David Gowers ([info]dgowers) wrote,
@ 2007-07-21 19:33:00
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Entry tags:philosophy method

Laziness and Efficiency
(an article taken from my offline notebook)

Laziness is just a way of making more work for your self. At the least, it is a misunderstanding of efficiency - efficiency is not to employ the least effort to gain the greatest effect, but to aim for the greatest effect and spend an amount of effort that neatly achieves that effect.
If you phrase it the second way, you are not prone to thinking of 'what is the minimum effort' first and fitting your goal to that, rather it promotes thinking of goals first. Otherwise, the amount of effort you put forth tends to become a compromise between greatest effect and least effort (ie. becomes inefficient)

Why should you consistently aim for the greatest effect, when this may increase a lot the amount of effort required? Because actions are largely gambles, and a very sound principle in gambling is to, if betting at all, always increase the amount of your bet. Mathematically, assuming that the return from a successful endeavour is worth more than 1.0x the value of the effort put into it, increasing the amount of effort will consistently compensate for any earlier failed tries, both numerically in value, and in feeling. The only necessary guarding principle is efficiency (eg. it is not efficient to put forth more effort than your body can safely withstand)


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[info]rinku
2007-07-21 12:31 pm UTC (link)
This is true in intention, but there's a neat counter to it: our efforts are a limit resource, whereas our goals are not -- everyone sensible would like to do and experience and accomplish more than they have the time (in their life or in any given timespan) to do. Because of this, one has to choose goals which can be accomplished within a given timespan. So you have to look at both, neither alone is a reliable guide.

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[info]dgowers
2007-07-21 01:55 pm UTC (link)
I wrote this with everyday opportunities in mind, rather than long term planning. I mean, supposing that you're drawing, and you leave the pencil on your desk, where it remains for a week before you use it again. By the time that week is up, you have paid many times for the laziness of not putting that pencil away, in the form of encountering its presence regularly. Aiming high optimizes your ability to capture immediate opportunities (eg. to put the pencil away immediately, getting some little amount of exercise and improve your discipline; To talk to someone you admire, thereby identifying more with them and improving your disposition toward yourself by seeing how you are like this person;..) ; That's what I mean by 'Laziness makes work' -- it's almost invariably a net loss of time even though it seems like an immediate gain.

As it is oriented toward immediate usefulness, I was considering effort as simply -- amount of physical or mental effort required to achieve a result X.
Considering that over time, it should be even more applicable, shouldn't it, due to conditioning? (you do X, you can then do X longer/better, you do X, ... net result being that the amount of effort you can expend stays constant over time, but its power increases (more effect for less effort, ie. trying to increase your effort actually only maintains it at suitably high levels.))

I actually thought that time was accounted for by efficiency in my formula; what is efficiency but effort over time versus result over time (being that simple effort vs result comparison is not a reliable measurement of efficiency, even though it's often a useful one :))

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Idetrorce
(Anonymous)
2007-12-16 01:05 am UTC (link)
very interesting, but I don't agree with you
Idetrorce

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[info]dgowers
2007-12-16 02:42 am UTC (link)
My purpose in writing is thankfully not 'to be agreed with' -- an impossible proposition on the whole. More to express my ideas in a way that prompts other people to think.
For example, anonymous commenting prevents you from getting any reply, as you have no identity.
So I would like to be perfectly clear -- comments that say simply 'I don't agree' and do not explain further are not welcome - they can be in real life, but in this disconnected, logical arena, they're identical to saying 'A FBRO BRONINSE' or any other random thing -- only meaningful to the author.
And I understand that people are selfish, I think perhaps though that the thought of later eventually being reviewed by hundreds (minimum, for a single entry in an obscure web site) of people might prompt them to review their comments for usefulness.

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