Post No.: 0836
Furrywisepuppy says:
Seeking efficiency always seems like a sensible goal. But we’ve got to be careful about specifically what conditions we’re trying to be most efficient for?
For instance, just-in-time (JIT) in supply chain dynamics – where goods are received from suppliers only as and when needed – is efficient because stockpiling inventory for any length of time is costly due to warehousing costs. But it’s a fragile strategy because if something like a coronavirus pandemic or uncertain Brexit-type transition period hits a country then there’ll be no stockpiles as a buffer to keep the business or economy running. So efficiency under ideal circumstances is risky if there are things like supply chain problems in this context.
Maximal efficiency can conflict with robustness. Scale conflicts with agility. Maximisation in one aspect conflicts with flexibility. It’s similar to the conflict between specialisation (being the best at just one thing and focusing on that, which can be most lucrative career strategy as long as that specialisation is in demand) and generalisation (being decent but perhaps not the best at many things, which affords more adaptability if the markets change).
This explains how something, like a species of creature, can naturally evolve to become super-specialised and efficient in a particular environmental niche, but if that environment suddenly changes or we try to place it in a very different environment then it’ll suffer or fail badly. The fluffy giraffe may find it hard to survive if tall trees no longer exist in Africa, for instance. This is why rapid climate change is so deadly to many species of animals and plants. They will not have enough time to evolve for the new conditions; and if they cannot adapt, they will die off. Life is fragile, and shouldn’t be taken for granted (see other planets). Woof.
We do have to note though that specialising doesn’t necessarily make one better at that niche than someone who generalises across multiple niches. For instance, we get some people whose only language they speak is English and they use it every single day, yet their English is worse than the English of some people who had learnt it as their second or third language! Someone who only plays racing videogames might still have spent less time playing racing videogames in total than someone who plays all kinds of games, including racing games – perhaps because the first player only plays rarely while the second plays every day – hence we shouldn’t expect the former to be better than the latter at racing games despite that genre being the only one they play.
Natural selection doesn’t ‘over-engineer’ to create ‘über beings’ but tends towards minimal designs that a species needs to be to survive and reproduce because any excess is expensive to maintain if not required (including tails for humans). Of course, minimal is still technically enough, as long as the circumstances are stable. (Just to note – natural selection doesn’t have a drive towards ‘creating the best designs imaginable’ per se – it works with whichever random mutations it happens to be dealt with and according to a specie’s present environment; given enough time and environmental stability, since evolution isn’t instantaneous. It doesn’t ‘pick and choose’ from a full palette of all genetic variances possible. For humans, we can imagine way more optimal designs and instincts, like less vulnerable lower backs, more durable eyesight, and better instincts for statistical information – if there were an intelligent designer who had omnibenevolence for humans. It’d be a dangerous game to play god in such detail ourselves though because we don’t know what unforeseeable consequences could materialise. And indeed would you still be human if you meddled so much with your own genetic code; or would this not really matter?)
An advantage in one context can be a disadvantage in another, like a larger mass or being brightly coloured. There’s no ‘ultimate best design’ hence species have and will continue to go extinct – albeit this doesn’t mean that humans are morally fine in accelerating this process for many species(!) But humans have a great capacity to adapt rather than be slaves to their innate instincts – they can learn and impose regulations on their behaviours.
Adaptability is the key if you want to reduce risks, in order to be flexible enough to cope for or survive in a variety of different situations or environments.
However, building adaptability into a system can be inefficient and wasteful if it’s not needed – like owning and driving an SUV (sports utility vehicle) that’s rugged enough to go off-road even though one will basically never ever drive it outside of a city or suburb! (We know when things are bought only for posing with when they’re not utilised to anywhere near their maximum functional capability, like dive watches never going undersea and supercars never going near their top speeds!)
So it’s not as simple as saying one should build in adaptability. There’s no single strategy that’s best for all conditions and environments. There are plans that come with higher potential returns but they come with higher risks, whereas lower risks usually come with lower potential returns.
And reducing risks in one place can increase risks elsewhere. So a government could spend millions on stockpiling tons of expensive PPE (personal protective equipment), just in case of an emergency, but then it all never ends up being used and then much of it goes out-of-date and thus wasted. There are opportunity costs, or competing demands, for our money or time. With the benefit of hindsight, we’ll know exactly when we needed a large stockpile of PPE and when we didn’t – but that’s with the benefit of hindsight!
Competition can urge competing businesses to improve the efficiency of their operations so that they can reduce their costs, in turn so that they can reduce their prices, and thus attract more custom. Yet once more it’s not as clear-cut as that because competition can create unnecessary waste too. For instance, supermarkets would rather their suppliers of fruit and vegetables over-produce because if they’re left under-stocked then customers will likely go to a competing supermarket for their groceries instead.
Rapid adaptability can also be at odds with remembering past lessons. Although there are ways to minimise it – a characteristic of artificial neural networks is that they are prone to catastrophic interference or the forgetting of older training data in favour of newer training data. It’s like being quick to forgive someone after they appear to change their ways but then in turn being quick to forget the harm that this person did to you in the past – although in the case of a human intelligence, one can forgive yet not forget, which makes being quick to forgive an idea that works.
Howbeit, humans can fall prey to over-extrapolating from the latest result that sticks in the mind too, as if everything – including a line on a graph – must have the momentum of a thrown object! Early in the season, if your team wins three matches in a row then it’s ‘we’re going to win the league!’ but if they then lose the next three matches on the bounce it’s ‘the title race is over’ – yet if they win the next game after that then ‘the title chase is back on!’ Veteran managers know not to get carried away either way so early on, or really until something is mathematically certain. Our intuitions are poor at holding in mind the biggest picture. We’ll more likely imagine calamity if the last news story we hear is about war. We’ll more likely think all will be fine if the last news story we hear is about peace. So sometimes the last mood we’re left in appears to override all that we’ve learnt before, due to our limited working memories and WYSIATI. Yet this is why mindfulness meditation and focusing on the present helps to ground us because right now you’re probably okay, unlike when ruminating about the regretful past or scary future.
Salespeople and politicians who appeal to our emotions can exploit this though – for instance, you could go into a shop with a plan to not buy anything that’s not on your shopping list, but a salesperson or discount sticker will convince you to buy something unnecessary because all your ‘system one’ is thinking about right now is the sales pitch or apparent reduction. Your plan isn’t forgotten per se but ignored – but it’s the same end result unless you engage your ‘system two’ to weigh up the bigger picture.
Well linking back to the topic of efficiency, our system two is lazy and isn’t employed unless consciously directed to – but another word for ‘lazy’ could be ‘attempts at maximising energy and time efficiency’(!)
‘Efficient’ could mean something that ‘works well enough most of the time’ rather than ‘works perfectly every time’, like our instincts. A lot of our decisions are determined by our present circumstances rather than via mentally unadulterated free choice; and most of our decisions are made subconsciously or unconsciously rather than consciously and effortfully. We barely critically think about all of the decisions we make in our daily lives since this would be largely inefficient. (Our biases will tend to make us think we’re always in total conscious control of ourselves as rational beings who always make rationally well-thought-out decisions though!)
As long as the same work is completed satisfactorily, perfectionism is inefficient when the time spent on producing perfection won’t make a real-world difference.
But although most decisions in daily life are fine to be automatically made in the subconscious or unconscious domain – there are many times when we end up making irrational decisions. Our instincts can fail – and consistently and cataclysmically so – especially in these modern environments where our innate instincts weren’t honed for i.e. different situations or environments than where they were specialised for. For example, trusting what we see despite modern image manipulation technologies, or consuming too many calorie-dense foods where these things are highly available and plentiful.
Physical laziness may appear energy efficient because the less we move, the fewer calories we need to consume – but to make up for our personal laziness, we often use less energy efficient machines like cars and electrical appliances to get around or do stuff for us instead. (And many people still consume more calories than they need for moving about anyway!)
Even where efficiency gains can be made – we’ll typically just exploit those gains rather than save them. For instance, if they get better home insulation, some people will just use the same amount of energy as before but live in a warmer house!
Efficiency isn’t necessarily about saving – it’s ultimately about getting more out from what you put in. So an efficient car engine system can either save any found gains so that it can travel for longer on a given amount of fuel (e.g. a Toyota Prius), or instantly spend any found gains so that it can go faster (e.g. a McLaren P1, which also utilises a hybrid engine). Getting more out from what you have is like being frugal with your money, hence it’s not necessarily about being miserly. It’s about maximising what makes us happy but in a more sustainable way. So you could, say, get the exact same electricity supply you wanted but at a cheaper price because you shopped around, so that you can go on a holiday with what you saved.
It should therefore not be surprising that the pursuit for better economy and the pursuit for higher performance can involve the exact same design goal of efficiency – it just depends on whether one will save or immediately spend the gains. Perhaps we therefore shouldn’t automatically assume that improving economy (managing Earth’s resources) is always at odds with improving the economy (making more money).
Woof. In summary – efficiency can mean fragility as well as maximisation. And it can mean saving or spending the gains.
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