

A Parable - grosales
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd594.html

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Create
The children's bedtime story [from a former(?) Russian satellite] version of
this parable is a projector film slide series titled "The coloured pencil",
from the same era. It cheekily teaches the parents on how a "cost driven
market based" pencil factory had a brilliant innovator, arguing, that there is
no need for graphite in the end of a pencil, since nobody can use pencils when
they are shorter than a cm or so. The savings made on using less graphite was
stellar, the innovator got promoted.

Seeing the success, soon the second innovation followed: what use is the wood
at the end of the pencil, when there isn't any graphite inside? Less wood,
more profit.

And this handling of "externalised" costs continued until the pencil became
dysfunctional, unusable (Dijkstra as a programmer would notice the powerful
idea of recursion).

The story ends with the reinvention of the pencil, and a huge prime for the
genius.

Back to Dijkstra's version: an MBA market analyst would come up with a
"research" study which concludes, that in order to improve the "user
experience" of the customers on the train, at least (two) WC-s would be needed
in each wagon, pocketing a hefty consulting fee for the ground breaking
innovation.

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3pt14159
I get the story. I even kind of like it, but I still can't help thinking it
would have been cheaper just to outfit everything with toilets and get on with
life.

I kind of feel the same way about laptop "stand by" for energy saving (good
motive, wasteful execution). My time = money and the cost of having my laptop
turned on needlessly per hour is less than 2 cents while my wasted time every
time it happens when I'm just about to use it/reading what it says is worth
more than 2 cents. If it is about the environment I would rather them just
double the price of electricity and use that towards green initiatives.

~~~
tierack
The idea is that, initially, all cars had toilets (see the invisible emphasis
of "only" in "if only fifty percent of the cars would be equipped with a
toilet"). Of course, there must have been plenty of cost associated with
handling toilet complaints and training (and re-training) at the shunting
yard, but we can guess that the long term savings made up for that.

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sb
just for the record: there are _lots_ of brilliant articles in dijkstra's
EWDs. i am particularly fond of trip reports (almost always funny),
programming language comments (e.g. EWD498, or EWD898: " _Stop BASIC before it
stops you_ ") and insights to the commercial field of computer science (EWD
898: "I have fond memories of a project of the early 70's that postulated that
we did not need programs at all! All we needed was _intelligence
amplification_. If they have been able to design something that could
_amplify_ at all, they have probably discovered it would amplify stupidity as
well; in any case I have not heard from it since.")

~~~
jcl
Might he have been talking about Douglas Englebart's "Augmenting Human
Intellect" project? (which invented the mouse as well as provided the
foundation of GUIs, hypertext, and the Internet -- although any amplification
of intelligence is debatable.)

