Most things in life, especially in our technological civilization, are already sort of optimized
I want to nuance that point: in my experience, as soon as I stray one iota from the one size fits all (or no one) products provided by the mass market, things either suck, don’t exist or are 10x the price.
Even the so-called optimized path sucks sometimes, for reasons described in Inadequate Equilibria. A tech example of that is Wirth’s law:
Wirth’s law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
There is a lot of software that is literally hundreds of times slower than it could be, because for example it runs on top of bloated frameworks that run on top of toy languages designed in 10 days (cough Javascript cough) that run on top of virtual machines, that run on top of OSes and use protocols designed for a bygone era.
I think that as civilization leverages economies of scale more and more, the gap between the quality/price ratio of custom goods and mass-produced goods increases, which leads to the disappearance of artisans, which means that as time goes on civilization is optimizing a narrower and narrower number of goods, and that sucks when you want a product with specific features that are actually useful for you.
Back to your point, I would say that civilization is often not optimized: we can literally do a hundred times better, but the issue is that often there is no clear path from “creating a better (or a custom) product” to “earning enough money to live”.
I want to nuance that point: in my experience, as soon as I stray one iota from the one size fits all (or no one) products provided by the mass market, things either suck, don’t exist or are 10x the price.
Even the so-called optimized path sucks sometimes, for reasons described in Inadequate Equilibria. A tech example of that is Wirth’s law:
There is a lot of software that is literally hundreds of times slower than it could be, because for example it runs on top of bloated frameworks that run on top of toy languages designed in 10 days (cough Javascript cough) that run on top of virtual machines, that run on top of OSes and use protocols designed for a bygone era.
I think that as civilization leverages economies of scale more and more, the gap between the quality/price ratio of custom goods and mass-produced goods increases, which leads to the disappearance of artisans, which means that as time goes on civilization is optimizing a narrower and narrower number of goods, and that sucks when you want a product with specific features that are actually useful for you.
Back to your point, I would say that civilization is often not optimized: we can literally do a hundred times better, but the issue is that often there is no clear path from “creating a better (or a custom) product” to “earning enough money to live”.