I’m not sure I’m ready to adopt the 80⁄20 rule as a heuristic, although I use it all the time as a hypothesis.
The 80⁄20 rule is too compatible with both availability bias and cherry-picking.
“X is mainly bottlenecked by Y” is interesting to talk about, and gets shared, because the insight is valuable information.
“No single cause explains more than 1% of the variation in X” is uninteresting, and gets shared less, because it’s not very actionable. It’s also harder to understand, because there are so many small variables to keep track of.
As a result, we accumulate many more examples of the 80⁄20 “rule” in action than of the accumulation of many small contributing factors. Not only do we recall them more easily, but we coordinate human action around them more easily, which also helps generate vivid real-world examples.
The way I’d put it is that it’s worth examining the hypothesis that the 80⁄20 rules is operating, because if it is, then you have a big opportunity to make improvements with minimal efforts. If it turns out that you can’t find a bottleneck, move on to something else and forget about it...
… Unless the local problem you’re trying to solve itself is the bottleneck for a larger problem. For example, let’s say that fracking was the most important driver of carbon emissions reductions. Even if there weren’t single large bottlenecks available to improve fracking efficiency, it might still be worth looking for all the available small wins.
The other problem with the Natural Gas argument is right there in the premise. If burning natural gas is twice as carbon efficient as burning coal (X emissions → X/2 emissions), you can never do better than halving your emissions by switching everything to natural gas. So even though it’s good that gas has led to lower emissions so far, we must necessarily work on these other technologies if we ever want to do better than X/2.
Another issue is that, if your ultimate goal is to keep total CO2 content in the atmosphere before a certain level, natural gas gives you timeline but it is not, on its own, a solution. It is still an exhaustible resource that puts carbon permanently into the atmosphere.
That said, timelines count for a lot. If natgas gives us time to accumulate truly renewable green energy infrastructure, without reducing the urgency around installing renewables so much that the benefits cancel out, then it’s to the good.
Right but i think part of the argument being made above is that we shouldn’t bother will all this pie-in-the-sky stuff because the gas transition has caused almost all the actual emission reduction. It’s boneheaded as a statement on climate policy, but in a way i think is constructive to explore and apply more broadly.
If you have achieved big gains doing some thing X, but you are very confident that ultimately X has fundamental limitations such that it can’t possibly solve your ultimate problem....then it’s not good to put all your resources into X. (cf RLHF, i guess)
I’m not sure I’m ready to adopt the 80⁄20 rule as a heuristic, although I use it all the time as a hypothesis.
The 80⁄20 rule is too compatible with both availability bias and cherry-picking.
“X is mainly bottlenecked by Y” is interesting to talk about, and gets shared, because the insight is valuable information.
“No single cause explains more than 1% of the variation in X” is uninteresting, and gets shared less, because it’s not very actionable. It’s also harder to understand, because there are so many small variables to keep track of.
As a result, we accumulate many more examples of the 80⁄20 “rule” in action than of the accumulation of many small contributing factors. Not only do we recall them more easily, but we coordinate human action around them more easily, which also helps generate vivid real-world examples.
The way I’d put it is that it’s worth examining the hypothesis that the 80⁄20 rules is operating, because if it is, then you have a big opportunity to make improvements with minimal efforts. If it turns out that you can’t find a bottleneck, move on to something else and forget about it...
… Unless the local problem you’re trying to solve itself is the bottleneck for a larger problem. For example, let’s say that fracking was the most important driver of carbon emissions reductions. Even if there weren’t single large bottlenecks available to improve fracking efficiency, it might still be worth looking for all the available small wins.
The other problem with the Natural Gas argument is right there in the premise. If burning natural gas is twice as carbon efficient as burning coal (X emissions → X/2 emissions), you can never do better than halving your emissions by switching everything to natural gas. So even though it’s good that gas has led to lower emissions so far, we must necessarily work on these other technologies if we ever want to do better than X/2.
Another issue is that, if your ultimate goal is to keep total CO2 content in the atmosphere before a certain level, natural gas gives you timeline but it is not, on its own, a solution. It is still an exhaustible resource that puts carbon permanently into the atmosphere.
That said, timelines count for a lot. If natgas gives us time to accumulate truly renewable green energy infrastructure, without reducing the urgency around installing renewables so much that the benefits cancel out, then it’s to the good.
Right but i think part of the argument being made above is that we shouldn’t bother will all this pie-in-the-sky stuff because the gas transition has caused almost all the actual emission reduction. It’s boneheaded as a statement on climate policy, but in a way i think is constructive to explore and apply more broadly.
If you have achieved big gains doing some thing X, but you are very confident that ultimately X has fundamental limitations such that it can’t possibly solve your ultimate problem....then it’s not good to put all your resources into X. (cf RLHF, i guess)