Against efficiency

Full Moon and Crow, by Ohara Koson, 1900-1930

A line I think about more and more these days, from Taleb’s Skin In The Game: “Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners, or squeeze more ‘efficiency’ out of it (and out of your life) will eventually make you dislike it.”

From Jacobs

But you can’t optimize systems in a context that’s changing, especially if it’s changing in unpredictable ways. Removing inefficiencies when circumstances are as anticipated means that there isn’t much slack in the system to respond when the unanticipated happens. Optimization is intrinsically brittle, because it’s about closely matching the output to the conditions, which means it’s vulnerable if those conditions change. What we’ll need from our infrastructural systems, more and more, is for them to be resilient, able to absorb uncertainty and changing circumstances either without failing or by failing gracefully and reversibly, rather than unexpectedly or catastrophically.

Chachra, How Infrastructure Works, page 249

Mandy Brown, inspired by Deb Chachra’s brilliant new book: “Optimization presumes a kind of certainty about the circumstances one is optimizing for, but that certainty is, more often than not, illusory…. Another way to look at this is that you cannot optimize for resilience. Resilience requires a kind of elasticity, an ability to stretch and reach but then to return, to spring back into a former shape—or perhaps to shapeshift into something new if the circumstances require it. Resilience is stretchy where optimization is brittle; resilience invites change where optimization demands continuity