Re:The world is full of wasted motion
by neelnanda on Thursday February 04, 2021 @04:24AM
(#26023989)
Hey! Author of the piece here
Thanks for the feedback, this prompted me to add an afterword to the piece about the dangers of optimising too hard.
To me there's a pretty important difference between 'it is systematically bad to do anything about inefficiency' and 'sometimes inefficiency is protecting something important'. I strongly agree with the second one, but strongly disagree with the first one. I think that, empirically, there often are free wins, such as making learning more efficient. And sometimes inefficiency and balance is important, but sometimes it's not, and the skill is telling the difference.
For example, I think leisure time is great, but this is because it's time to relax, take breaks and do what I enjoy. Not just because it's time that I spend not being productive. If I notice a bunch of time in my schedule not being productive, but also not enjoying myself, eg commuting to work, finding ways to swap that for more true leisure time is a good way to reduce wasted motion
You might enjoy a post I wrote on the importance of leaving Slack and spare capacity in your life: https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/38-slack - essentially on the importance of leaving some inefficiency, so you can be flexible and reactive, and seize new opportunities.
Thanks for the feedback, this prompted me to add an afterword to the piece about the dangers of optimising too hard.
To me there's a pretty important difference between 'it is systematically bad to do anything about inefficiency' and 'sometimes inefficiency is protecting something important'. I strongly agree with the second one, but strongly disagree with the first one. I think that, empirically, there often are free wins, such as making learning more efficient. And sometimes inefficiency and balance is important, but sometimes it's not, and the skill is telling the difference.
For example, I think leisure time is great, but this is because it's time to relax, take breaks and do what I enjoy. Not just because it's time that I spend not being productive. If I notice a bunch of time in my schedule not being productive, but also not enjoying myself, eg commuting to work, finding ways to swap that for more true leisure time is a good way to reduce wasted motion
You might enjoy a post I wrote on the importance of leaving Slack and spare capacity in your life: https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/38-slack - essentially on the importance of leaving some inefficiency, so you can be flexible and reactive, and seize new opportunities.