Curious Realizer - shooting the potatoes and other failures of efficiency
Time savings are not always the answer
Just because something is faster doesn’t mean that it’s better. Sometimes curiosity doesn’t always lead to the best solution. Sometimes you need to learn to do things the hard way before you can graduate to the faster, easier method… or sometimes the faster, easier version just isn’t an option. Here’s an example from fiction.
Life, The Universe and Everything is the third book of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels written by the late Douglas Adams. The series revolves around a highly improbable series of events that befall the human Arthur Dent and his (mostly) alien traveling companions around the universe after something shocking happens to the Earth. The series is full of asides written as entries to the eponymous Guide and one of them is an appropriate match for this subject.
In the book, an alien race called the Silastic Armourfiends of Striterax were known and feared for their intensely aggressive and warlike tendencies. The Armourfiends tried to get their aggression under control:
In an attempt to deal with the problems their violent nature created, the Silastic Armourfiends passed a law that anybody who had to carry a weapon as part of their normal work… must spend a minimum of 45 minutes each day punching a sack of potatoes. It was hoped that this would allow them to work off their surplus aggression.
On the surface, this seemed like a great plan. But then curiosity intervened. One of the Armourfiends had the idea to simply shoot the potatoes to save time, creating excitement about their “first war for weeks”. Efficiency certainly saved time but the resurgence of their latent aggression led the Armourfiends to destroy themselves. Great for the galaxy as a whole, pretty awful for the Armourfiends.
So let’s be clear: I am still very much in favour of curiosity. It’s just that when you introduce curiosity into the “efficiency vs. effectiveness” debate, sometimes that narrows our thinking to efficiency: how can we do something faster, less expensively, etc. Sometimes our question to be more efficient can lead us to optimizing the wrong things, thereby diminishing our effectiveness (are we doing the right things?)
I’m tempted to reference the latest wonder and hand wringing about the growth in AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools for both visual art and writing but I won’t. Other than this paragraph.
Moral of the story: if someone thinks it’s a good idea to shoot the potatoes instead of doing some hard exercise to work out aggressive feelings, give them a one-way ticket to the nearest airlock.
Be curious but make sure the object of your curiosity won’t make things worse!
This essay is adapted from a post that first appeared on the now defunct Thoughtwrestling blog
P.S. I’m giving away a MOO hardcovered notebook to a lucky H.A.T. subscriber at the end of December, check this post for details!
Daft 😊 but I enjoyed it