What Should We Optimize Away? — The Autodidacts

Consider the dishwasher. Dishwashers are great: I really, really like having a dishwasher. Growing up, we didn’t have a dishwasher. Much time was spent immersing plates in soapy water. Now, a house that doesn’t have a dishwasher seems lacking. I recently moved to a house that lacked a dishwasher (now, there's a small mobile unit that I complain about constantly). Much as I disliked not having a dishwasher, adding a dishwasher hardly saved any time, because, following the timeless freemarket principles of supply and demand, dish usage soon caught up with dishwashing capability. The equilibrium — time spent immersing objects in soapy water — was maintained, even as thruput increased. Rather than saving dinner dishes for dessert, all kinds of culinary extravagances cropped up, like drinking wine out of wineglasses instead of mugs, and eating small objects on fussy little saucers, and so forth: extravagances which anyone who has gone camping, or lived without a dishwasher, will know are optional make-work. (Colanders are still outré, thankfully.)

This, in case you didn’t notice, is a metaphor for AI. Because these days everything’s a metaphor for AI, and vice versa. We used to write all our bugs by hand, and then fix them. It was very slow. Now, AI writes our bugs for us, and fixes them. The amount of code generated is, indeed, quite large. However, time spent working has not seemed to decrease. Shouldn't we all be sitting on the beach drinking out of coconuts now, like we’re designed to do? Hasn’t that been the dream since the industrial revolution? And hasn’t it always remained just that: a dream?

I don’t know whether I like efficiency because I like programming, or like programming because I like efficiency. In any case, optimizing optimization is endemic among engineers. The idea is, you automate the boring stuff, and then get to work on the important/interesting/fun stuff (like babysitting Claude while it has spitups).

But I can’t help noticing that the faster we speedrun optimization, the faster the treadmill goes, and the whole system begins to seem zero-sum.

This, I think, is a key insight that the Amish beat most people to by several hundred years. Optimization is great for “productivity”, whatever that means, but seems orthogonal to the quest for eudaemonia.

In case you haven’t noticed, despite being what is officially known as a lazy bum, I am a card-carrying member of the school of Do Hard Things: the meaning over pleasure camp. Because, as far as I can tell, pleasure alone is hollow, and, also, relative. Paradoxically, suffering can make joy more intense. Hence the ultramarathoning and cold water plunges.

Given that I believe that Hard Stuff (at the right dose) often makes us tougher in the long run, and resilience makes us happier than mere ease, here’s a question that nags me almost continually: what hard stuff should we optimize away?

The normal answer is, all of it!. But I’m not so sure.

I’ve met survivalists who almost starved because it took them so long to hunt a bear; homesteaders who make their own cheese, and spend most of their time meeting their own needs for food and shelter, with minimal interchange with the outside world; and executives who don’t even clean their own house or write their own emails. And, frankly, it doesn’t seem like the executive lifestyle is maxxing out Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as hard as other lifestyles.

In what sense is it optimization to pay someone else to chop your firewood, and then turn around and pay the gym for weights and a room to lift them in?

But this is just part of the question. If there are strenuous activities that are enjoyable (like chopping and stacking wood, in moderation), then it’s pretty obvious that just doing them makes more sense than delegating them and then needing to get this bourgeois thing called “exercise”. But what about psychological hardship? The Stoics are big on making your goat ungettable. And, as all skydivers know, practice makes perfect. So, obviously, the way get an ungettable goat is to surround yourself with an army of goat-getters and fight the good fight ceaselessly until thy goat is ungettable, amirite?

So (taking the argument to its conclusion), the too-small dishwasher with the pump that makes chewing-on-broken-glass sounds, and the obnoxious friend, and the horrible politicians, and the sun with no dimmer and the earth with no thermostat are all part of the grand journey to un-goat-gettable Stoic perfection.

Or, is it possible that if I fixed the things that bother me, the universe would graciously provide even more skillful goatgetters for my personal benefit? Or, at least, that I would be able to be annoyed by new, bigger things?

Perhaps, just has perfectionism is (often) optimizing at the wrong scale, holistic optimization needs to account for the fact that sometimes bugs have a role in the ecosystem.

Between the Scylla of overoptimization, and...