The 80/80 split
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Don't believe everything you thinkThe liminal space Veteran
This is my attempt to write down a way I've slowly developed/evolved to look at the world. I'm sure it will be scattered and incomplete.
Its based on a couple rough principles. First is the notion of low hanging fruit, that you can get say 80% of the juice with only 50% of the effort. To get the last 20% takes more and more effort with diminishing returns as you try to get 100%.
Second is somewhere along the lines of tradeoffs and balance. Power vs efficiency in a vehicle, for example. You can have a very powerful race car that uses large amounts of energy on one side and you can have a very efficient vehicle that doesn't really perform at levels that serve people's practical needs. Somewhere in the broad middle there are lots of places to find a balance that serves different needs.
Combine the two principles and theoretically you could spend 50% of your effort to get 80% of the performance attributes and 50% of your effort to get 80% of the efficiency attributes. 100% effort produces a 160% outcome.
Obviously the math is stupid, its only to point out a principle. Instead of putting all of our efforts into maximizing one value, we're better off dividing and integrating our efforts and intentions to achieve a whole that is greater than the sum of our efforts.
This basic philosophy applies to all sorts of things. Worldly life vs spiritual practice. Balancing time spent with family and friends, areas of knowledge, politics, on and on.
We live in a fairly specialized world, where an academic has to pick a discipline and spend all their efforts in one sphere to really get to the cutting edge. Where media (social and mainstream) specializes in delivering one thing, so when people want that thing they know where to get the best of it. I think this has certain benefits for society at large, but it also misses area where an integration of fields/values gives added benefit. I'd like to say more about how integrating differing areas can create something greater than the sum of its parts. I have an intuition that this can be true in many circumstances, but I haven't investigated and thought it through enough.
Anyway, its really only partially formed. I guess I'm saying I think you can get more with a balanced, integrated approach than an all in specialized approach. Though now that I write that I think it probably depends on the context. I think its good general worldly advice, but if your goal is enlightenment or curing cancer specialization and maximization is what is required.
Comments
It’s an interesting way of thinking, but I’m not sure it always applies. Look at what happened in the Laptop industry in the last few years for instance. Apple turned the laptop CPU design philosophy on its head by prioritising performance-per-watt (CPU performance per unit of electricity) above all else. Prior to that, Intel and AMD had sought to create balanced architectures with fair performance and fair efficiency (perhaps what you might call an 80/80 solution).
But by starting with a best-efficiency, low-performance solution — the ARM architecture — and then relentlessly pursuing performance-per-watt over successive yearly generations of chip design, Apple created a system that matched the performance of the very best at a fraction of the energy usage, and was able to offer Laptops that had truly great performance as well as all-day battery life.
It has taken AMD and Intel three years to respond, and create chips of their own that are starting to focus on efficiency. They are still lagging substantially however, and Apple is reaping the benefits of having started from a new micro architecture design with a lot of room to grow, and in those three years Apple have doubled the performance per core while still keeping the low power use of their systems.
Can you apply this philosophy to other arena’s, by starting with a best-efficiency, low-performance approach and scaling it up to become high-performance, and to in this way achieve a higher peak ‘work per unit of energy’ output? I’m not sure, but it sure feels possible.
This is a good thought. I think it speaks to the specialization I referred to but really haven't well considered.
The thoughts that come to me are that most, if not all, of the low hanging fruit of knowledge and innovation have already been picked and specialization and optimization are required to further progress the boundaries.
I did have some sense that specialization has merit in certain areas and mentioned that, but didn't have any fleshed out ideas about it.
I think I am trying to apply my notion of 80/80 to life and that is the direction I've put my energy. I don't know if I could answer your question as it doesn't reflect my personal world view, so I couldn't ever really speak from practical experience.
The things that I am currently more concerned with are that capitalism, the dominant free market system that we use to control our economies, is starting to break and prove to not be an optimal solution for the people living within those economies.
Look at the paradigms examined within ‘Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy’. The idea of designing a product to break goes against the idea of the consumer’s ideal product with a long life, it produces more waste and shorter lifecycles. Yet it is one area where clever capitalists have identified a way to make more money. The whole fashion industry is going this way.
Another area is ‘enshittification’, the process where a company introduces a good new product or service at a good price, but after having grown to a worldwide scale starts trying to maximise it’s profits and so introduces tiers of product and in effect a worse value-for-money deal for the consumers.
I think you can certainly think of approaches to efficiency as differing in various fields, without even considering multiple axes like performance and efficiency. Take reading for example. You could say there is a concern of how to efficiently absorb high-quality ideas, and there is a concern of how to achieve a decent performance in number of pages read per hour.
What I’ve found about reading efficiently is that many books contain wrong or low-quality ideas, and that identifying those books saves you a lot of effort. So I skip through books on a first look, seeing if I can find significant passages and trying to get a feel for the general quality of a text. Then if I come across enough that’s of interest, I settle down and read the entire book cover to cover. Pure performance, or speed reading, is not a skill I have taken the time to master. I find my absorption of the subject matter is hampered by going fast.
My stepfather was someone who always put the highest quality first. He would be making an illustration, and tweaking it and playing with it, until to his eye it was exactly right. He’d produce a final version, and then a finalfinal version, and then a finalfinalfinal version after it had been to the art editors. It was quite inspiring and sometimes a little chaotic, to see how he prioritised quality.
I'm not picking up the connection you're trying to make here.
Perhaps this video makes some sense in terms of my argument. Capitalism and Socialism both focus on one value efficiency or equality. A mixed system won't get as much of either value as a specialized system, but it would get more overall. This video is short and makes that point.
I guess I don't think a balanced approach fits everywhere. In narrow and competitive arenas where the best get selected, a specialized, maximized approach is needed. That 1% more matters.
I think to my profession in construction and building. In commercial and new construction trades are very specialized. I work in residential remodels, its different there, for a homeowner being able to hire one person to do several things has a value. I look at specialists who do the same things I do and they do it a bit better and a bit faster.
In terms of quality vs cost. I'll generally ask my new clients questions to gauge where they lie on that spectrum. Most want some balance, but I have one pretty rich client who wants only the best and she'll pay me by the hour and have me redo things until they're just right. Or I'll spend way more time on something to get it just right instead of "good enough".
It’s kind of related to process optimalisation and the way business processes evolve, which speaks to the speed of completion of a workflow and it’s efficiency.
Getting the opportunity to discuss this some and have a bit of back and forth, I've come to appreciate that my approach has a great deal of dependence on the specialist approach. They do the work and effort to excel at something which allows me to spend less effort on several different areas and benefit from their knowledge and experience.
Think there is much truth to this.
A few years back, I picked up @Jeffrey's "don't eat stupid shit" principle and did nothing else regarding food. It was easy, simple, we all know what "stupid shit food" is. This could be an example of 80% of the benefit with 50% of the effort. Coupled with other positive lifestyle adjustments I made massive progress regarding health and wellbeing.
I'm trying to implement "don't do stupid shit" these days, as a kind of upgrade and widening of the principle, but so far am seeing limited progress (no fault of the principle).
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In that period of successful positive lifestyle adjustments, I was blown away by how progress in one area positively influenced other areas, often in totally unexpected ways, and how the whole thing together was a positive self-reinforcing mechanism and definitely "greater than the sum of its parts".
For instance, as a result of improved health and wellbeing, I noticed much better reasoning capacity and better relationships (due to less negative emotion and more positive emotion), things I of course highly value but was not "working on" in any way. Then these things positively reinforced other areas, such as joining a sports club (felt more at ease in social situations) and getting a prestigious professional mentoring scholarship (finally trusting my mind).
Y'all might have touched on this, but I think there are examples where trying to maximise one thing, in practice does not actually maximise it.
Ex:
Take for example the pteranodon, it looks like a really awkward flier…