I appreciate the sentiment that 'it's always been like this.'
That said, I am of the view that the mindset of optimizing for efficiency and the tools we've acquired over the last 50-100 years for doing so may, in addition to the benefits, have unintended consequences on a large scale. A couple of examples; in yesterday's discussion of nurses want to leave the profession, it was observed that the buyers of EMRs are optimizing for different things than the nurses that use them, to the detriment of nurses and patients. And, Boeing's products may be less safe now that it is optimized for capital rather than engineering.
To vastly oversimplify, it seems to me that optimizing for efficiency will eventually remove all margin for error, and so errors will be more frequent. The larger the span of influence of the optimization, the more these errors will accumulate in all kinds of places and all kinds of ways. So, my running joke is that the spreadsheet may be the death of Western civilization, and it remains less funny to me as time goes on.
> To vastly oversimplify, it seems to me that optimizing for efficiency will eventually remove all margin for error, and so errors will be more frequent. The larger the span of influence of the optimization, the more these errors will accumulate in all kinds of places and all kinds of ways. So, my running joke is that the spreadsheet may be the death of Western civilization, and it remains less funny to me as time goes on.
That may be a problem that can be addressed though. Neglecting resilience to over-optimize for efficiency seems like it's symptom of stability. People, as a whole, seem to lack the wisdom to not fool themselves that they can ignore long term risks while the short term is good, especially when we're talking about spans greater than generation.
However, a lot of that stability is getting disrupted right now: the pandemic, a big land war in Europe, supply chains are fucked, etc. The war especially has blown up a lot of naive assumptions that had been taken for granted until a couple months ago. I think here's a decent chance that for the next few decades, Western civilization will value resilience far more than it has over the last few.
That said, I am of the view that the mindset of optimizing for efficiency and the tools we've acquired over the last 50-100 years for doing so may, in addition to the benefits, have unintended consequences on a large scale. A couple of examples; in yesterday's discussion of nurses want to leave the profession, it was observed that the buyers of EMRs are optimizing for different things than the nurses that use them, to the detriment of nurses and patients. And, Boeing's products may be less safe now that it is optimized for capital rather than engineering.
To vastly oversimplify, it seems to me that optimizing for efficiency will eventually remove all margin for error, and so errors will be more frequent. The larger the span of influence of the optimization, the more these errors will accumulate in all kinds of places and all kinds of ways. So, my running joke is that the spreadsheet may be the death of Western civilization, and it remains less funny to me as time goes on.