Efficiency vs Resilience
The cluster centers on the trade-off where optimizing systems for efficiency increases fragility and reduces resilience, often highlighting the value of slack, buffers, and redundancy in complex systems like supply chains and finance.
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It feels like a general rule of thumb is that the more efficient you make a system, the more brittle it becomes
If you take the slack out of a system you make it more "efficient" but also more fragile in the face of the unexpected.
Key sentence: "When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break."
Systems generally become more efficient when under stress. They are also forced into local optima - everything has upsides and downsides.
Is that a bad thing? Maybe that's how systems become more efficient.
Increases in efficiency make systems less resilient. Buffers tend to be optimised away.
It's not money, it's efficiency. Too much efficiency results in a lack of resiliency.
A complex system ruthlessly optimizes for profits...and is anyone surprised that other metrics grow worse?
Shhh, or somebody will realize how much slack there is in the system (for very good reasons, as evidenced here) and "optimize" it away...
Complexity increases in every system till it fails. Avoiding this entropy may be impossible.