Produce / Consume Ratios

I’ve been thinking about this a bit recently, and thought I’d do a dump of evidence and conjecture, and see what Less Wrong had to say.

There are lots of areas of life where activities can be partitioned into either producing products or consuming products. For those areas, it may be worthwhile to calculate one’s Produce / Consume Ratio (PCR) and also contemplate what the optimal PCR is for that area.

There’s often some ambiguity with units- I spend minutes preparing food, but I eat meals, not minutes. Even if you have the units aligned (producing and consuming meals, say), I’m not certain if “ratios” are the right measurement, rather than ‘fractions.’ The benefit of ratios is that it’s a single number, but the trouble is that there are many instances where one only produces xor consumes, which implies a ratio of either 0 or infinity; since it’s more common to consume and not produce, I’ve arranged it so those ratios will be 0, and ratios of infinity will be unlikely. (One could talk about produce fraction minus consume fraction, which would go from −1 to 1 and be a unique mapping, but I don’t find it as intuitive.)

It’s also worthwhile to remember the fifth of Deming’s Seven Deadly Diseases: running a company on visible figures alone. This ratio is just a measure of what’s going on underneath, not a goal in its own right; it’s also a dial you can turn only by adding or subtracting activities. Much of the value I’ve gotten from thinking about it so far is just that it gives me another perspective from which to view a situation, and I sometimes see something I missed before.

Food

Comparative advantage seems large here; for many meals, prep time is mostly fixed, rather than variable, and a relative preference for cooking over cleaning suggests domestic gains from trade, not to mention massive benefits from skill specialization.

This also seems like an area where the range of PCRs is fairly well developed- everyone eats, but some people never cook (0) and chefs cook many meals that they don’t eat (10-1000), and many people living alone cook most of their own meals (my ratio, eating out about one and a half times a week and eating once a day, is about .8).

It seems like there may be some missed opportunities at PCRs that are only slightly above one, which I suspect is related to friction associated with family / household size. Generally, each household will have a dedicated chef who cooks most of the meals for most household members, but there’s no guarantee that the household size that’s optimal overall is optimal for food production. With shifting residential patterns and stricter food safety laws, we don’t seem to have boardinghouses anymore- airbnb is making the paying guest a thing, but I don’t know of many areas where twenty people will eat dinner together; it seems to be either a handful or hundreds (counting all customers at a restaurant, including delivery customers, rather than just the ones there at once).

On that topic- is there a missed opportunity for boardinghouses for college students? Most of the lodging options I’m familiar with are dorms (with attached cafeterias) and apartments, but the twelve-bedroom home run by someone who will cook and clean and be a friendly face seems like something that some college students would prefer.

Science

There are a couple of PCRs here; the important ones that come to mind are concepts and papers. A relevant section from Hamming’s You and Your Research:

Question: How much effort should go into library work?

Hamming: It depends upon the field. I will say this about it. There was a fellow at Bell Labs, a very, very, smart guy. He was always in the library; he read everything. If you wanted references, you went to him and he gave you all kinds of references. But in the middle of forming these theories, I formed a proposition: there would be no effect named after him in the long run. He is now retired from Bell Labs and is an Adjunct Professor. He was very valuable; I’m not questioning that. He wrote some very good Physical Review articles; but there’s no effect named after him because he read too much. If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do—get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you’ve thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one. So yes, you need to keep up. You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions. The reading is necessary to know what is going on and what is possible. But reading to get the solutions does not seem to be the way to do great research. So I’ll give you two answers. You read; but it is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts.

Academics

I’m tempted to say time spent learning, and time spent teaching, but I don’t think those are clearly delineated. There’s something called the tutor learning effect- students who tutor their peers learn from the experience as well, and many teachers remark on how much they learn about a subject by teaching a class on it.

Time spent preparing notes and time spent rereading notes seems like it might be cleaner- in particular, looking back at classes and saying “How would I present this material? What is the takeaway that I would try to emphasize and remember?”

Some Confucius:

To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.

(Actually, it seems like the difficulty of measuring PCR here may be a sign that it’s valuable to think about here- with food there was just economics and social interactions to think of, but here there’s a complicated underlying model which you learn about by trying to tease apart the consumption and production of knowledge.)

Programming

Again, there seem to be multiple dimensions. One is time use, another is code use. Using a library that does what you want, rather than writing your own version, is generally the right decision, but shifts the code PCR heavily towards 0 while barely adjusting the time PCR (if you measure it by days, and have enough projects to fill your time, rather than measuring it by time spent on a particular project).

A common claim in programming is that code is harder to read than write, and yet it seems like there are significant gains to learning from how other people write code, not just using what their code outputs. This talk, “Programming is Terrible” by Thomas Figg (script here, differs a bit from the talk) is worthwhile for programmers, but here’s the relevant section:

Read code every day. Read other peoples code, in order to learn from someone elses mistakes.

To start with a terrible metaphor—if you met a professional writer you would expect them to be well read — the few I have encountered have a intimidating collection of books. Before you are expected to write a novel, you should have read some novels. Same goes for code bases.

Yet with programming, much of the education and resources goes into the practice of writing code for the first time, and little towards analysis, debugging or maintenance.

Programmers often complain that ‘we have to estimate things we’ve never done before’, I cannot help what part of this is due to our institutionalised ignorance of other peoples code and projects.

Not Invented Here seems relevant.

Fiction

Many authors have personal libraries in the tens of thousands of books; an author who just writes is unlikely to write well, but an author who only reads will find that most of what they have learned has floated away because they did not nail it down with practice. I thought Steven King had given advice on this, but he adds the two and focuses on total activity level: “Read and write four to six hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can’t expect to become a good writer.”

But that’s professional fiction writers; what sort of PCRs should one pursue when interested solely in entertainment? I suspect this varies heavily from individual to individual, but I don’t think people do much testing to try to find the right balance. As well, this suggests the opportunity of writing for pure entertainment’s sake: putting down just the scenes you want to write, when you want to write them, ignoring any steps you don’t like (editing, sections critical to communicating the plot you don’t want to write, etc.).

Go

(This should generalize to other competitive skill-based games.) Watching other people play games, and playing your own games are different experiences that you learn different things from. There’s also deliberate practice problems, where you focus on some limited situation to work out that precise concept. While many people talk about the benefits of watching others games, or doing Go problems, this makes me wonder about the value of writing Go problems- when I learn something new, can I construct an example that would teach that to someone else? Attempting that will refine my understanding, but it’s not clear it will do so more than reading an expert’s problems (though perhaps it will make me better at the art of reading problems).

Internet

There are many lurkers, and few producers, and different sites encourage different PCRs. There seems to be both a personal PCR and a site-wide PCR; we could compare the number of submissions per reader on memegenerator and LW, and we can also compare how much I consume and produce on each site.

Most of my thoughts here are muddied by the importance of quality. The amount of time I spend reading and posting on forums seems relatively constant across the years (though the ratio of reading to posting might change, I imagine it stays within a relatively small window) but the content of what I read and post has changed significantly, and for the better.

Time Use

Looking at optimal PCRs for lots of different activities seems useful, but we can go a level higher- what is your global amount of time spent producing or consuming? Where can you push that ratio, and where should you? Basically every aspect of your life could be improved by devoting more time to it, but ensuring that your marginal value from additional effort is roughly equal along facets of your life is important. (If it isn’t, you should shift effort from low-value activities to high-value activities.) PCR can help with that if there’s costs for production or consumption are shared across areas; perhaps, for example, reading fiction is less entertaining than watching movies, and so you could increase your PCR by swapping out books for movies. (Or, perhaps, you chose movies over books for that reason, but now realize that you should take combine your entertainment and fiction-writing time and devote some of it to reading, if that gives you a better combination of fiction production quality and entertainment.)

Optimal ratios seem highly dependent on personal energy levels, tastes, and efficiency. Time use gives a natural unit of measurement, but it measures inputs, and what you want from both production and consumption time is outputs: a meal is about as sustaining if you eat it in ten minutes and an hour, and its taste is only indirectly related to the amount of time you spent working on it.

Blog posts I found searching this topic: JS Ohlander, Kevin Espiritu. Both are short and have some insight; both focus on quality of consumption, and ramping up production.

Also, it seems worthwhile to explicitly point out: while thinking about this, I considered both just thinking about it, preparing a Main post about it, and preparing a Discussion post about it while it was unfinished. The first seems like it has a PCR of infinity, the second a high PCR, and the last a moderate PCR. The first option has a deceptive ratio, because the total amount of activity varies across the options. The last seemed like the best way to learn, in part because it alternated produce and consume activities. My speculations would be developed by putting them in writing, I would do some research in writing the post, and then I would get feedback after publishing to discussion, which would then be useful if I decide to polish it and create something for Main.

Produce /​ Consume Ratios