[HN Gopher] 'Optimal Illusions' Review: Efficient to a Fault
___________________________________________________________________
'Optimal Illusions' Review: Efficient to a Fault
Author : lxm
Score : 13 points
Date : 2023-09-27 03:00 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| dekhn wrote:
| I'm trouble by the example the review gives (about Norman
| Borlaug's green revolution having unanticipated side effects). I
| think they're tryting to make the point that in optimizing yield,
| Borlaug caused a whole bunch of secondary side effects (family
| farms going away, massive monoculture and pesticide). And the
| conclusion they want you to reach is that by optimizing yield,
| they left out variables like "social and other effects on the
| commons".
|
| It wasn't Borlaug's job as an optimizer to consider those
| downstream effects. If he had, and hadn't done his research,
| billions of people would not be alive today (having starved to
| death or not being born in the first place). Good luck working
| out the utility function around that!
|
| I'm sure there are better examples. Maybe antibiotics, whose
| discovery saved millions of lives, but also helped bacteria
| evolve defenses, thus making some antibiotics useless due to
| overprescription?
| [deleted]
| groby_b wrote:
| https://archive.ph/f9EMF
|
| It doesn't sound like a particular insightful book - yes, models
| do not always match reality, and slack/friction are valuable
| properties we lose at our own risk. But at least based on the WSJ
| review, I'd assume these are the essence of the book.
|
| Any HN readers who actually read the book and can shed more light
| than the meagre article?
| cs702 wrote:
| Relevant here is the classic treatise, "How Complex Systems
| Fail," by Richard I. Cook:
|
| https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/course/2/2.75/resources/ran...
| dang wrote:
| Discussed in past threads:
|
| _How Complex Systems Fail (1998)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32895812 - Sept 2022 (33
| comments)
|
| _How Complex Systems Fail (1998)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25550685 - Dec 2020 (83
| comments)
|
| _How Complex Systems Fail (1998) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20380055 - July 2019 (33
| comments)
|
| _How complex systems fail (2002) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002683 - Aug 2017 (19
| comments)
|
| _How Complex Systems Fail (1998) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14127543 - April 2017 (7
| comments)
|
| _How Complex Systems Fail (1998)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8282923 - Sept 2014 (16
| comments)
|
| _How Complex Systems Fail [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926735 - Nov 2009 (1
| comment)
| cs702 wrote:
| Thank you. Yes, it's a classic, especially on HN!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-09-27 23:02 UTC)