
Just Too Efficient - MindGods
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient
======
derefr
> 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
> 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.

~~~
derefr
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.

~~~
celrod
> 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)

I am skeptical. Fatigue rate would be the delta between exertion and recovery
rate. Recovery rate is far from negligible.

Try running up several flights of stairs as fast as you can, vs taking them at
a leisurely pace. Most people would be winded after the former, but not
bothered after the latter.

EDIT: It's made more complicated by the fact that we have many different
"recovery rate"s. When talking exercise, there's the obvious "V02 max", or the
maximum rate at which we can absorb oxygen. So long as our muscles have
sugar/fat, they should be able to work if we keep our exertion below this
point.

If we exceed this, our muscles begin working anaerobically; recovering energy
there takes much longer. That's the difference between running and walking up
the stairs.

I imagine there are other types of fatigue, but I am not a
medical/health/exercise professional.

Mental fatigue is different again as well.

But there are probably background "fatigue"ing rates that are important, like
hours-since-you've-eaten. In that case, doing the same work in half the time
may be better.

It's easy to talk myself into realizing I know nothing.

------
kstenerud
> 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.

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

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-
on-moloch)

~~~
oehtXRwMkIs
>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.

~~~
phreack
What is the correct definition then?

~~~
eeereerews
Molok is the name used in the Bible for a Canaanite deity that the Israelites
were forbidden to "suffer their seed to pass through the fire to". Details are
scarce, but this is usually taken to refer to human sacrifice. It later became
syncretized with reports of child sacrifice at Carthage, where the popular
imagery associated with Molok (the idol with outstretched hands, the drums) is
taken from.

~~~
zozbot234
Carthage and Canaan did share many cultural traits, and the Carthaginians also
called themselves Canaanites. It's quite plausible that the Carthaginians
would indeed worship Moloch and make sacrifices to that god, and that the
mentions of child sacrifice in classical sources about Carthage are based on
such.

~~~
oehtXRwMkIs
I think it's still inaccurate to refer to Moloch as Carthaginian rather than
Canaanite. The latter is obviously correct, though a bit vague. The former is
contested and not as clear.

------
dnc
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...](https://libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Praise%20of%20Idleness.pdf)
. 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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21509144)
[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015092)

------
Animats
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._

~~~
CamperBob2
Comparing today's IT workplace to the conditions that inspired Marx and the
labor movement seems a tad naïve, to put it politely.

~~~
sdenton4
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.

~~~
luckylion
It works out well for the IT people as well, they're making much more than the
average employee. Most could cut back on the hours by taking a hit in the
salary. People value getting more money though.

------
photon12
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/](https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/sherman/)

~~~
MattGaiser
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.

~~~
3pt14159
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.

------
bambax
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.

~~~
quotemstr
> 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.

~~~
zozbot234
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.

~~~
quotemstr
I'm all for helping people be productive. It's a shame to waste human
potential. But if you have the ability to be productive and _choose_ to be
idle instead, nobody is under any obligation to feed, house, or clothe you. If
you want things made by other people and you're able to work, you must work.
Anything else is incompatible with basic tenets of fairness. And even ignoring
fairness and descending to the level of crude practicality, when you take from
the productive and give to the unproductive, the size of the former group
shrinks and the latter one grows. Eventually, there's not enough productivity
to go around and the whole thing collapses.

~~~
fock
still, even really productive people (such as the ones sewing your shirt)
can't yet have all of the above basic goods (let alone something extra), while
yet other people (heirs, investors, ...) are consuming insane amounts of labor
in no relation to the outputs of their "work" (if they do any). That's what
our economic system is happily covering and it's decidedly not fair in any
rational way. And its also leading to societal collapse if you're looking at
the US.

------
Giho
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.

~~~
quietbritishjim
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.

~~~
jacobolus
> _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.

~~~
quietbritishjim
I was in two minds about mentioning that analogy in case someone attempted to
address the content directly, which is what you've done. It really misses the
point of what I was saying. The point was, if you can imagine a person that
did make an argument like I said - however unlikely it is that you think it is
that anyone actually would - then hopefully you could see that it does not
communicate their point of view well. As it's an analogy, the idea is that
this lesson would carry over to what the parent comment was saying.

~~~
jacobolus
Yes, I understand the point you’re trying to make, and this analogy is fine
insofar as it refers to some kind of fictional/hypothetical conversation about
torture.

But this characterization of anti-torture arguments is a straw man, not
reflective of how the discussion goes in practice, and itself missing the
point of converations about torture’s essential ineffectiveness.

------
csours
> “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
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.

------
bostik
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
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
> 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?

------
pcstl
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](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS)

~~~
lixtra
It would be more efficient if you added the actual link

[https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS)
?

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

------
m12k
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)

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

~~~
m12k
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure)

------
ihuk
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

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

\- Frank Herbert, Dune Chronicles

------
dgudkov
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.

~~~
hrktb
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.

------
lazyjones
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
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](http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html?viewfullsite=1)

~~~
perl4ever
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?

------
kiba
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.

~~~
mqus
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)

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

~~~
alex7o
But even if I want to spend more, how will I know I am no spending more on
inefficient stuff like a touchscreen on my fridge? Spending more money is
sadly not equal to better quality, but I don't know what designates it.

~~~
icelancer
Buy industrial/commercial appliances. They're ugly as hell and last forever.
Except... people want nice looking things.

~~~
faeyanpiraat
This.

------
paganel
> 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul)

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

~~~
bartmika
“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.

------
sudeepj
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.

------
qznc
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.

~~~
zozbot234
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,

------
SideburnsOfDoom
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.

------
agumonkey
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.

------
abiro
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.

------
malkia
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.

------
xg15
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
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.

------
throw0101a
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505342)

------
stareatgoats
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.

------
082349872349872
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?

------
smitty1e
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.

------
scandox
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.

------
mcguire
" _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.

------
bambax
> _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.

------
baxtr
_> 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
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...](https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/robert-gordon-interview)

~~~
raverbashing
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.

~~~
Smaug123
Well, the wall-clock time may be longer, but the human time is much shorter.
As long as you have one meal's worth of slack in the amount of crockery you
have, the dishwasher wins by a country mile in the amount of effort expended.

~~~
raverbashing
Yes, but as I said, and the math changes for different automations, the time
(and ease) vary

Automate dishwashing for a 10 party dinner: no brainer

Automate dishwashing for one plate, one fork and one knife. Not advantageous

Automate generating a manual report that takes 30min and needs to run
everyday: no brainer also

Automate a report that needs one piece of data that's easy to get and needs to
run once a month: does it really matter?

------
studentik
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVP0tb6FzCs)

------
tonyedgecombe
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism)

~~~
sudosysgen
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.

~~~
jtolmar
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.

~~~
zozbot234
> create a decentralized system that evenly spreads power

That's simply not feasible, because many centralized systems are a _lot_ more
effective than decentralized ones. And centralized systems can't be run via a
committee or via direct democracy either, so you will always have some people
with outsized decision-making power. At least when you reward these actors
with wealth (as opposed to raw political influence, as in socialist countries)
they can then go and deploy that wealth on pro-social things, like many of
wealthiest businesspeople do in the US. Distributism has the right idea, it's
just not universally applicable.

~~~
sudosysgen
There is no socialist philosophy that objects to centralization of power as
long as it is kept in check and limited to it's usefulness

Even Anarchism doesn't say that no one should have outsized decision-making
power. Just that it shouldn't be the same people every time, that there should
be a good reason for it and that it should be kept in check. The old anarchist
example was that of the pirate ship :)

Also, decentralized systems are not always less efficient than centralized
systems. Sometimes they are much more efficient, it depends on what you are
optimizing for exactly.

Indeed, centralized decision-making, while viable sometimes, need not be
pluripotent, and it can be limited enough that it doesn't actually create a
power imbalance. Many human societies actually operated in such a way.

If you actually wish to read up a bit more on that, I'd suggest in the extreme
of reading up on anarchism. If you use debian, you should be able to apt-get
install anarchism :)

~~~
zozbot234
> Just that it shouldn't be the same people every time, that there should be a
> good reason for it and that it should be kept in check. The old anarchist
> example was that of the pirate ship

Peter Leeson has written extensively on the way actual pirate ships were run.
He sometimes calls himself an anarchist, but he makes it clear in his work
that these ships were relying on carefully-tuned institutional designs that
were not all that far from what we would now call liberal, representative
government.

~~~
sudosysgen
I don't see how that conflicts at all with what I said.

Even in the most extreme of situations, such as a pirate ship, there would be
less hierarchy than in our society (this is due to analysis of economic
hierarchy).

That is exagtly what I said.

------
lifeisstillgood
> 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

------
ReptileMan
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.

------
aj7
Just think how much more efficient porn is than the real thing.

------
moomin
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.

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

------
rland
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...

~~~
quotemstr
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.

~~~
el_oni
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

~~~
ekianjo
Developing nations are actually very happy to have work instead of abject
poverty which was their state before.

~~~
el_oni
Im sure nations are very happy with increasing GDP, and im sure families are
happy to receive 5c/h manufacturing clothes for a multibillion dollar
multinational corperation.

Just because their lives are better doesnt mean we are doing good. Not to
mention that india and most of africa wouldnt be living in abject poverty were
it not for western colonialism.

Let's go to your country, destroy your society and culture, then build a
factory and pay you pennies. Then you can thank me for pulling you out of
poverty. It's a tough sell

------
miked85
This guy sure has a bone to pick with Amazon. Did so much change in the 5
years he worked for them?

~~~
vidarh
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.

------
yogthos
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.

------
mdale
Some great commentary here :)

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

------
known
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs)

------
jwr
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.

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

It seems to be quite anemic.

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

~~~
vidarh
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.

------
cheesecracker
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
> 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.

~~~
cheesecracker
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.

~~~
macintux
> People can negotiate their contracts.

I’d wager that’s true for perhaps 10-20% of the workforce at best.

~~~
bserge
You're very optimistic :)

------
praptak
"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.

------
tommilukkarinen
"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.

