I’d distill this into two valid admonitions, neither of which is really an objection to efficiency properly defined.
The first is “Beware efficiently achieving the wrong thing,” covering the strongest argument and the measurement problem. I think this covers most objections to ‘efficiency’ in the wild; the protesters I once saw who wanted a company to less efficiently pursue profit, probably really wanted it to more efficiently pursue worker happiness.
The second is “Beware cargo cults of efficiency.” All that stuff about adding more and more measurements and throwing out RPDT is attacking a cargo-cult definition of efficiency.
The truth is that efficiency correctly defined (as by Bugmaster, “a ratio of your expenditure of resources (which include money, time, oxygen, etc.) to the number of your true goals which you are able to achieve”) really has a valid fully general counterargument in its defense. That is, if you are goal-directed and resource-bound, you want to be as efficient as possible. Complaining about this is like… I don’t know… complaining about the patent office’s fully general counterargument to all the perpetual motion machines you send in?
I’d distill this into two valid admonitions, neither of which is really an objection to efficiency properly defined.
The first is “Beware efficiently achieving the wrong thing,” covering the strongest argument and the measurement problem. I think this covers most objections to ‘efficiency’ in the wild; the protesters I once saw who wanted a company to less efficiently pursue profit, probably really wanted it to more efficiently pursue worker happiness.
The second is “Beware cargo cults of efficiency.” All that stuff about adding more and more measurements and throwing out RPDT is attacking a cargo-cult definition of efficiency.
The truth is that efficiency correctly defined (as by Bugmaster, “a ratio of your expenditure of resources (which include money, time, oxygen, etc.) to the number of your true goals which you are able to achieve”) really has a valid fully general counterargument in its defense. That is, if you are goal-directed and resource-bound, you want to be as efficient as possible. Complaining about this is like… I don’t know… complaining about the patent office’s fully general counterargument to all the perpetual motion machines you send in?
I think there is a third dimension here, which I would distill as:
“if you are not a unified agent but a congress, you should worry about politics, compromise, and game theory, not just efficiency.”