyrics condemning slavery, would there have been so much criticism for the magnitude of their condemnation?

This phenomenon of "talking about something, then being attacked for not caring/knowing enough" seems to be happening more and more online.

paganel• 6 years ago

The end-game · Efficiency, taken to the max, can get very dark.

This is the main point behind most of the works of Jacques Ellul, we're re-discovering it at our own expense decades later.

The Ellulian concept of technique is briefly defined within the "Notes to Reader" section of The Technological Society (1964). It is "the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.

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

baxtr3• 6 years ago

They’re winning, but everyone’s losing.

Huh. Interesting. I think it’s the other way around. Efficiency leads to more convenience and better prices. Thus, I have more time and money to spend on things that really matter to me. The most basic “item” is for example a dish washer. How many hours and water was wasted before doing this work by hand?

llimos• 6 years ago

This is exactly the point he addresses in his final paragraph. Efficiency is great, but up to a point, and we've passed it.

Most of today's innovations are not freeing up people's time on the scale that the washing machine or dishwasher did. On the contrary, many of them are using up time without any productivity gains. Smartphones and Facebook have not improved any other part of the economy besides their own.

Edit: See this interview which makes the point very well https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/robert-gordon-inter...

andyfleming• 6 years ago

Or worse, the gains from efficiency improvements aren't benefitting the end-users anymore.

raverbashing2• 6 years ago

Agreed

There's a point where more automation does not mean things become easier.

Let's take the same dishwasher example. Of course it saves a lot of time for a family of four, for example. Pop it in and you're done.

But for example, for a single person, this makes much less sense. Because the time it takes for putting it in the dishwasher, waiting to fill the machine and running the cycle is longer than just washing the damn dishes.

No automation is "free". And overautomation causes problems as well.

danjc2• 6 years ago

Are convenience and efficiency the ultimate goals to optimise for? Were our ancestors less happy because they had to wash dishes by hand?

baxtr3• 6 years ago

Let’s ask women if they want to go back to hand washing garment

chii3• 6 years ago

Yes, because the time and effort spent on the creation of the dishwasher is less than the total time and effort required to hand wash dishes, which means there's now a savings in resources when using the dishwasher, and that savings could be used for more productivity elsewhere (and perhaps producing an even more labour/resource saving device). This eventually avalanches into a state where the absolute minimum resources required are spent for a task, thus allowing more tasks to be done with the finite resources available. This translates to more wealth and quality of life.

tonyedgecombe2• 6 years ago

I still wash our dishes by hand. I quite like doing it, it's almost like a meditation and it doesn't take much longer than using a dishwasher.

baxtr3• 6 years ago

I do that too from time to time. I hate drying dishes, but washing has the same effect on me like you describe.

However, I love having the option to just start the dish washer and do other stuff instead.

bserge2• 6 years ago

Then you belong to "they" in this case :D

People working like robots in warehouses and factories are certainly not winning. They have neither more time, nor more money.

miked85• 6 years ago

This guy sure has a bone to pick with Amazon. Did so much change in the 5 years he worked for them?

vidarh3• 6 years ago

Does he? It doesn't seem like he's arguing they're really doing anything "wrong", other than being caught up in a larger societal process and doing what society is saying is good and rewarding:

It’s important to realize that Amazon isn’t violating any rules, nor even (on the surface) societal norms. Waste is bad, efficiency is good, right? They’re doing what’s taught in every business school; maximizing efficiency is one of the greatest gifts of the free market. Amazon is really extremely good at it.

This idea that capitalist efficiency is not something to blame the capitalist for, but is an effect of the mode of production of society overall is really very much a Marxist idea, and yet like your assumption that Bray is berating Amazon, people tend to similarly believe Marx hated capitalists.

But like Marx praised capitalism into the skies for its efficiency yet criticised its bad sides, Bray is also pointing out that this efficiency has good sides. It's just that it also has bad sides, and we should worry that we blindly keep accepting the bad sides even as the toll it takes rises:

It’s hard to think of a position more radical than being “against efficiency”. And I’m not. Efficiency is a good, and like most good things, has to be bought somehow, and paid for. There is a point where the price is too high, and we’ve passed it.

kiba• 6 years ago

One way I heard efficiency described is the idea of a race car falling apart at the end of a race, doing its job in the most efficient manner as possible.

Of course, this is pretty much inadvisable in every day life. We need some 'inefficiency' to ensure that our stuff won't break apart at the wrong time.

chii3• 6 years ago

there's a time horizon attached to efficiency that needs to be considered. Sometimes this time horizon is not explicitly examined, but is just assumed.

For the case of a racing car, if the engineers were told to design it with maximum efficiency possible, and it only has to last the race, then yes, why not have it break and fall apart at the end, if doing so means it runs at a very high efficiency?

withinboredom• 6 years ago

It's not very efficient to win the race if you have to replace the car every race.

mqus• 6 years ago

But otoh, this kind of efficiency is probably the reason why washing machines and other household items are now breaking sooner than before ("planned" obsolescence)

MattGaiser6• 6 years ago

I also blame consumers here. Are you willing to pay $100 for a better quality washing machine? Most people are not.

agumonkey• 6 years ago

Efficiency goes dark when the measure is myopic. If the system took in account the quality of food rather than the price tag .. the efficiency wouldn't be a problem. Quantity over quality in a way.

qznc2• 6 years ago

Big enterprises are (too) great at improving efficiency for their low-level workers. On the other hand they utterly fail to do so with the middle management.

The alternative theory would be that middle management does its job efficiently but it is a different one than the job description says.

zozbot2347• 6 years ago

Low-level work can often be measured in some way, and that's the kind of "efficiency" one can improve most easily. Whereas the whole point of having middle management in a firm is to deal with the many things that can't be measured easily,

m12k2• 6 years ago

I'm currently reading The Divide by Jason Hickel, a book that explores the origin and causes of global inequality. This article reminded me of the book's chapter about the enclosure movement in Britain: Families used to just farm and live off the land. The enclosure movement made most of this land the property of the aristocracy, who would then lease it back out to farmers - but they would keep increasing the price of the lease, so the farmers now had to work themselves to death and use every means to increase yield, in order to keep up, and not get replaced by someone else. It was much more efficient than the previous subsistence farming. (And left many thousands without a home or the means to support themselves)

qznc2• 6 years ago

The farmers probably paid the aristocracy before as well under a different name. What prevented the aristocrats to increase it before?

m12k2• 6 years ago

No, the aristocracy didn't own the land before it was enclosed - the land used to just be commonly owned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

obiwanpallav1• 6 years ago

Here is the link to the book on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32603498-the-divide

tommilukkarinen• 6 years ago

"But, wealth! If we all work less, we’ll be poorer, right? Because the total cash output of the economy is a (weird, nonlinear) function of the amount of work that gets put in."

In the previous sentence or so, there was talk about margins of healthcare, which have disappeared. These margins don't exist without more work.

Maybe it is rather that we are working with more things with less effort, rather than doing few things well.

Also cash and work have some correlation, but I think there is higher more profound correlation with work and total amount of products such as roads and buildings. Cash rarely stays in bank accounts but circulates and randomly spawns service and concrete products.

Everyone should work, all the time, to leave this a better place than we found it. And there is still much work to do.

praptak• 6 years ago

"The theoretical basis of alienation within the capitalist mode of production is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists." -- that's Wikipedia on Marx' theory of alienation.

Sounds weirdly similar and weirdly appropriate.

Animats• 6 years ago

Union, yes!

This is an old complaint going back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution at least. The US once had an 8-hour day and a 40-hour week. Now those are only memories.

Unions. The people who brought you the weekend.

MattGaiser6• 6 years ago

The increased work hours are among the professional class. It consists of professionals competing, not exploitation from the top.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-w...

morelisp• 6 years ago

I don't know how you can believe this unless you somehow also believe professionals are at the top.

CamperBob2• 6 years ago

Comparing today's IT workplace to the conditions that inspired Marx and the labor movement seems a tad naïve, to put it politely.

sdenton4• 6 years ago

And yet, it seems to be working out fine for the actors and writers guilds... Unions are about dealing with the power asymmetry between a large organization and individual workers, which has nothing to do with the kind of work being done.

TheNorthman3• 6 years ago

Marx wasn't inspired by poor worker conditions: he wasn't an idealist and his writings aren't normative.

To claim that Marx isn't relevant for worker conditions today is to either misunderstand him or misrepresent him. The contradictions arising from social conflict can't be solved by air condition because they are bound to our mode of production.

sudosysgen9• 6 years ago

Marx eventually settled on the position that it is not the conditions per se but the mechanisms that lead to them that are the issue, as they will always lead to the same fundamental problems. Which is the case - an IT worker has the same fundamental conflicts as a factory worker. At a certain level, losing these conflicts despite nominally better conditions doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes.

If Marx was still alive today, I think that he would answer the question about how modern workers have such better conditions than those in early capitalism the exact same way as when people in his time said that proletarian had better conditions than the peasants before them, which was nominally true.

In any case, the prescriptions of how a 19th century proletarian could improve their life are essentially the same. The idea is that the interests of your employer will always he opposite yours, as a result you will only be able to improve your conditions by organizing with your fellow workers in order to tip the balance of power, and eventually it is in your interests to change the conditions that lead to this conflict to begin with.

sporkpint• 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure Moses was not in a union.

cheesecracker12• 6 years ago

Complete bullshit. Do a job that is actually in demand, then nobody can force you to work more than you want.

And the 8 hour work day was supposedly introduced by Ford, not by Unions.

baq2• 6 years ago

There’s plenty of jobs in demand that still don’t pay enough to house and feed more than one person.

Unions are a way of making HR listen.

pseudalopex2• 6 years ago

Ford didn't invent the 8 hour day.[1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/how-the-8-hour-workday-chang...

throw0101a4• 6 years ago

Union, yes!

Or at least guilds with 'base' contracts / conditions for employments.

Actors all get the same basic level of protection with regards to working conditions, pensions, health care (?), but that does not stop them from negotiating different salaries (with a floor?) for the "100x" performers.

missedthecue• 6 years ago

Actors guilds are the exception to union typicality. Not the rule

csours2• 6 years ago

What got you here, may not get you there.

I have personally benefited from rights that unions have fought for. I am grateful to them for this. What I see them fight for now is worker retention. The most common fight is for the worst union members, because you have to represent your worst member, otherwise what is a union worth?

The other common union fight is whether the members are going to be screwed by management or by the competition, where the competition may be in a different country or a state with fewer protections on workers' rights.

I think there are still marginal conflicts where the Union can secure benefits for their members, but I'm not sure how much more they can help society overall.

femiagbabiaka• 6 years ago

Unions are just a framework. If you dig a bit you’ll find there are factions in almost every union fighting for more democracy and benefits for the members, and many of them are winning. Two off the cuff examples are Teamsters for a Democratic Union and CORE from the Chicago Teachers Union.

EDIT: it would also be remiss not to add that much of the power of unions has been stripped away by union busting and bad legislation

aliante• 6 years ago

Twenty years ago, France introduced a 35-hour workweek. Their economy still functions.

It seems to be quite anemic.

msy• 6 years ago

It's the seventh largest economy in the world with a per-capita GDP of $42k.

vidarh3• 6 years ago

Notably, looking up graphs of GDP per capita of France and the UK and putting them next to each other, I'd challenge anyone to see when the change happened.

One thing that comparing GDP per capita growth tends to show is that global and regional overall development totally swamps even seemingly large changes like the 35 hour week.

What the change also tends to gloss over is that the number of hours worked per worker in France is not particularly low. According to OECD, for 2019 it stood at 1505 vs. 1538 for the UK or 1386 for Germany. The reduction in France, to the extent it changed anything, may have distributed work a bit more but it did not suddenly drastically reduce the hours worked.

The average number of hours worked per worker dropped somewhat over the few years after the reform, but it dropped across all the major OECD countries, and by similar rates.

ivalm• 6 years ago

For past 30 years us gdp per capita ppp has been consistently ~35% greater, which is to say that the roughly grow at the same rate

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=France+and+us+gdp+per+...

Here is a ratio to illustrate my point better (the ratio is roughly flat)

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=France+divided+by+us+g...

photon122• 6 years ago

This is also true for software production: we have made writing and deploying software so easy to do that the rate at which training of software developers to produce PRs has outpaced the ability for systems either human or automated to handle managing the introduction of risk in all this new code.

This talk [1] by by Mark Sherman of the Software Engineering Institute at CMU is about as dark as the summary of injuries Tim presents in his post. He mentions there are on the order of hundreds of thousands of CVE reports that there are neither time nor money to triage.

[1] https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/sherman/

MattGaiser6• 6 years ago

As a society, "injury" (defined broadly to include software bugs as well as knee damage) has always been accepted for certain benefits. At some point we decide that the injuries are worth the cost of progress.

We send astronauts to space knowing that we will kill about 1 in 30 of them. We let thousands die on roads so we can move around cities quickly.

Everything we enjoy about modern society has a certain amount of injury risk.

We are constantly saying skew the bugs, let's see what happens.

photon122• 6 years ago

I feel like the idea that society has accepted software bugs for some other benefit is questionable, given that software has only had an impact on most people's lives for a relatively small period of time in relation to the amount of time humans have studied philosophy and ethics.

Edit: also I'm discussing security bugs where there are asymmetries in the risk profiles and threat models of actors and agents.

3pt14159• 6 years ago

People conflate risk (likelihood of the event) and hazard (amount of harm if the event happens) and I think it degrades our conversations. The issue with software is that hazard has quite a large range, due to class attack (hitting all instances of something at once, like a software update poisoned with malware) and I don't think even software developers understand the scale of a worst case scenario, let alone most politicians.

ihuk• 6 years ago

The part about Amazon reminded me of one of the best quotes from Frank Herbert's Dune:

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

― Frank Herbert, Dune

bartmika2• 6 years ago

“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind.“

- Frank Herbert, Dune Chronicles

abiro• 6 years ago

There is a broader point here: maximizing local efficiency in systems leads to greater fragility overall. The current COVID crisis highlights this very well with shortages due to global supply chains.

Giho3• 6 years ago

The article start with the example of to cleaners that takes a break at their job and that is seen as inefficient in today's society. But I say this is most a misuse of the word and understanding of efficiency. Taking a break is a stop in productivity short term(cleaning in this example). Efficiency can actually be better by a break, by boosting productivity long term and thus reaching the goal (clean streets) with higher quality. Most management try to think scenarios in closed simplified systems with in- and outputs at a certain time, but by doing this the bigger picture is missed. For example: By neglecting the cleaners wellbeing (physically and mentally) the output may be good cleaning for a while but as times go with no break the wellbeing decrease and so the output.

adrianN2• 6 years ago

At which point you simply fire them and hire new cleaners?

Giho3• 6 years ago

Until it affect the whole society in a way that its difficult to get productive workers or the unemployed litter more because of no good wellbeing.

quietbritishjim2• 6 years ago

The problem with this argument is that it's less important than the one in the article but easier to undermine. What if a soulless bureaucrat read it and thought, "OK then, I'll try it out and see if it increases productivity" and find that, even in the long term, it doesn't. Is that enough justification to remove breaks? If course not. The truth is, it's irrelevant whether it increases efficiency.

It reminds me of someone who believes that all torture is morally wrong, but then adds "and it doesn't work anyway". Now if someone can find a situation where it does work then they can undermine that position with addressing the core argument.

Giho3• 6 years ago

The truth is, it's irrelevant whether it increases efficiency.

Exactly that's what I want to point out. The talking in the article is not about efficiency or productivity, but that there is a moral compass we have to uphold whatever path we chose to take.

zozbot2347• 6 years ago

The truth is, it's irrelevant whether it increases efficiency.

Why? Efficiency means performance per unit of effort. Being more efficient means you can take more smoke breaks, and still perform the same.

jacobolus2• 6 years ago

reminds me of someone who believes that all torture is morally wrong, but then adds "and it doesn't work anyway".

This is not really the way the argument goes though. Person A says “torture is repugnant and should be banned”; person B responds “well how will we ever get a prisoner to answer the questions we need”.

And then person A points out that trained interrogators who build some kind of trust or at least mutual respect with those they are interrogating literally always get better results than the adversarial tough guys who jump to inflicting pain, and that if you ask effective experienced interrogators even from repressive horrible regimes, they’ll tell you “nah, skip the torture, because you’ll waste a lot of trouble getting completely worthless results. When you torture someone they’ll tell you whatever you want to hear to make you stop, and the garbage they spew under torture is never actionable. It takes a lot of hard work to undo the damage and regain enough trust to get useful information, if it’s even possible at all”.

This is not to say that torture would be fine if only it were effective, but rather that the people who torture are lying when they cite its effectiveness or potential. The people who turn to torture (or instruct others to do so) are not actually doing it because they get valuable information out of it; that’s just a rationalization. They’re really doing it for (a) the sadistic psychopathic pleasure in the act, or (b) to terrorize and degrade as an end in itself.

The folks who defend torture based on some hypothetical efficacy (always without evidence, or sometimes with “evidence” that falls apart like wet toilet paper once exposed to the most cursory examination) reveal themselves to be not only morally repugnant but also dishonest and disingenuous. Unless they are extremely naïve (e.g. schoolchildren) it is not worth having this or any other debate with them, because they are not arguing in good faith.

cosmodisk• 6 years ago

I work in an environment where everything can be measured: emails sent, calls answered, CRM cases resolved, SMS sent and so on. I can even see if anyone went to the toilet at a particular time. And I simply ignore half of it. The jobs that are being monitored are already bad enough: monotonous, repetitive,and etc. And tbh, by ignoring half of all these metrics,I somehow have almost issue free workforce, as opposed to the other department that follows it by letter. Let's be efficient but let's not go completely crazy either.

karaterobot• 6 years ago

Raises the question: do you ever wonder whether your monitoring of the employees will someday, itself, start to get monitored?

bartmika2• 6 years ago

“See how easily our technologies turn on us? The more power you think you have, the more quickly it slips from your grasp.“

- Tracer Tong, Deus Ex

The older I get, the more prophetic that quote becomes.

lazyjones• 6 years ago

One can't lament about maximized efficiency in societies and corporations while ignoring competition. If Amazon doesn't optimize, Alibaba will take over and nothing will change for the better. If we put more "humanity" in our food production, our food will become more expensive and most people will opt for cheaper, imported food. There are always dependencies, consequences, prerequisites for interventions in the natural order of things and far too many articles get written in total ignorance of these. And far too often, bad examples of modern consumer products (like the grocery-ordering fridge or Facebook) are used to argue against efficiency.

nojs• 6 years ago

Reminds me of this pg classic [1]:

When we say that one kind of work is overpaid and another underpaid, what are we really saying? In a free market, prices are determined by what buyers want. People like baseball more than poetry, so baseball players make more than poets. To say that a certain kind of work is underpaid is thus identical with saying that people want the wrong things.
Well, of course people want the wrong things. It seems odd to be surprised by that. And it seems even odder to say that it's unjust that certain kinds of work are underpaid. Then you're saying that it's unjust that people want the wrong things. It's lamentable that people prefer reality TV and corndogs to Shakespeare and steamed vegetables, but unjust? That seems like saying that blue is heavy, or that up is circular.

In the same way, it’s “lamentable” that people buy mass-produced products that are slightly inferior and cheaper, but not surprising.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html?viewfullsite=1

perl4ever• 6 years ago

You can fool some of the people all of the time; therefore you should rationally invest all your efforts in maximizing resource extraction from those people. That means the less foolish aren't provided with good choices, so how can society evolve to choose good stuff?

Tarq0n• 6 years ago

One important example of this is pensions. Some people argue that we should settle for less consumption and economic growth. However, our concept of retirement is predicated on these. If you want to change the workings of the economy, you have to reinvent retirement first, or you'll end up with the elderly starving.

flingo• 6 years ago

Food's a fun example, because there's currently too much of it. At least in my part of the world, the price of various foods is moderated by the government buying or selling huge stocks of it.

My bigger concern about that is all of the fossil fuels getting wasted doing the haber-process for food nobody's going to use.

bostik2• 6 years ago

The word missing from the post is "headroom". In critical systems it's more often called safety margin.

If you let the beancounters squeeze out headroom in the name of greater efficiency, you sacrifice resilience and reliability. In other news, water is wet.

H8crilA• 6 years ago

Funnily enough - margin of safety is also exactly what works best in capital(ist) markets. See Graham&Dodd, or Buffett&Munger.

This reminds me that capitalism will probably be just fine once people are reminded (yet again) about what risk is, and that they should treat all their counterparties well, to get those long term win-win situations.

agustamir• 6 years ago

This reminds me that capitalism will probably be just fine once people are reminded (yet again) about what risk is

Can you elaborate on this? What is the risk, and what do people need to be reminded of?

bambax7• 6 years ago

It’s important to realize that Amazon isn’t violating any rules, nor even (on the surface) societal norms.

Not taking orders from robots, or having your agenda defined by robots/automatic scripts, should in fact be a societal norm. One can argue with a human boss, however bad or mean or stupid they are. You can't argue with a robot and that's what makes people's lives miserable.

studentik• 6 years ago

Professor Julian Birkinshaw judges that we may go from knowledge era where technologies lower transaction costs to zero to post-knowledge era where we use our knowledge to make more people feel better emotions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVP0tb6FzCs

rland5• 6 years ago

Many things are so much less efficient now, though.

Where formerly we ate what was in season, we now have produce shipped around the globe, sometimes raw foods shipped across the ocean and turned into process foods and then shipped right back again. We eat meat in nearly every meal.

We used to die quickly at home when we were incurably sick; now we cling to half-life for years or decades.

We used to let our kids out the front door when they were bored, now we drive them all over town for everything in their busy calendar.

When we wanted to learn how to do a job, we'd talk to someone doing it and start working directly under them, quickly making ourselves useful. Now we spend years learning totally unrelated stuff, just to prove that we're human beings with a pulse who can be hired.

Now, flying across the world to have fun is 'necessary,' because parks and natural areas in our own backyards are not enough.

etc...

oehtXRwMkIs7• 6 years ago

Your basic premise actually is fact, not opinion, despite the weak evidence you present.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

Planet Money had a great episode on this with Nordhaus.

quotemstr3• 6 years ago

Anti-modernity is a tiresome perspective. It's always the same: the past was some kind of lost idealistic state and the contemporary world is a fallen and corrupt one inimical to the human spirit. Every generation has had people who thought this way, going back at least as far as the Sumerians. so what? Writing something doesn't make it true. In reality, technology has been a huge boon to humanity, and the more of it we have, the better.

Where formerly we ate what was in season, we now have produce shipped around the globe, sometimes raw foods shipped across the ocean and turned into process foods and then shipped right back again

Yes. Now instead of eating salt pork and tubers all winter, we can enjoy a healthy and balanced diet year-round. How inefficient.

We used to die quickly at home when we were incurably sick; now we cling to half-life for years or decades.

People like Stephen Hawking can lead a full life. How inefficient.

We used to let our kids out the front door when they were bored, now we drive them all over town for everything in their busy calendar.

Travel across town can happen in minutes, not hours. Our kids can visit their friends and have rich social connections instead of helping with the corn harvest. How inefficient.

When we wanted to learn how to do a job, we'd talk to someone doing it and start working directly under them, quickly making ourselves useful. Now we spend years learning totally unrelated stuff, just to prove that we're human beings with a pulse who can be hired.

Previously, you were born into a trade and just joined your father's guild. Now someone of any background can prove himself via an impartial process and work on problems he feels passionate about. How inefficient.

Now, flying across the world to have fun is 'necessary,' because parks and natural areas in our own backyards are not enough

Now people can experience all humanity has to offer instead of limiting their perspectives to whatever backwater their parents happened to call home. How inefficient.

bambax7• 6 years ago

Our kids can visit their friends and have rich social connections instead of helping with the corn harvest.

The reason our kids don't help with the corn harvest and have "rich social connections" (?) is that we hire immigrants do it, paying them as little as possible and denying them basic rights.

el_oni2• 6 years ago

You're not wrong, but at the same time, our western lives have lead to the exploitation of both the people and the resources of less economically developed nations.

It seems our geographic removal from that exploitation leads to an emotional removal from it in a lot of people too

Erlich_Bachman• 6 years ago

It is easy to call your perspective subjective, and people often will. You have listed many variables here, and considered together they paint a certain picture of the world. And yet, someone else could come up with many more other variables which would paint a completely different picture and outcome. Our life and the world in general are indeed very complex.

However, when I hear proponents of the anti-modernity, it is hard to take them seriously because I immediately start to wonder why is it that that they don't walk the walk and demonstrate the correctness of their estimation of the inadequacy of the modern world by moving their lives to a small village, a forest, a wild the tribe or any other place still existing today that lives by the old standards.

There is no shortage of these places, that by modern standards should be considered prehistoric. There are many perfectly functional tribes existing today, that are still operating in largely the same way as they did thousands of years ago. They live in tight connection with nature, they don't use technology, they are not subjected to apparently very dangerous and devious hazards of our modern world like small smartphone screens, long commutes in personal vehicles and overwhelming amounts of freedoms that we suffer in the city life. These tribes would be perfectly willing to accept in new members because in their present condition they always require more workforce. If the tribe life is not what one is looking for, it would surely be just as easy to move out into a forest or another natural place. 100% of the problems discussed in this topic would be completely resolved by changing the life situation in this way.

And yet you don't see people moving out of the modern society into prehistoric tribes by the hundreds of thousands. They complain about how bad the life is in the modern world, and yet don't take any of the obvious steps available to them for quickly resolving all of the issues.

This observation makes me seriously question how much of what these people say and what they are complaining about can we really trust even as accurate representations of what they believe. Life is much easier and makes much more sense when we start judging what people believe by what they do and not by what they say.

michaelgrafl• 6 years ago

You're purposefully misinterpreting the parent's point to discredit them in a way that fits your agenda.

Every single one of your examples represents the ideal outcome of the use of modern technology, as if most people's diet during Winter is more nutritious than dried or pickled meat and produce, or as if the only alternative to driving your kids to a friend in an SUV is to let it do hard manual labor on a field.

erikerikson2• 6 years ago

I haven't taken the hypothesis as "anti-modernity" but simply, "we can do yet better". These points declare benefits but felt like strawmen to me. It is better than it was in many ways and there are many ways we will continue improving. Often identifying those opportunities is part of achieving them.

Eating

Yes, that's why we do it but many eat repetitively and miss out on a lot of flavors and discovery they would likely enjoy, especially if poor. I wish high product quality would also be sustainably industrialized.

Death

I hope to live well then die quickly and inexpensively. Being brain-dead on life support brings me no value and would cost my family a lot. It was legally mandated where I live in Washington state for a long time.

Kids

Raising the bar on safety by creating laws that punish parents for letting their kids walk to the park or school or roam in the "hood" on their own is real. They used to "visit their friends and have rich social interactions) running freely around their neighborhood. That written, this seemed a point of evidence stretched in the article.

Learning

I have to agree that this was a weak point. It forgoes the benefits of cross-disciplinary research and the advances due there. But the description references college degrees as a stamp of approval rather than as a source of knowledge (and perhaps wisdom) which, in some cases, applies and is a shame.

Travel

Yes, a limited set can experience more. The hedonic treadmill is real and it does seem we've lost appreciation for what we have as well as our stewardship of those resources and ability to create more of them. We chase the "best" and often miss out on much.

In conclusion, yes the article was imperfect and most of us can agree that modernity brought many advantages but we seem a bit stuck in some ways and there have been unforseen and undesirable outcomes. Identifying where allows us to continue making it better and doing so more broadly.

bambax7• 6 years ago

The modern world is a version of the paperclip maximizer thought experiment[1], which was devised to warn about the dangers of "AI" but applies much better to us with our ordinary "I".

We make more and more things we don't need, in ever greater quantities, using more and more resources, and destroy the planet in the process. We won't stop until there's nothing left.

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

rland5• 6 years ago

Yes, the "paperclip maximizer" already applies: corporations. I can't remember the post, but someone wrote that corporations are effectively an AI which maximizes profit. In many ways, we have already invented AI; its objective function is to maximize profits, often to the detriment of, well, everything.

nahuel0x• 6 years ago

well said, this is the premise of Das Kapital in modern words.

hedora• 6 years ago

Universal Paperclips is a wonderful game:

http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips

jlg23• 6 years ago

I understand your sentiment to some degree, but I also see the benefits of modern development:

[food]

Even when we live in rather harsh conditions we can have a balanced diet (where I live, without modern means of transportation, my diet would be exclusively Barbary figs, fish and mussels. If I wanted meat, someone would have to tend goats and sheep full time and that person would have to roam a huge area to find enough food for them).

[medicine]

I am not dying of an infection, I take antibiotics.

[raising kids]

Kids can now easily try out things their parents never did, understood or appreciated. The cost for the parents is negligible while the benefit for the kids can be tremendous. (That's why know how to play the flute, how I got into software development and into theatre).

[education]

I have at least a basic understand of the problem domain when writing software for chemists or biologists; I understand political processes and have a broad cultural knowledge. Even when I don't know, I know that I don't know.

[travel]

I really understand that there are different cultures, way beyond hearsay. That allows me (to some degree) to critically reflect on my own culture, to understand what shaped it.

randomdata• 6 years ago

I have at least a basic understand of the problem domain when writing software for chemists or biologists

While that may be efficient in certain scenarios, what are the odds of winning that lottery?

As market efficiency shows up in income, and incomes have held stagnant even as the population gains more and more education, we know that most people aren't winning. They are only losing.

sillysaurusx• 6 years ago

Re: antibiotics, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xZbcwi7SfZE argues that we’ve lost respect for the effectiveness of antibiotics. That ties in with the original argument that we’ve become less efficient, or at least effective, if it’s true.

acituan• 6 years ago

I want to play the devil's advocate so forgive the extra cynicism;

Even when we live in rather harsh conditions we can have a balanced diet

We can have a balanced diet, but it is not the cheapest or most convenient; 40% of Americans are obese, and there is so much we can fault willpower for it. Heart disease, diabetes etc. being top killers, we are still actually dying and suffering from mal-nutrition. The system that fills 90% of our supermarkets with crap food is very efficient for itself, but that efficiency is not shared with the entirety of population.

I am not dying of an infection, I take antibiotics.

Yet we stumbled so hard supplying basics like masks in a rather middling pandemic. High efficiency supply chains came at the cost of high fragility, again a cost paid by the entirety of population.

Besides, death is not the worst of all fates. E.g. 1/8 of Americans are on antidepressants, and this rate is increasing sharply. 10 percent of kids are diagnosed ADHD, 60% of which are pushed amphetamines, again at increasing rates. Is this an increase in efficiency? For whom?

Kids can now easily try out things their parents never did, understood or appreciated.

Novelty at all costs is the core mission of AI recommended content pushed to kids. Do you think a nation that can't fight with high obesity rate is really doing well with limiting screen time? Do we know the long term effects of this 'stimulation obesity'? Again, this is efficiency for the company that profits from the engagement, and we're just gonna roll with the experiment and see where the costs will show up.

I understand political processes and have a broad cultural knowledge

Look at the quality of political discourse dominating the US. Does it sound educated, able to reflect critically, able to allow ideas fight instead of people? Many attended to college, paid high tuition sure, but what was gained in the end? The system they attended, the admin class grew and made money very efficiently indeed. Did it reflect to the quality of education?

I really understand that there are different cultures, way beyond hearsay

Almost the entire rest of the world already understands this because certain dominating "cultures" long been in their land, whether by force or through TV, internet, merchandise, food etc. Kids in far far away places grew up with Batman, McDonalds, Coca Cola, they watched MTV when TV was a thing, now we're letting YouTube decide what they should find relevant etc. The fact that an American is required to travel to understand there are different cultures is an exception and a privilege.

thinkloop• 6 years ago

Effeciency makes luxuries possible. Luxuries are stacked effeciencies.

faeyanpiraat3• 6 years ago

I dont know, I kinda prefer living a half-life.

In a sense everyone is damaged in one way or another.

In the meanwhile there is always a chance of getting a new cure.

Except when you are no longer available..

rland5• 6 years ago

I have a very personal/weird opinion on this issue. I'm type 1 diabetic, so I must have insulin or else I have a couple painful weeks to live, at best.

On the one hand, yes, modernity keeps me alive, at far greater than "half-life," thanks to control theory and hi-tech sensor technology. But on the other hand modernity was the very thing which caused my t1d in the first place -- environment is thought to cause t1d, with rates much higher in developed countries.

This issue is one of those 'what does it all mean' type of issues, for me personally.

throw0101a4• 6 years ago

Where formerly we ate what was in season, we now have produce shipped around the globe, sometimes raw foods shipped across the ocean and turned into process foods and then shipped right back again. We eat meat in nearly every meal.

If you live in a coastal city, it may actually be more efficient (on a J-per-kg basis) to have something shipped from far away on a boat than over land in a truck. I'm sure there's cross-over point between the two that can ostensibly be calculated.

eezurr• 6 years ago

From reading the article, it appears the author is talking about efficiency and convenience.

Where formerly we ate what was in season, we now have produce shipped around the globe, sometimes raw foods shipped across the ocean and turned into process foods and then shipped right back again. We eat meat in nearly every meal.

The author touches upon this when he chooses to wait at the butcher for fresh bacon vs walking into a grocery store and leaving a minute later with plastic wrapped water logged bacon. The convenience (i.e "efficiency") is the multitude of options available at the grocery store, at the cost of human interaction and quality.

We used to die quickly at home when we were incurably sick; now we cling to half-life for years or decades.

I think this falls outside of the articles context

We used to let our kids out the front door when they were bored, now we drive them all over town for everything in their busy calendar.

This culture was created from "stranger danger" and helicopter parenting.

When we wanted to learn how to do a job, we'd talk to someone doing it and start working directly under them, quickly making ourselves useful. Now we spend years learning totally unrelated stuff, just to prove that we're human beings with a pulse who can be hired.

As mentioned, author talks about the loss of humanity.

Now, flying across the world to have fun is 'necessary,' because parks and natural areas in our own backyards are not enough.

It is convenient to do so, and like the grocery store, there are more options

mlthoughts2018• 6 years ago

These all seem like valuable, positive aspects of progress and increased efficiency to me.

Waiting a year to eat another in-season fruit or vegetable is a bad thing that we ought to use technology to solve. It’s not wholesome or contentment or whatever, it’s a bad, unproductive limitation.

Apprenticeships often lead to servitude and heavily suppressed wages, more similar to indentured servants. It is not a glamorous or romanticized vision of steadily mastering a craft.

All of your examples follow this pattern. It reads like Luddite anti-progress fantasy and glorification of past limitations like a sort of noble savage lie.

derefr3• 6 years ago

We used to let our kids out the front door when they were bored, now we drive them all over town for everything in their busy calendar.

Now, now. We can't really do the former any more in most of America; there's nowhere for kids to go. Overstrict zoning, and massive property developments plopped down in outlying low-land-value areas, has killed suburbia and replaced it with exurbia. Most detached single-family homes in America are now in "housing islands" in the middle of huge stretches of nothing, only accessible to urban centers by highways. (And without viable public transit accessible to said kids, because adults are too car-obsessed to fund it.)

And that's not really more or less efficient; it's just silly and self-defeating. People buy these houses precisely for the dream of suburbia; but they find it isn't there to be found. It's not a vicious cycle; it's simply a trick, a con, on the part of the property developers, misleading people into thinking they can have their whole family integrated with the life of a city despite living many miles away from it with no easy access.

A child could have a "busy calendar" in the 1950s—friends, hobbies, clubs, sports, etc.—and get along just fine, because they actually could walk to everything in town, because they functionally lived "in" the town they lived in. (Or they didn't live "in" a town at all, but rather "on a farm" — but that used to be its whole own lifestyle with its own coping mechanisms. Now suburban children may as well live on a farm as well—but without even the livestock to bother.)

Udik• 6 years ago

we now have produce shipped around the globe

That is in fact extremely efficient, as it allows to grow food in an industrial way: at scale, with optimal process and conditions.

We used to die quickly at home when we were incurably sick

And also to remain sick forever when we were curably sick, for lack of cures. Amputated limbs for simple infections, lifelong toothaches, broken backs, skin, ear and eye infections, fleas, etc.

to learn how to do a job, we'd talk to someone doing it and start working directly under them

Yes, sent as an apprentice at an artisan's shop, probably before age ten. Or working in the fields (all that nice ploughing, by hand) or just learning your father's trade.

stareatgoats• 6 years ago

He points to a real problem, but the solution is - what? We are not in a position to say "efficiency must stop", all we can say is ~"this efficiency drive has serious drawbacks" - which we can say in all perpetuity to no avail.

I'm wondering if this is might be a problem of "incomplete models". Defined such, the human need for "inefficient gaps" in their work could be factored into the models, and we might get something that resembles a less controlled mode of production again, which doesn't burn out the workforce.

But I wouldn't hold my breath.

cheesecracker12• 6 years ago

I thought the 8 hour work week was introduced by Ford, because he figured out it would maximize productivity. Not by Unions. Pretty sure Tim Bray has turned full socialism, to be honest.

If an "efficiency rate" leads to too many injuries, it is not the best "efficiency rate". I don't think you need Unions to figure that out, it is in the capitalist interest to then reduce the efficiency rate.

I find the whole idea of discussing "how much should we work" very telling. It comes from a position of high privilege and ignorance - the idea that we live in abundance, and stuff only needs to be distributed somehow.

If you are naked in the jungle, the question is not "how many hours should I work", the question is "what do I have to do to survive". If it takes 80 hours to build shelter, make a fire and hunt some food, then you'll work 80 hours.

If you manage to build stuff that reduces your work load, good for you. Like in the jungle, build a net that automatically catches fish, so you don't have to spent so many hours hunting. Not you have spare time. Good for you. But don't ask some imaginary entity (god? capitalism? the government?) to provide you with your spare tie and assign your jobs.

I'd like to add that to me the story of the 8 hour work week is also a warning before corporate employment. Because if 8 hours maximize your productivity, it means you are wasted after 8 hours. All you can still hope to do is eat and watch some TV. But that's not a reason to me to blame corporations . If you don't like it, negotiate with the corporations to work only part time, or seek to improve your skills so that you can ask for more money and afford more spare time. Nobody owes anybody a job.

ianleeclark• 6 years ago

I thought the 8 hour work week was introduced by Ford, because he figured out it would maximize productivity. Not by Unions.

The Haymarket Massacre happened 30 years prior to Ford introducing the 8 hour workday in his plants. Furthermore, there had been labor agitation resulting in 8-hour days in other parts of the country decades before Ford did so.

cheesecracker12• 6 years ago

Thanks for the information.

Nevertheless the claim that only Unions can reduce work hours is simply false. People can negotiate their contracts. Many people work less than 40 hour work weeks.

bambax7• 6 years ago

The word "efficient" isn't defined in the article. Is it a synonym for "productivity" (output per worker)?

Modern society seems obsessed by productivity. It's interesting for example that the mission statement for the Gates Foundation is to build a world where every person has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life. Why is that? What if I don't want to be productive? Am I still entitled to be healthy, or is health reserved for "productive" people?

In Cape Town, at the top of Table Mountain lives a species of little mammals, the dassie (rock hyrax). They spend most of their day staring into the void, not looking for food, not mating, doing nothing. (I know because I once spent a day watching them.) The official explanation is that they either stand guard for predators, or they stay immobile in the sun to keep warm.

But isn't it possible they're having an aesthetic experience? The scenery there is simply breathtaking, and changes constantly due to moving clouds just below. Contemplation is possibly the least productive activity one can think of; yet it's vital, if not for dassies, at least for us humans.

One possibility may be that we love productivity so much, simply because it's eminently, and easily, measurable: weight the output, divide by the number of workers, done.

We need a way to measure contemplation.

quotemstr3• 6 years ago

Am I still entitled to be healthy, or is health reserved for "productive" people?

Who pays for the sustenance of these idle people and why are they obligated to do it? Life is not sustained by manna from heaven. Life is sustained by the hard work of real people. Glorifying idleness is a giant "screw you" to the people who make civilization possible.

zozbot2347• 6 years ago

We are of course not obligated, but it's a good bet that those who are currently idle will become productive if we enable them to do so, and we all stand to benefit. Teach a man to fish, and all that.

bambax7• 6 years ago

That is a very clear answer to the question! So the health promise is simply transactional.

fortran77• 6 years ago

the people who make civilization possible.

People like you?

Hallucinaut• 6 years ago

Sometimes I just lie down and look at the roof. I enjoy these times, but all sense of enjoyment would be lost the moment you develop a metric to track my contemplatative moments

bambax7• 6 years ago

Fair point. What I mean is, if we want to be allowed to be contemplative, even for brief periods of time, we need to help society find value in contemplation, or else it will be squeezed out of us.

orwin• 6 years ago

Increasing efficiency does increase productivity, but to increase productivity you don't have to increase efficiency. You just have to add more machines.

But when those machine can't eat anymore, you'll see productivity decline.

jwr• 6 years ago

There is also another side to efficient systems: as you remove the slack, they become fragile. The inefficiencies are what allows systems to adapt to changing environments.

You could also think of this as the bias-variance tradeoff, lack of generalization, or overly specific adaptation.

This can be seen in the supply chains and economies right now with the COVID-19 impact. Economies with ultra-efficient supply chains (like the US or Western Europe) are being hit the worst, while those with slack and inefficiencies (like Central/Eastern Europe post-communist countries) can absorb the impact much better.

fierarul• 6 years ago

Efficiency is very unevenly distributed. If only my local and national administration would be half as efficient as Amazon!

scandox• 6 years ago

This is such an obvious and basic truth to most working people that it barely merits saying. It is only we that have to "work it out". That's why many of us that do this work are so valuable to our employers: we aim for efficiency without asking what it is efficient for.

Efficiency without a specific goal doesn't mean anything. It's like Philip K Dick's Autofac. Just a replication machine.

malkia• 6 years ago

Several times in my software engineering career, I've experienced cases where super-optimizing a system leads to later removing the optimzation due to critical bugs found much later (threading, racing conditions, producing invalid data, etc.), thus leading to less performant than before software.

ReptileMan• 6 years ago

When you optimize a complex system for single variable you get suboptimal strange and shitty results. This is revelation that every software engineer and gamers know by heart after year of experience.

kstenerud• 6 years ago

It’s important to realize that Amazon isn’t violating any rules, nor even (on the surface) societal norms. Waste is bad, efficiency is good, right? They’re doing what’s taught in every business school; maximizing efficiency is one of the greatest gifts of the free market. Amazon is really extremely good at it.

It's important to realize that tycoons cornering the market in days gone by weren't violating any rules or societal norms. They were just maximizing efficiency. Same goes for industrial revolution era business owners demanding 16+ hour work shifts and tossing the broken people aside. You didn't need much skill to feed the machines; just functional hands.

Eventually, society steps in and changes the rules to favour the downtrodden, and those who stand to lose from the change fight and complain bitterly about interference and the unfairness of making their efficiency harder to achieve, and then it gets pushed through regardless and life goes on.

We may not be able to prescribe remedies against future abuse in many cases (and probably shouldn't in some), but we can at least recognize it when it's there, and do something about it. That's what a free society is about.

aj7• 6 years ago

Just think how much more efficient porn is than the real thing.

lifeisstillgood• 6 years ago

In practice, interest rates stay low, governments can borrow more or less for free, and all sorts of crazily doomed shit is getting investment funding.

Please continue this while I find something to get VC funding

smitty1e• 6 years ago

A few points:

* People scale poorly. There is a reason Agile favors a "less is more" approach.

* There is more than one dimension. Money is an easy metric, but not the sole one. Diminishing returns kick in when we optimize for frog$kins.

* Wisdom is hard to communicate. If human wisdom were cumulative, we should have long ago reached some paradise where everyone shares their toys nicely. Doesn't happen, and great parents are followed by dull kids. And the wiser parents somehow have less offspring than the fools. This, too, is counterproductive.

082349872349872• 6 years ago

Normally one optimises GDP because that's (a) more or less measurable, and (b) more or less correlates with things that individual wants out of society. Part of Bray's point is that going for too much efficiency is like going for pure returns at the expense of risk, another part is that GDP is merely means, not the end, and blindly optimising for GDP continues to do so even when increasing GDP starts negatively correlating with having a worthwhile society.

Efficiency yes, but please to measure in human utility per input, not in currency output per input?

dgudkov• 6 years ago

The key question that is missing in the article - efficient for whom, buyers or sellers? Too often (but not always), business is a zero sum game. Make customers pay 20% more without extra cost and your business will be 100% more profitable (assuming 20% profitability). Or, which happens more often, cheapen quality/cost by 20% while retaining the price, and your profitability doubles.

Competition is supposed to enforce efficiency on sellers, but the temptation to cheapen quality is just too big, because it turns out customers are less picky than they should've been in theory, and are ready to give up quality for something free (as free social network) or cheaper (as cheaper sugar-laden food). So when your competitor cheapens quality and it goes down well with the customers, what else can you do besides watching your market share shrinks?

EDITED: typos.

hrktb3• 6 years ago

The efficient for whom par is clearly stated all along, with even a direct mention:

and (for the business) efficient

Otherwise on the bigger point about competition: it doesn’t seem to me the landscapes are that tight, except when you’re in the efficiency game.

If your target is Amazon, you’re in for a ride and can leave your ethics in the closet. If your goal is to find a viable niche where you can grow with your customers, you won’t be in a zero-sum, drive the prices to the ground kind of rat race.

Finding that kind of niche if of course far from easy, now I’d argue a rat race to become the next Amazon isn’t either.

ComodoHacker• 6 years ago

what else can you do

Either follow the suit or cater to subset of customers who value quality.

inerte• 6 years ago

An article I read recently makes a similar point on maximizing only one side of supply and demand and the effects for consumers and “quality”, in this case, how animals are killed. Good read: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/7/8/21311327/farmers...

dnc• 6 years ago

Related to this and discussed quite a few times on HN ([1],[2]), 'In Praise of Idleness', an essay by Bertrand Russell: https://libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Prais... . I return to it every once in a while, if not to regain a bit of sanity, than just to enjoy clarity of thought and style in his writing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21509144 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015092

xg15• 6 years ago

Efficiency is not the problem, because the term "efficient" by itself is meaningless. You have to define what you consider the "costs" to minimize or the "benefits" to maximize to even be talking about efficiency.

In many cases, the quantity that is being optimized is simply profit.

dpflan• 6 years ago

Yes, the article mentions the metrics movement that allows these efficiency calculations. Other variables need to be added to the equation to maximized (and minimized) such as employee well-being.

moomin• 6 years ago

Pretty much everyone in management should read “Slack” by Tom DeMarco. And try to make changes to free up that time for their reports. It will pay off.

throw0101a4• 6 years ago

I am reminded of this observation from another thread:

If we suppose that the goal of society is to produce the greatest utility, and that the utility wealth provides an individual is sub-linear (i.e. twice as much money makes you less than twice as happy), then inequality is inefficient resource allocation.
However, we also suppose that some level of inequality can lead to greater productivity, and thus greater utility overall. The question is then what level produces the best outcome?

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505342

mdale• 6 years ago

Some great commentary here :)

I for one am enjoying being not so efficient this morning.

csours2• 6 years ago

“All of the overcapacity that has been squeezed out of our healthcare system; we now wish we had it. All of the redundancy in our food production that has been consolidated away; we want that, too. We need our old, local supply chains — not the single global ones that are so fragile in this crisis. And we want our local restaurants and businesses to survive, not just the national chains.”

Just In Time - the machine that changed the world (See Toyota Production System)

Just In Time works great, until it doesn't. The factory works at 1 unit per minute, demand is pretty inelastic. Society is pretty elastic, if a bunch of people decide they want toilet paper TODAY, the Just In Time system is going to starve out.

gwern• 6 years ago

Just In Time works great; that and other efficiencies have brought humanity to a world so cosmically wealthy, so infinitely more developed than robust decentralized green (ie. medieval peasant standard of living) economies, that its inhabitant can lounge around eating bon-bons getting obese while endlessly resharing on social media the same photo of one shop out of thousands being out for a day or two of a luxury as a devastating indictment of Just in Time.

jimbokun5• 6 years ago

There were a lot of articles written about the Great Toilet Paper shortage, but in reality after a short period of time everyone got all the toilet paper they needed.

I think the system responded very well.

known• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

derefr3• 6 years ago

Summary: Certain (not all) Amazon warehouses seem to have per-employee injury rates that are significantly higher than the industry average, as in twice as high or more. Apparent reason: It’s not they’re actually dangerous places to work, it’s just that they’ve maximized efficiency and reduced waste to the point where people are picking and packing and shipping every minute they’re working, never stopping. And a certain proportion of human bodies simply can’t manage that. They break down under pressure.

Wouldn’t a more parsimonious explanation be that the job previously consisted of a safe part and a dangerous part, and it was easier to automate the safe part, so now more of a human's time on the job is spent doing the dangerous part?

If you imagine the "safe part" of the job as "slack" (i.e. imagine that the employees were previously half working, and half doing nothing—not that they actually were, but it makes the model clearer), then they've effectively just gotten rid of all the slack, and so made the employees do twice as much work per work day. If there's a constant small probability of injury per item packed, then of course doing twice as much work per work day, will lead to twice as many injuries per employee per work day. You'd have gotten the same number of employee-injuries out per items-packed in, no matter what time scale that packing occurred on.

padiyar83• 6 years ago

If there's a constant small probability of injury per item packed, then of course doing twice as much work per work day, will lead to twice as many injuries per employee per work day

This assumes injury-risk is a linear function of number of items packed. That's not true. Fatigue increases injury-risk - that is how tired you and your entire team is while performing the task. If the person sorting the packages up the line is tired and making mistakes, the person binning it is more prone to mistakes, leading to an injury. In summary, there is a "fatigue-threshold" after which injury-risk increases non-linearly (say exponentially) with every item packed.

derefr3• 6 years ago

If fatigue is a simple threshold (i.e. you "become fatigued" after a certain number of units of work done), then the obvious solution is to work the employees at 100% utilization for half as long (at which point they should be roughly as fatigued as the employees worked half as hard for twice as long), and then swap them out for a second shift. (I.e., instead of having 10 employees with 40hr weeks, you now have 20 employees with 20hr weeks.)

This is the approach I believe is also advised for improving productivity/decreasing errors in the medical field (where doctors have a hard time not pushing themselves to 100% all the time, because of their personalities): hire more doctors per hospital, such that each doctor can be cut down to a shorter shift (and thus maybe lower salary, too.)

If, on the other hand, fatigue is about the lack of micro-rests between individual units of work, then the appropriate solution is more subtle:

1. replace the low-quality rest of doing "slack" work, with high-quality rest of doing nothing-at-all (or even "actively" resting, the equivalent of an athlete doing cool-down stretches between sets of an exercise), so that employees can cool down more quickly and/or return closer to peak productivity from each rest;

2. have slightly more employees (hopefully fewer than double), working off branching lines, such a way that units of work are directed to go to whichever employee is "fresh" rather than "stalled." Like processors with pipelined executions and multiple APUs per core, directing instructions to the APU that isn't currently blocked.

SideburnsOfDoom• 6 years ago

The question is not always "Is this efficient?" but "Who is this efficient for?"

A lot of the things that he is describing are very efficient for the company providing them, and now less so for the customer.

yogthos• 6 years ago

Words like efficiency and freedom are loaded terms that have an implicit context. It's always important to ask what the context actually is. Efficient to what end, or freedom to do what. All too often we discover that we are not the beneficiaries of the efficiencies and freedoms being discussed.

mcguire2• 6 years ago

"Item: Speaking of which, it seems that when you have a problem with a business, the process for solving it each year becomes more and more complex and opaque and irritating and (for the business) efficient."

Hey, I was there! Back in the '90s, IBM was getting too many support calls for AIX forwarded to the AIX team, so they introduced another layer of phone tech support to cut down on it.

Just Too Efficient

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