Just Too Efficient

This is the approach I believe is also advised for improving productivity/decreasing errors in the medical field (where doctors have a hard time not pushing themselves to 100% all the time, because of their personalities): hire more doctors per hospital, such that each doctor can be cut down to a shorter shift (and thus maybe lower salary, too.)

If, on the other hand, fatigue is about the lack of micro-rests between individual units of work, then the appropriate solution is more subtle:

1. replace the low-quality rest of doing "slack" work, with high-quality rest of doing nothing-at-all (or even "actively" resting, the equivalent of an athlete doing cool-down stretches between sets of an exercise), so that employees can cool down more quickly and/or return closer to peak productivity from each rest;

2. have slightly more employees (hopefully fewer than double), working off branching lines, such a way that units of work are directed to go to whichever employee is "fresh" rather than "stalled." Like processors with pipelined executions and multiple APUs per core, directing instructions to the APU that isn't currently blocked.

I was thinking the same thing recently, reading a New York Times review panel on Hamilton. Someone said they didn't focus enough on slavery, and that the casual mentioning of Sally Hemings was tasteless. I posed the same thought: If Sally hadn't been mentioned at all, they wouldn't have commented on the lack of focus on her. If they didn't make a point of being a multiracial cast, or had lyrics condemning slavery, would there have been so much criticism for the magnitude of their condemnation?

This phenomenon of "talking about something, then being attacked for not caring/knowing enough" seems to be happening more and more online.

EDIT: it would also be remiss not to add that much of the power of unions has been stripped away by union busting and bad legislation

If Marx was still alive today, I think that he would answer the question about how modern workers have such better conditions than those in early capitalism the exact same way as when people in his time said that proletarian had better conditions than the peasants before them, which was nominally true.

In any case, the prescriptions of how a 19th century proletarian could improve their life are essentially the same. The idea is that the interests of your employer will always he opposite yours, as a result you will only be able to improve your conditions by organizing with your fellow workers in order to tip the balance of power, and eventually it is in your interests to change the conditions that lead to this conflict to begin with.

To claim that Marx isn't relevant for worker conditions today is to either misunderstand him or misrepresent him. The contradictions arising from social conflict can't be solved by air condition because they are bound to our mode of production.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/how-the-8-hour-workday-chang...

Unions are a way of making HR listen.

Edit: also I'm discussing security bugs where there are asymmetries in the risk profiles and threat models of actors and agents.

People like you?

This is not really the way the argument goes though. Person A says “torture is repugnant and should be banned”; person B responds “well how will we ever get a prisoner to answer the questions we need”.

And then person A points out that trained interrogators who build some kind of trust or at least mutual respect with those they are interrogating literally always get better results than the adversarial tough guys who jump to inflicting pain, and that if you ask effective experienced interrogators even from repressive horrible regimes, they’ll tell you “nah, skip the torture, because you’ll waste a lot of trouble getting completely worthless results. When you torture someone they’ll tell you whatever you want to hear to make you stop, and the garbage they spew under torture is never actionable. It takes a lot of hard work to undo the damage and regain enough trust to get useful information, if it’s even possible at all”.

This is not to say that torture would be fine if only it were effective, but rather that the people who torture are lying when they cite its effectiveness or potential. The people who turn to torture (or instruct others to do so) are not actually doing it because they get valuable information out of it; that’s just a rationalization. They’re really doing it for (a) the sadistic psychopathic pleasure in the act, or (b) to terrorize and degrade as an end in itself.

The folks who defend torture based on some hypothetical efficacy (always without evidence, or sometimes with “evidence” that falls apart like wet toilet paper once exposed to the most cursory examination) reveal themselves to be not only morally repugnant but also dishonest and disingenuous. Unless they are extremely naïve (e.g. schoolchildren) it is not worth having this or any other debate with them, because they are not arguing in good faith.

Exactly that's what I want to point out. The talking in the article is not about efficiency or productivity, but that there is a moral compass we have to uphold whatever path we chose to take.

Why? Efficiency means performance per unit of effort. Being more efficient means you can take more smoke breaks, and still perform the same.

Can you elaborate on this? What is the risk, and what do people need to be reminded of?

- Tracer Tong, Deus Ex

The older I get, the more prophetic that quote becomes.

However, I love having the option to just start the dish washer and do other stuff instead.

There's a point where more automation does not mean things become easier.

Let's take the same dishwasher example. Of course it saves a lot of time for a family of four, for example. Pop it in and you're done.

But for example, for a single person, this makes much less sense. Because the time it takes for putting it in the dishwasher, waiting to fill the machine and running the cycle is longer than just washing the damn dishes.

No automation is "free". And overautomation causes problems as well.

It's notable that in a lot of Europe, the welfare systems we have today, for example, while they happened under pressure or fear of socialism, were pushed through with the help of Christian democrats.

E.g. Bismarcks pension and healthcare bills that effectively formed the first large-scale welfare system were blatant attempts at stemming the growing support for what he saw as dangerous socialist parties becoming a threat to the established order - while stealing some of their social policies he proceeded to ban dozens of groups and newspapers and arrest their leaders. But he passed those bills with the help of the conservative Christian "Zentrum", the forerunner of Merkel's CDU, by appealing to Christian values.

For that audience, and over-simplifying greatly: all communists are trying to create a decentralized system that evenly spreads power, and the main split among them is how to actually do that. Anarchists think we should build decentralized power structures until they've replaced our current centralized ones. Marxist-Leninists think we should replace the state with one that promises to implement communism later.

Distributism reads a lot like somebody heard of Marxism-Leninism, thought it was dumb, reinvented anarcho-communism in response, and then described the result as opposed to communism, even though it's largely the same idea as one of the main branches of communist theory.

http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips

> Even when we live in rather harsh conditions we can have a balanced diet

We can have a balanced diet, but it is not the cheapest or most convenient; 40% of Americans are obese, and there is so much we can fault willpower for it. Heart disease, diabetes etc. being top killers, we are still actually dying and suffering from mal-nutrition. The system that fills 90% of our supermarkets with crap food is very efficient for itself, but that efficiency is not shared with the entirety of population.

> I am not dying of an infection, I take antibiotics.

Yet we stumbled so hard supplying basics like masks in a rather middling pandemic. High efficiency supply chains came at the cost of high fragility, again a cost paid by the entirety of population.

Besides, death is not the worst of all fates. E.g. 1/8 of Americans are on antidepressants, and this rate is increasing sharply. 10 percent of kids are diagnosed ADHD, 60% of which are pushed amphetamines, again at increasing rates. Is this an increase in efficiency? For whom?

> Kids can now easily try out things their parents never did, understood or appreciated.

Novelty at all costs is the core mission of AI recommended content pushed to kids. Do you think a nation that can't fight with high obesity rate is really doing well with limiting screen time? Do we know the long term effects of this 'stimulation obesity'? Again, this is efficiency for the company that profits from the engagement, and we're just gonna roll with the experiment and see where the costs will show up.

> I understand political processes and have a broad cultural knowledge

Look at the quality of political discourse dominating the US. Does it sound educated, able to reflect critically, able to allow ideas fight instead of people? Many attended to college, paid high tuition sure, but what was gained in the end? The system they attended, the admin class grew and made money very efficiently indeed. Did it reflect to the quality of education?

> I really understand that there are different cultures, way beyond hearsay

Almost the entire rest of the world already understands this because certain dominating "cultures" long been in their land, whether by force or through TV, internet, merchandise, food etc. Kids in far far away places grew up with Batman, McDonalds, Coca Cola, they watched MTV when TV was a thing, now we're letting YouTube decide what they should find relevant etc. The fact that an American is required to travel to understand there are different cultures is an exception and a privilege.

While that may be efficient in certain scenarios, what are the odds of winning that lottery?

As market efficiency shows up in income, and incomes have held stagnant even as the population gains more and more education, we know that most people aren't winning. They are only losing.

However, when I hear proponents of the anti-modernity, it is hard to take them seriously because I immediately start to wonder why is it that that they don't walk the walk and demonstrate the correctness of their estimation of the inadequacy of the modern world by moving their lives to a small village, a forest, a wild the tribe or any other place still existing today that lives by the old standards.

There is no shortage of these places, that by modern standards should be considered prehistoric. There are many perfectly functional tribes existing today, that are still operating in largely the same way as they did thousands of years ago. They live in tight connection with nature, they don't use technology, they are not subjected to apparently very dangerous and devious hazards of our modern world like small smartphone screens, long commutes in personal vehicles and overwhelming amounts of freedoms that we suffer in the city life. These tribes would be perfectly willing to accept in new members because in their present condition they always require more workforce. If the tribe life is not what one is looking for, it would surely be just as easy to move out into a forest or another natural place. 100% of the problems discussed in this topic would be completely resolved by changing the life situation in this way.

And yet you don't see people moving out of the modern society into prehistoric tribes by the hundreds of thousands. They complain about how bad the life is in the modern world, and yet don't take any of the obvious steps available to them for quickly resolving all of the issues.

This observation makes me seriously question how much of what these people say and what they are complaining about can we really trust even as accurate representations of what they believe. Life is much easier and makes much more sense when we start judging what people believe by what they do and not by what they say.

> Eating

Yes, that's why we do it but many eat repetitively and miss out on a lot of flavors and discovery they would likely enjoy, especially if poor. I wish high product quality would also be sustainably industrialized.

> Death

I hope to live well then die quickly and inexpensively. Being brain-dead on life support brings me no value and would cost my family a lot. It was legally mandated where I live in Washington state for a long time.

> Kids

Raising the bar on safety by creating laws that punish parents for letting their kids walk to the park or school or roam in the "hood" on their own is real. They used to "visit their friends and have rich social interactions) running freely around their neighborhood. That written, this seemed a point of evidence stretched in the article.

> Learning

I have to agree that this was a weak point. It forgoes the benefits of cross-disciplinary research and the advances due there. But the description references college degrees as a stamp of approval rather than as a source of knowledge (and perhaps wisdom) which, in some cases, applies and is a shame.

> Travel

Yes, a limited set can experience more. The hedonic treadmill is real and it does seem we've lost appreciation for what we have as well as our stewardship of those resources and ability to create more of them. We chase the "best" and often miss out on much.

In conclusion, yes the article was imperfect and most of us can agree that modernity brought many advantages but we seem a bit stuck in some ways and there have been unforseen and undesirable outcomes. Identifying where allows us to continue making it better and doing so more broadly.

It seems our geographic removal from that exploitation leads to an emotional removal from it in a lot of people too

The reason our kids don't help with the corn harvest and have "rich social connections" (?) is that we hire immigrants do it, paying them as little as possible and denying them basic rights.

Every single one of your examples represents the ideal outcome of the use of modern technology, as if most people's diet during Winter is more nutritious than dried or pickled meat and produce, or as if the only alternative to driving your kids to a friend in an SUV is to let it do hard manual labor on a field.

On the one hand, yes, modernity keeps me alive, at far greater than "half-life," thanks to control theory and hi-tech sensor technology. But on the other hand modernity was the very thing which caused my t1d in the first place -- environment is thought to cause t1d, with rates much higher in developed countries.

This issue is one of those 'what does it all mean' type of issues, for me personally.

One thing that comparing GDP per capita growth tends to show is that global and regional overall development totally swamps even seemingly large changes like the 35 hour week.

What the change also tends to gloss over is that the number of hours worked per worker in France is not particularly low. According to OECD, for 2019 it stood at 1505 vs. 1538 for the UK or 1386 for Germany. The reduction in France, to the extent it changed anything, may have distributed work a bit more but it did not suddenly drastically reduce the hours worked.

The average number of hours worked per worker dropped somewhat over the few years after the reform, but it dropped across all the major OECD countries, and by similar rates.

Nevertheless the claim that only Unions can reduce work hours is simply false. People can negotiate their contracts. Many people work less than 40 hour work weeks.