<story><title>Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better</title><url>https://psyche.co/ideas/why-efficiency-is-dangerous-and-slowing-down-makes-life-better</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>roughly</author><text>&amp;gt; Fragile systems are often very successful for a long time because they ignore hidden risks and then collapse due to the unexpected.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s another interesting aspect to this in that things that are failures from some perspectives may not be from others.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s long-term fatal.&lt;p&gt;As a hypothetical example, let&amp;#x27;s say you take a company making $1M a year and trim $19M a year of costs out of it. The company lasts another 10 years and then collapses. You&amp;#x27;ve netted an extra $190M out of that company, or nearly 200 years at their previous rate.&lt;p&gt;In that case, it&amp;#x27;s in your local interest to strip the company bare, even if it&amp;#x27;s not necessarily optimal for your partners, workers, society, or any other stakeholder in this wonderful interconnected world of ours. The benefits are concentrated, the costs are distributed, and there&amp;#x27;s no mechanism for connecting the two.</text></item><item><author>yt-sdb</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s a nice way to think about, and it reminds me of Nassim Taleb&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;antifragile&amp;quot; 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.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Antifragility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Antifragility&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>bschne</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve found &amp;quot;efficiency as the opposite of stability&amp;quot; a very powerful concept to think about - even though it&amp;#x27;s fairly simple, it seems to be almost a fundamental law.&lt;p&gt;Whether it&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x2F;damping out of the system and become instantly more liable to catastrophic failure if some of your basic conditions change. Efficiency gives you a speed bonus, at the cost of increased risk &amp;#x2F; less resilience to unforeseen events.&lt;p&gt;Stewart Brand&amp;#x27;s concept of &amp;quot;Pace Layering&amp;quot; comes to mind for how to deal with this at a systemic level - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;jods.mitpress.mit.edu&amp;#x2F;pub&amp;#x2F;issue3-brand&amp;#x2F;release&amp;#x2F;2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;jods.mitpress.mit.edu&amp;#x2F;pub&amp;#x2F;issue3-brand&amp;#x2F;release&amp;#x2F;2&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>marcus_holmes</author><text>Even better, why not get the company to borrow against those 10 years of income, and pay you your profit now?&lt;p&gt;Even better, since you now don&amp;#x27;t actually even need to keep the company alive for 10 years since you&amp;#x27;ve already got your profit, you can sell the company&amp;#x27;s assets now and increase your profit!&lt;p&gt;Except there&amp;#x27;s not a company in the world that this logic doesn&amp;#x27;t apply to (at some point). Asset-stripping has killed off a few old companies that were ready for it, sure. But it&amp;#x27;s also destroyed lives and communities that didn&amp;#x27;t deserve that.&lt;p&gt;There is more to life than money, and one of the things that this article is talking about is that we need to recognise that.</text></comment>
<story><title>Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better</title><url>https://psyche.co/ideas/why-efficiency-is-dangerous-and-slowing-down-makes-life-better</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>roughly</author><text>&amp;gt; Fragile systems are often very successful for a long time because they ignore hidden risks and then collapse due to the unexpected.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s another interesting aspect to this in that things that are failures from some perspectives may not be from others.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s long-term fatal.&lt;p&gt;As a hypothetical example, let&amp;#x27;s say you take a company making $1M a year and trim $19M a year of costs out of it. The company lasts another 10 years and then collapses. You&amp;#x27;ve netted an extra $190M out of that company, or nearly 200 years at their previous rate.&lt;p&gt;In that case, it&amp;#x27;s in your local interest to strip the company bare, even if it&amp;#x27;s not necessarily optimal for your partners, workers, society, or any other stakeholder in this wonderful interconnected world of ours. The benefits are concentrated, the costs are distributed, and there&amp;#x27;s no mechanism for connecting the two.</text></item><item><author>yt-sdb</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s a nice way to think about, and it reminds me of Nassim Taleb&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;antifragile&amp;quot; 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.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Antifragility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Antifragility&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>bschne</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve found &amp;quot;efficiency as the opposite of stability&amp;quot; a very powerful concept to think about - even though it&amp;#x27;s fairly simple, it seems to be almost a fundamental law.&lt;p&gt;Whether it&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x2F;damping out of the system and become instantly more liable to catastrophic failure if some of your basic conditions change. Efficiency gives you a speed bonus, at the cost of increased risk &amp;#x2F; less resilience to unforeseen events.&lt;p&gt;Stewart Brand&amp;#x27;s concept of &amp;quot;Pace Layering&amp;quot; comes to mind for how to deal with this at a systemic level - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;jods.mitpress.mit.edu&amp;#x2F;pub&amp;#x2F;issue3-brand&amp;#x2F;release&amp;#x2F;2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;jods.mitpress.mit.edu&amp;#x2F;pub&amp;#x2F;issue3-brand&amp;#x2F;release&amp;#x2F;2&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dependsontheq</author><text>Only if you define local interest as purely financially motivated. I am not even talking about the ethics, but even social status is not only dependent on wealth. We are much more than a bank account number, thinking that we are is more or less a pathological disease, because rationally it makes no sense.</text></comment>