Stop blaming efficiency

post by KatjaGrace · 2011-10-03T16:00:58.000Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

Andrew Sullivan, quoting and commenting on Adam Frank:

We’re more efficient than we’ve ever been, but extreme efficiency has drawbacks:

More efficient forestation means running through forests faster. More efficient fishing methods means running through natural fishing stocks faster. … The truth is that we have limits. True connections between family, friends and colleagues can not be compressed down to tightly scheduled “quality time.” The relentless logic of efficiency can unintentionally strip the most valued qualities of human life just as easily as it strips forests.

Under a common meaning, ‘efficiency’ is just getting more of what you want for a given cost. Since people want different things, what is efficient for you may be very inefficient for someone else. If you don’t want deforestation, then my efficient tree harvesting method is not an efficient way to pursue your goals. Often people seem to forget this and think of the fact that other people are efficiently pursuing goals they don’t like as a problem with the concept of efficiency. This can then prompt them to go back and reject the original goal of efficiency in their own endeavours. Which is a very bad idea, if they are hoping to get what they want, without wasting other things they want in the process. Which is very likely what they are hoping for.

For instance if ‘the most valued qualities of human life’ are stripped by spending most of your time say efficiently pursuing career productivity, the problem is not that efficiency is bad, the problem is that you are efficiently pursuing the wrong goals. i.e. goals that are not your own, or at least not all of what you value. Being inefficient about, say, work is a terrible strategy for improving your home life, since only a miniscule proportion of the ways to be inefficient at work involve any home life improvement, and most of those not efficient improvements. Fortunately people using this strategy probably know intuitively that they will have to aim at the set of ways of being inefficient at work that do help their family lives. But once you have got as far as pursuing the values you actually care about, being efficient about them has really got to help, no matter how much your enemies also like efficiency. Similarly, don’t abandon ‘succeeding’, just because bad people also like it.

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Added: Another example.

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