They feel like opposites and I it strikes me as strange to think they can be achieved at the same time.
This probably roots on how I tried to understand slack in terms of the magic the gathering colors terms as a very green property. Evolution can either be radiative or convergent. You can either have natural selection or natural expression. In a cuthtroat world only the very best survive and the smallest mistake gets you killed. In a world of abundance flexibility lets you go into niches you didn’t know you could thrive in.
With color wheel one could think efficiency as a black concept ie which costs are worth taking (Can I and do I want to cut off my arm in order to get my objectives?) or blue concept (What is the easiest and minimum amount of effort to get me to my objective?). A slack green would oppose as enemy color to black that having an arm is big chunk of flexibility just thrown away, it would make sense to lose this battle in order to go into future battles with both arms. It is okay to carry around limbs that are not crucial for the issue at hand. As opposition to blue, achieving only your goals mean you miss out on growth. Doing one thing good means you are only going to do one thing in your life. Being vibrant and adaptative lets you grab the sunshine where it happens to be rather where you are looking for it.
I haven’t read Zvi’s post, but would have thought that the good of slack can be cashed out in efficiency, if you are optimizing for the right goals (e.g. if you have a bunch of tasks in life which contribute to various things, it will turn out that you contribute to those things better overall if you have spare time between the tasks).
If you aren’t in the business of optimizing for the ultimately right goals though, I’d think you could also include slack as one of your instrumental goals, and thus mostly avoid serious conflict e.g. instead of turning out as many cookies per minute as I can, aim to turn out as many cookies as I can while spending half my time not working on it, and setting aside a bag of each ingredient. Perhaps the thought is that this doesn’t work because ‘slack’ is hard to specify, so if you just say that I have to be away from the cookie cutters, I might spend my time strategizing about cookies instead, and that might be somehow not slack in the right way? Plus part of the point is that if things go awry, you want me to be able to put all my time back into cookies briefly?
There is probably a process to burn slack to get efficiency and to use efficiency to create slack. I am somewhat skeptical that just having spare time would make overall time spent less. The way I would imagine a slack approach working out for greater efficiency would be like having a drinking pause and conversing with a buddy who gives a tip about the cookie making that makes it go more smoothly.
I would also think that instead of using only half the time a slack approach would be just bake cookies to achieve mastery better by being deliberate and slow instead of setting tighter and higher bars. Like pausing to wonder about the philosophy of baking.
I have also this analog about anticipating things go wrong. In a military setting having a reseve can be used to address when a default operation goes wrong. A optimization focused mind might think that they need to assign the minimum amount of soldiers to get each task done so that reserve is as big as it can get so it can more forcefullly address problems. But overassigning soldiers to tasks makes each of them less likely to fall. So being slack about it could mean that you want a reserve so that there is flexibility if main plan goes awry but you want the main plan to be flexible enough so it doesn’t brittle immidietly on the first hiccups.
If it was important that the cookies are made (big party or something) I would probably do them slowly rather than doing them quick and then idling. For big things the difference of being able to withstand 0,1 or 2 catasrophes is pretty big. If you do it quick and have some probability of having to do it from scratch again there is some probablity of spending double time on it. So one approach of increasing the expectancy of success would be to buff up the reliability rather than the number of shots. If you can aim that one bullseye it doesn’t matter how many arrows per second you can shoot at the target. One could think this as bullseyes per arrow in eficiency terms. But one could also think about all the factors taken into account: wind, gravity, breathing rythm, arrow conditions and material, muscle tension, sunglare, followthrought, degree of pull on the string. If any of the factors would have been different would you have known to adjust for it? Slack is the degree of disruption permitted while maintaining goals, the multitude of ways things could have unfolded.
Yes, this feels related to slack. No-one has really figured out how to get both slack and efficiency.
They feel like opposites and I it strikes me as strange to think they can be achieved at the same time.
This probably roots on how I tried to understand slack in terms of the magic the gathering colors terms as a very green property. Evolution can either be radiative or convergent. You can either have natural selection or natural expression. In a cuthtroat world only the very best survive and the smallest mistake gets you killed. In a world of abundance flexibility lets you go into niches you didn’t know you could thrive in.
With color wheel one could think efficiency as a black concept ie which costs are worth taking (Can I and do I want to cut off my arm in order to get my objectives?) or blue concept (What is the easiest and minimum amount of effort to get me to my objective?). A slack green would oppose as enemy color to black that having an arm is big chunk of flexibility just thrown away, it would make sense to lose this battle in order to go into future battles with both arms. It is okay to carry around limbs that are not crucial for the issue at hand. As opposition to blue, achieving only your goals mean you miss out on growth. Doing one thing good means you are only going to do one thing in your life. Being vibrant and adaptative lets you grab the sunshine where it happens to be rather where you are looking for it.
Efficiency enables more slack in a well functioning priority stack.
How often is the world actually a well functioning priority stack?
the world doesn’t have a priority stack, people do.
I haven’t read Zvi’s post, but would have thought that the good of slack can be cashed out in efficiency, if you are optimizing for the right goals (e.g. if you have a bunch of tasks in life which contribute to various things, it will turn out that you contribute to those things better overall if you have spare time between the tasks).
If you aren’t in the business of optimizing for the ultimately right goals though, I’d think you could also include slack as one of your instrumental goals, and thus mostly avoid serious conflict e.g. instead of turning out as many cookies per minute as I can, aim to turn out as many cookies as I can while spending half my time not working on it, and setting aside a bag of each ingredient. Perhaps the thought is that this doesn’t work because ‘slack’ is hard to specify, so if you just say that I have to be away from the cookie cutters, I might spend my time strategizing about cookies instead, and that might be somehow not slack in the right way? Plus part of the point is that if things go awry, you want me to be able to put all my time back into cookies briefly?
There is probably a process to burn slack to get efficiency and to use efficiency to create slack. I am somewhat skeptical that just having spare time would make overall time spent less. The way I would imagine a slack approach working out for greater efficiency would be like having a drinking pause and conversing with a buddy who gives a tip about the cookie making that makes it go more smoothly.
I would also think that instead of using only half the time a slack approach would be just bake cookies to achieve mastery better by being deliberate and slow instead of setting tighter and higher bars. Like pausing to wonder about the philosophy of baking.
I have also this analog about anticipating things go wrong. In a military setting having a reseve can be used to address when a default operation goes wrong. A optimization focused mind might think that they need to assign the minimum amount of soldiers to get each task done so that reserve is as big as it can get so it can more forcefullly address problems. But overassigning soldiers to tasks makes each of them less likely to fall. So being slack about it could mean that you want a reserve so that there is flexibility if main plan goes awry but you want the main plan to be flexible enough so it doesn’t brittle immidietly on the first hiccups.
If it was important that the cookies are made (big party or something) I would probably do them slowly rather than doing them quick and then idling. For big things the difference of being able to withstand 0,1 or 2 catasrophes is pretty big. If you do it quick and have some probability of having to do it from scratch again there is some probablity of spending double time on it. So one approach of increasing the expectancy of success would be to buff up the reliability rather than the number of shots. If you can aim that one bullseye it doesn’t matter how many arrows per second you can shoot at the target. One could think this as bullseyes per arrow in eficiency terms. But one could also think about all the factors taken into account: wind, gravity, breathing rythm, arrow conditions and material, muscle tension, sunglare, followthrought, degree of pull on the string. If any of the factors would have been different would you have known to adjust for it? Slack is the degree of disruption permitted while maintaining goals, the multitude of ways things could have unfolded.