Efficiency

Interesting post. This isn’t the motivation for M, but my theory about efficiency is that it’s primarily driven by laziness. It’s not really my own theory, I think my dad believes something similar. I’ve told this story before, right? After he finished grad school, he was applying for jobs and had an interview with IBM. They asked him to describe himself and he answered that he’s lazy.

His reasoning, of course, is like I said, that efficiency and innovation is driven in part, maybe even largely, by some element of laziness. Being unsatisfied spending all this time doing something a certain way, and figuring out a way to do it faster, better. He believes (I think) that invention is frequently driven this way. I think it’s true. The only concrete example I can think of at the moment is the creation of Perl, but yeah, I think there’s truth to it.

Anyway, yeah, my dad’s English skills didn’t quite convey this well, so the interviewer just responded, “Lazy? That’s… not a good quality.” Whoops!

Lazy is actually a bad word for it. More accurately, it’s a desire to do what they want to do, and compact as much as possible the time required to do other stuff. I say this because frequently (not always), people who care a lot about efficiency aren’t really trying to be “productive” all the time. They have no problem spending lots of time screwing around. And that’s the point. Not to be maximally productive, but to spend more time doing what you want, and the least amount doing what you don’t. Shouldn’t we all want that?

As for me, I’m the worst of all worlds. Spend copious amounts of time screwing around and don’t care that much about efficiency. C’est la vie.