The efficiency of a process is the rate with which it turns what you have into what you want.
This definition seems to imply that what you have is not what you want (fair enough, I guess), and that the process is a means to get what you want, and the process itself is also not a part of what you want.
Since life is a process (I do not believe that the one who dies with the most toys wins), efficiency under this definition is trading away a part of life for some end result that you want. (And I think that people tend to object to efficiency in human things, not in purely mechanical things.) May or may not be a good trade, but intuitively, a process that is less efficient in producing the end result but more life-affirming (for lack of a better word) sounds good to me, and I don’t agree that efficiency is definitionally equivalent to goodness. There is a tradeoff.
(On the other hand, if you consider the process as part of the end result, and the process as producing itself, and the efficiency as the rate with which the process produces itself in a form that’s what you want, I suppose you can get around this definitionally, but I find that definition less intuitive and more difficult to work with, as you can probably tell by the awkward way I described it. I don’t think this is usually what is meant by efficiency.)
This definition seems to imply that what you have is not what you want (fair enough, I guess), and that the process is a means to get what you want, and the process itself is also not a part of what you want.
Since life is a process (I do not believe that the one who dies with the most toys wins), efficiency under this definition is trading away a part of life for some end result that you want. (And I think that people tend to object to efficiency in human things, not in purely mechanical things.) May or may not be a good trade, but intuitively, a process that is less efficient in producing the end result but more life-affirming (for lack of a better word) sounds good to me, and I don’t agree that efficiency is definitionally equivalent to goodness. There is a tradeoff.
(On the other hand, if you consider the process as part of the end result, and the process as producing itself, and the efficiency as the rate with which the process produces itself in a form that’s what you want, I suppose you can get around this definitionally, but I find that definition less intuitive and more difficult to work with, as you can probably tell by the awkward way I described it. I don’t think this is usually what is meant by efficiency.)