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Comment by fallous | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, the more efficient you become the more brittle you will be. You must depend upon the present being static and the future being perfectly predictable based on the events of the past. The present and the future don't merely need to be dependable within your own domain but also in the entire world.

The flexibility necessary to succeed in a real world requires a certain level of inefficiency.

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Interestingly, the same effect shows up in communications systems. The more efficient an error correction code (ie. the closer it approaches the Shannon Bound), the more catastrophically it fails when the channel capacity is reached. The "perfect" code delivers no errors up until the Shannon bound then meaningless garble (50% error rate) beyond the Shannon Bound.

My point is that error correction codes have a precise mathematical definition and have been deeply studied. Maybe there is a general principle at work in the wider world, and it is amenable to a precise proof and analysis? (My guess is that mileage may be made by applying Information Theory, as used to analyse error correcting codes.)

An interesting idea but I'd imagine you would have to operate within something like the "100 year flood" boundaries that insurance companies do in order to define a constrained domain such as the Shannon Bound. I suspect you would also have to define the scope of this principle within the company and/or deal with the compounding effects of the multiple layers of the system and its "effective inefficiency."

I have heard this same criticism leveled at global supply chains as of the supply shocks of the early 2020s such as COVID, Ever Given, etc.

Yes, just-in-time supply chain systems often become over-efficient and brittle... usually because each link in the chain assumes that someone else is taking on the burden of inefficiency by having excess inventory in order to absorb shocks to the system.

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