Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better

Re:Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better by clairity on Friday August 21, 2020 @04:36PM (#24238624)

i stumbled on "stability' too, because it's a static quality.

rather than robustness, i prefer to use the term resilience, a dynamic quality, since efficiency is also a dynamic quality. you can trade efficiency for resilience and vice versa (as the parent poster switched to later).

edit:

i should add that i don't entirely agree with the thesis of the article, which exhorts us to slow down, thereby trading efficiency away for resilience. there are a number of ways to add resilience (and trade away efficiency), and in some cases, slowing down might be the best, but it's certainly not the only, or best, option in most cases.

for housing, an example used in the article, we could add more housing to create resilience, which requires reducing friction, like increasing the throughput of permitting/inspections while generally reducing zoning/regulations.

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Re:Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better by civilized on Friday August 21, 2020 @05:18PM (#24238974)

I like resilience better as well - here it just happens that the technical terms of statistics match up fairly nicely with what we're trying to say.

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Re:Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better by akendo on Saturday August 22, 2020 @10:53AM (#24244520)

Do you have any reference or source of this statement? Just asking out of curiosity.

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Re:Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better by throwaway815190 on Friday August 21, 2020 @05:05PM (#24238878)

I'm completely ignorant on this topic, so I apologize for asking what must be an extremely stupid question to you, but: what makes stability a static quality whereas resilience is a dynamic quality? Are these statistical definitions that I can look up somewhere?

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Re:Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better by vulpesx2 on Saturday August 22, 2020 @07:53AM (#24243515)

Not OP, but my take is that stability is usually defined as a base-state that will continue onto perpetuity unless some outside force disrupts it. Resiliency is more closely defined as the ability to recover from disruptions back to the base-state quickly.

Since the context here is that efficiency can remove layers of redundancy therefore allowing disruptions to wreck more havoc - I believe that's what OP was getting at.

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