In Defense of Inefficiency
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- Опубликовано: 25 июн 2024
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DESCRIPTION:
We're obsessed with being efficient. But is it really all it's cracked up to be?
CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Intro
02:51 - Part 1: What is efficiency?
16:58 - Part 2: The Waste Problem
33:43 - Part 3: The Effectiveness Problem
56:58 - Part 4: Where do we go from here?
01:05:01 - Outro
SPECIAL THANKS TO (in chronological order):
------ @SKTheCrusader ( / @skthecrusader )
------ @MainelyMandy ( / @mainelymandy )
------ @Salari ( / @salari )
------ @BABILA. ( / @babila. )
------ Neil of @TheLeftistCooks ( / @theleftistcooks )
------ @BrigitteEmpire ( / @brigitteempire )
SHORTER VERSIONS:
------ 5 Minute Version: • Efficiency is Bad, Act...
------ Short 1: • If they REALLY wanted ...
------ Short 2: • Efficiency Sucks #shorts
SOURCES:
------ 2022 K12 Edtech Safety Benchmark: National Findings - Part 1 (Internet Safety Lab; internetsafetylabs.org/resour...)
------ "College Students Say Crying In Exams Activates "Cheating" Eye Tracker Software" (Futurism, Lonnie Lee Hood; futurism.com/college-students...)
------ Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Raymond Callahan)
------ "Goodhart’s Law: Recognizing and Mitigating the Manipulation of Measures in Analysis" (Stumborg et al; www.cna.org/reports/2022/09/G...)
------ "Learn Different: Silicon Valley disrupts education" (The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead; www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...)
------ "Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is making this the ‘year of efficiency’" (The Verge, Alex Heath; www.theverge.com/2023/2/1/235...)
------ "Murders in the Rue Morgue" Edgar Allan Poe
------ "Risking Ourselves in Education: Qualification, Socialization, and Subjectification Revisited" (Gert Biesta)
------ "Silicon Valley’s obsession with efficiency is fundamentally rooted in sexism" (Quartz, Lux Alptraum; qz.com/906115/silicon-valleys...)
------ "Study: Stricter School Discipline Policies Have Long-term Negative Effects on Students" (Campus Safety, www.campussafetymagazine.com/...)
------ Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning (Audrey Watters)
------ Team Human (Douglas Rushkoff)
------ The Marxification of Education (James Lindsay)
------ The School to Prison Pipeline: Long-Run Impacts of School Suspensions on Adult Crime (Bacher-Hicks, et al; www.nber.org/papers/w26257)
------ The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Nicholas Carr)
------ "Why 'What Works' Won't Work: Evidence-Based Practice and the Democratic Deficit in Educational Research" (Gert Biesta)
------ "why “what works” won’t work and why “what works” may hurt" (Human Restoration Project, Nick Covington; www.humanrestorationproject.o...)
------ Youth Risk Behavior Survey 2011-2021 (CDC; www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data... )
FURTHER READING:
------ Audrey Watters' Blog: hackeducation.com/
------ Sketchplanations of Goodhart's Law: sketchplanations.com/goodhart... (and BONUS Campbell's Law: sketchplanations.com/campbell...)
------ "The Californian Ideology" (www.metamute.org/editorial/ar...)
* To Support Me: *
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@@youtubeuniversity3638 She's just getting her coin. Don't mess that up.
I know everyone needs to make a living, but schilling for oil companies seems pretty gross...
@@AaronStierCohen1 Hating the oil companies is good. Convert that anger into Direct Action and try to make an actual difference. Don't go after someone like Zoe Bee for trying to improve her Material Condition while providing us with free content. She has bills just like you.
@Fred Nurk it's a RUclips comment. Relax. I'm not going after anyone. The comments section is not praxis.
This is really bad look. An hour long video about not treating ourself like machines and then "Use this to optimize your life to fit the current global narrative".
“Just because something is concise, doesn’t mean it’s good”
Me: *sighs in relief*
VIP in the chat.
I needed to hear that after my old boss once said I could write what you did in a paragraph in 2 sentences. I had inherited wordy writing from academia of all those years.
We stan our trekkie queen!
Jessie the queen of inconcise :D
YES
Once I gave up trying to lose weight as /fast and efficiently as possible/, I finally lost the weight. I focused on doing it the most fun way. The most sustainable way. The most enjoyable way. The easiest way. The most thoughtless way. That’s when it all fell into place. I lost 50 lbs last year after a lifetime of desperate attempts. The most efficient way and the /best/ way are not always the same thing.
Something isn't effective if its not sustainable or moving towards something sustainable
so you did something more effectively, in less time, compared to another method?
Bro if that isn't the definition of efficiency then wtf is?
Not taking sustainability into account as a variable is simply calculating efficiency incorrectly. Short term efficiency is not always the most efficient over a longer span, this is especially important to calculate when the desired goal WILL take more time.
Congratulations!
Okay but the problem there was definitely not the fact you wanted to lose the weight as fast as possible but however the fuk you were trying to accelerate the process
As far as I'm concerned, this is the only long term solution to lose weight. If its about results and not lifestyle, things will go back to the way it was. There has been no scientific study proving any diet can maintain its results long term for a significant portion of the subjects, and to me I think it comes down to: fat isn't one "diagnosis" with one solution. Bodies are efficient at keeping you alive, but the most "efficient" way to lose weight definitely isn't the fastest.
9:03 this right here is like the number one reason why the Radium Girls ended up with horrific radiation poisoning.
Their managers instructed factory girls, some as young as 10 years old, to lick their paintbrushes that had ‘un-dark paint’ on them which contained radium which made clock faces glow in the dark. This was to clean the brush and make a sharper point so the factory girls could paint the tiny details on clock faces more accurately. Making a sharp point with their mouths would shave off a few seconds rather than the girls using their fingers or dipping the brush in water and twirling it around the edge.
Despite the men working in the factories such as delivery men and janitors handing the paint with tongs and wearing lead lined aprons and gloves (they ABSOLUTELY knew radium was dangerous) the girls were told by their managers, usually an older woman, that radium was GOOD for them and ingesting the paint was a job perk.
They were encouraged to paint their nails teeth with the stuff, put it in their hair and use it as make-up on their off time and many of them ended up dying a really awful, painful death a few years later. Such as the radium ‘honeycombing’ their bones so their limbs would snap and wouldn’t hold their weight. Their teeth and jaws broke into pieces and they had burned oesophagus’. They developed painful cancers and many died from haemorrhages. American Radium was sued in a class action lawsuit by a few of the girls but so many fighting died before their case was won. The girls who remained alive had all medical bills covered and were paid a sizeable amount of money but nowhere near enough to compensate for the agony they were all in.
And all of this was for the sake of shaving off a couple of seconds between paint applications and seeing a dip in productivity. The girls who refused to put their brush in their mouth were fired about a week into the job for being inefficient. But they were the only girls employed by The American Radium Company that lived to old age.
So whenever I think about efficiency and how it’s glorified in our current capitalist society, I think of the poor Radium Girls and every other factory worker (especially children) who were permanently injured, maimed or were killed all for the sake of profit and productivity.
I had no idea that was why they did that to the radium girls!! That’s horrific
This was such a fistfight to address with students that have (frequently undiagnosed) learning disabilities or neurodivergency. So many students have had the “right way” to study, take notes, or construct assignments beaten into them. The “most efficient” method for them was useless to actually learn. Usually if those students could be convinced to try methods that were friendlier to their minds, their grades immediately jumped. However, many of them still had an internalized sense that using to use an alternative method was “wrong” and that it was some kind of personal or moral failing. The school system’s obsession with efficiency can literally set up these students for both educational struggles and emotional distress. Drives me up the wall.
By definition the standard way isn't efficient in those cases lol
neurodivergency seems affect interest of time investment, like the mismatch with the education system of school force us to create our own system that hardly measured, sadly the measurement is the only way to communicate qualities.
those are a lot of fancy words magic man
@@anthonypena3322You can watch an hour long video but not read a single paragraph? Lmfao
@@JG_Wentworth I think he was joking
The one key thing to always ask is "efficient by which metrics?"
More often than not, people optimize their businesses and operations to be efficient by only one specific metric
In my experience, it almost always means "optimizing for short term profits and ignoring every other metric"
Concerns for safety, long term sustainability, environmental impact and human suffering must always go out the window whenever somebody needs the numbers on their excel sheet to increase
Exactly! It's a flattening of information. Only things that make the number go up are considered, anything else is disregarded as irrelevant or a distraction or wasteful.
im a person who likes to be efficient, even find it fun to try to be efficient. but ive thankfully learned through my little brother at a young age that mistakes are fine, and things that might seem inefficient to me dont have to be better if its working as is.
Ive always though the one metric above all that should be considered is "does this reduce suffering" because if something is more efficient but causes someone discomfort id say thats not more efficient.
Precisely this is what I hate about this obsession with efficiency.
Its one of those terms that implies an objective goal behind whatever it gets applied to. A goal that we're just supposed accept uncritically, like it is obvious, not even worth debating.
A goal which remarkably often really does not serve the needs of the majority of those involved, yet theyre expected to play along anyway, because thats most efficient, duh.
"Of course its better when the company makes the most money!" even when workers are paid starvation wages.
It takes whichever deeply arbitrary values one person holds, posits those as unquestionably good, and then pushes them onto everyone else like its the obvious, objective best option.
Which it rarely is.
@@TheSpeep I know right? It's like saying "x doesn't work!"
There's an intentional omission of critical information there. Should be "x doesn't work [at achieving y goal]"
It's the same for efficiency. "X is not efficient" omits the metrics. Should be "X is not efficient [in terms of a, b and c]"
How does this work? You leave out the important part for people to interpret as obvious based on what they personally value. If you keep a lie vague enough, each person will fill in the blanks and turn it into a different truth in their mind
lets bring down capitalism
Efficiency often comes with a tradeoff. Often that tradeoff is system robustness. If your system always runs close to max efficiency, it's likely to fail more catastrophically when it does fail because there is no slack space to absorb the system shock.
This is actually a mathematical certainty. Maximum efficiency means reducing a variety of strategies to the single most efficient strategy. If any circumstances change the system is extremely vulnerable.
Society doesn’t like efficiency but it hates robustness even more.
E.g. supermarkets being unable to keep goods, such as toilet paper, in stock during the pandemic.
Or super accurate competition guns being really susceptible to jamming due to dirt and the like.
@alwynwatson6119 i don't know about society. Definitely corporations seem to hate robustness
To me, one of the most tragic things to come out of online schooling is that there are no more snow days. No more days where you look excitedly outside and ask your mom if she got an email saying school was out...
And it's not so much the loss of "snow days" as it is the loss of free time and innocence. Even children are being forced to give up their precious and rare off days "because they can", "because it would mess up the lesson plan if we missed a day", and "because they don't have anything better to do".
Children are being forced into this hyper productive mindset earlier and earlier, and it makes me horrifically sad.
I probably won't have kids, but if I do I'm going to homeschool them so we get more free time and more flexible "school days", because you don't even need 40 hours a week of classes and 20+ hours of homework to teach kids. And if its so snowy outside we can't go anywhere, I can tell them "it's a snow day!" And let them have fun.
One thing that has really caught my attention is how this video points out flaws in both strict, one-size-fits-all schooling methods, AND individualized, custom-fit schooling methods.
And I love that someone is able to recognize this.
Not just in schooling, but in nearly every aspect of life, *balance* is very important; going too far in any given direction is only to make even more problems down the line.
I have a similar story to the doodle incident. I was staring out the window at two pigeons fighting in the carpark. My teacher decided to stop and ask me what she'd just said, and I repeated the last couple of sentences back to her word for word then went back to staring out of the window.
She never commented on it again.
i bet this is one of your dearest and favorite memories. it would certainly be one of my own of such kind
Similar thing happened to me. My professors stopped picking on me when they would specifically ask me questions about the lesson thinking i was slacking and i responded with genuine discussion
I draw religiously during class, I used to do comics and record my lectures on my phone. Occasionally teachers would tell me to stop, but after I consistently got As and Bs they realized my way of listening to lectures worked for me and stopped bugging me to not draw in class :) if they had a bee in their bonnet I just wrote stories instead lol
I've lost track of the number of times I have uttered the phrase "People are not machine parts," either as a comment, or a stand-alone statement, or as the opening to some kind of argument I'm about to make. Now there's a video that I can point to when the subject comes up, and say, "Hey, yeah, somebody made a video about this, and it's totally worth your time to watch it."
You are not a machine part. You are a person that can have experiences, and make art, and have feelings, and be a part of other people's lives.
Also, like the song says, "Are you having any fun? What you getting out of living? What good is what you've got if you're not having any fun?"
The way I see it, humans absolutely can be seen as machines or data processors that have traits/values that can optimized, it's just that the traits that need to be optimized for aren't literally the exact same as the machines that we create.
During lockdown, there was a news item about hospitals becoming quickly overwhelmed because of policy decisions made earlier that there should not be unused beds in the hospital. There was no extra capacity for something new and big, because when there's not a pandemic, it's a 'waste', and 'inefficient'. This short-sighted grab for efficiency made the experience of the pandemic objectively worse for society as a whole and many many individuals in it. That's when I realized something - designing for efficiency is designing for fragility. If you're squeezing maximum output from your input, you're guaranteeing that anything negatively affecting your input - like supply chain issues - will crash your output drastically. That's not only irresponsible to a company's employees when the company goes out of business, it's irresponsible to society that benefits from - sometimes, needs - the product or service that's now unavailable because of earlier pursuit of 'efficiency'. What's efficient in the big picture, in the long run, is some level of robustness. You just need to broaden the horizons of your concern, look beyond the bottom line of the fiscal quarter.
By that same token, designing too much robustness runs into a similar problem. It'd be theoretically reasonable to argue that every hospital needs sufficient capacity to house most or all of the population it serves, but so much of this capacity would go unused so much of the time that the added cost would detract from other areas of the hospital.
@@Ornithopter470 Of course that's true. Extremism can go the opposite way, too. From our current situation, with such devotion to 'efficiency', the direction to go is towards robustness. That's not advocating for extremism in that direction, it's just identifying the direction we need to move, some of the way, not all of the way, from where we are now.
@@hughobyrne2588 oh, I'm not disagreeing, just pointing out that it's very much a balancing act. And because the scales are so long, tiny changes make a massive impact.
This also leads to damaged items impacting your ability to operate.
When the goal is profit instead of people.
As a digital illustrator who is watching AI generator bros delight in the cruelty of the theft and destruction of one of the most passion filled professions to exist, this video was a warm hug.
You don't see a democratization of art generation to other folks that also want to express themselves creatively but never managed to develop those skills themselves? - As a programmer I find ChatGPT makes me much more productive (since I already know what is good and so can sift through it's responses more quickly and work well with it) -- I imagine as an artist / person with good taste you'd be uniquely well positioned to use it for your benefit to improve your workflows, collaborate with it.
As a digital illustrator your kind once drew the ire of physical illustrators who were for the most part outmatched by the switch in demand to digital illustration (and the better tools and faster prodcution that can happen with that, like layers, variations, etc.)
@@JulianSloman "Democratization of art" is dumb. art was already democratized, you just need to learn it. Why are we losing faith in ourselves?? We already have the ability to make visual art, music, movies etc. The problem with AI is that it takes control away from the artist in exchange for more efficiency. As a result you get mediocre mass-produced "art". thus, collaborating with ai won't actually help make better art it just makes art faster. the already oversaturated market just became even more saturated, with cheap art only produced with the intent of making money.
@@triisart1721 opportunity for investing in it is not equally distributed, nor is everyone's ceeiling anywhere near the quality of what a good AI tool can do. if the results were actually mediocre as you say then there wouldn't be a big threat
@@triisart1721 This has the same aura as saying that calculators are bad because everyone could learn how to do long division and complicated square roots without calculators, which ignores the very real issue of some people who really struggle with math. Same goes with art. What is your response to someone who really wants to draw a beautiful picture but is terrible at art? Are they just meant to spend years upon years and dollars upon dollars on something they might never be able to achieve? Certainly there are issues with AI art and the repercussions it will have, but can’t we at least celebrate that now the bar for artistic expression has now been lowered? Surely we can agree on that?
@@josiahdsmith5641 mathematics aren’t creative expressions.
As an engineer, I have always told other STEM folk that efficiency is important, but it’s not the only thing that’s important.
As revolting as it might sound to some, doing things in an inefficient manner that preserves the sanity and dignity of the humans involved is sometimes better than doing things in an efficient manner that can be soulless and dehumanizing.
I’m very interested to see Zoe’s take on it!
Absolutely. My main area is maths, which is often very concerned with optimisation and efficiency, but that doesn't mean I think people should behave like robots. In fact, maths tends to have a very "lazy" mindset, with practically all of the resources going to figuring out the easiest way to do something so that people in the future have less work to do. Like finding a closed formula for something rather than an algorithm, for example.
That's exactly my take on efficiency. Good to see other engineers in the same boat
That's what separates the competent from the excellent. Many people DO want to devote their entire life to working efficiently, which is why the Twitter engineers are working extreme hours right now. It's a drive of self-sacrifice to the community that our entitled generation knows nothing of.
@@allisthemoist2244 If you truly believe that sacrificing all one's time and energy is what generates or defines excellence, I'd encourage you to read up on the mathematician June Huh in "The Three-Hour Fields Medal". Also the author Douglas Adams, a notorious procrastinator, gave the world The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, among several other incredible works.
I'd also like to point out that many (if not most) of the people who work at Twitter are part of this supposedly entitled generation, and if they were dedicated to this grand idea of efficiency, they wouldn't continue to work for such incompetent management.
Sorry to tell you, but the reason most people these days stay in such grueling jobs is the simple fact that they need money to pay for food, rent, and the degrees that got them said jobs in the first place. Not wanting to be ground into dust and debt isn't being entitled, it's wanting to actually get something out of your single shot at life.
@@luizdevil6855 you might, but not everyone gets burnout from continous hard work. For example, my dad has been working 60 hours a week since he was sixteen because he grew up dirt poor and he needed to help his family survive. He was apperently an outlier because he got into Harvard and has worked even more ever since. I have never seen him do anything for himself. The only leisure things I've seen him do is things with his kids (and he sleeps five hours per night). Despite this, he has no burnout. He bikes into work to stay in shape, and he can somehow hold his own when debating me.
All this is to say that burnout is not inevitable. It happens to some people, but it's the kind of thing we work past. The issue is people don't know how to move through pain, so they just stop when it gets hard.
It's always worth asking, efficient with respect to what metric? If someone's using "it's just more efficient" to justify something, that question helps you work out their priorities. I find this particularly true of people who are "just being logical" when they treat human emotions as pesky little irrelevances. If you maximise human efficiency with that kind of mindset, you'll end up with a smooth-running, well-oiled engine of misery.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. I think that efficiency is, in and of itself, a positive thing in the same way that "achieving ones goals" is positive.
That's also my problem with efficiency:
In a physical sense, efficiency is the amount of useful work you get out of a process per amount of energy invested into it. While in principle the amount of energy invested could be measured or calculated objectively (although doing so usually gets quite complicated), you can not *objectively* quantify how much useful work you get out.
That's because, how good the outcomes are depends on your goals. It's not a physical question but rather a moral one.
@@CD4017BE Exactly. See Hume's Guillotine.
I am a logical thinker but I factor in human emotions. It cannot be disregarded with a high quality result. They need to be adequately factored in and accounted for.
When people feel connected to you, your vision and/or purpose, they'll want to put more energy into making it happen. I watched a few interviews about how the movie Everything Everywhere all at Once got made on a (for that kind of movie) shoestring budget, and it was clear that so many people went above and beyond because they knew and trusted Daniels and their vision, many having worked with them in the past, and all the things the cast and crew did together outside filming to help everyone feel appreciated and close. Human connection is a powerful force very underappreciated by much of society.
As someone with recently diagnosed ADHD, I've always had a fraught relationship with efficiency, and that's even more true now that I'm getting treatment and counseling for it. On one hand, trying to be more efficient in my personal time would absolutely help me live a fuller life with more self-care and greater community, but on the other hand, I can never be sure how much of that would be me overcompensating and forcibly conforming to the standards of our hypercapitalist society?
I have at least 87 hobbies and I am a master at none of them, and I don't sell anything, and I love it. It lets me think creatively and that actually makes me a better problem solver in the long run. It was the same when I was homeschooled, my mom used my input to pick curriculums and in my senior year I even got to pick my own for subjects that I had already filled all my requirements for. It's a good time to just be and learn to make candles for the lolz
As a writer, I write A LOT of "useless" scenes. Some go into the final draft, others don't, but to me all of them are important whether if they contribute to the plot or not because writing them makes me happy, it makes me understand and explore my characters better, which allows me to make them more relatable or realistic in the relevant scenes. If I hadn't written those scenes that go nowhere, my characters would have half the depth they have today, and the people that have read the story would not have told me how much they felt those characters.
Being an illustrator as well, I feel too that "waste of time" when I'm doing work like answering e-mails, updating my site, editing photos of my prints etc, it feels like if I'm not drawing, I'm wasting time I could use to be better at my art, but well. Something not having the purpose you value doesn't mean it doesn't have a valuable purpose.
This is actually a really good idea. I always try to pre-edit and maybe I should stop and just let myself write.
I think I'm a little afraid of all the extra work it will be to edit it down after the fact, but maybe that's what's meant by, "All writing is re-writing."
Currently writing a fiction novel for fun to work out my creative muscles since I don't get to do that as much as I'd like to and I've been doing the same thing. Useless/filler scenes add a lot of character to the end product, even if you end up removing most of it. It reminds me of that viral clip of David Lynch working on Twin Peaks: The Return and getting pissed that he wasn't allowed to spend a week on a specific set experimenting. That stuff almost always makes the work better!
Extra work is just practice. A book I'd recommend to creative people in general is Dean Westley Smith's 'Writing Into the Dark.' In one chapter, he talks about actively choosing to write extra for the purpose of enjoyment like you talk about. But really, it's a book on his process of writing his novels without an outline. It's a very interesting deep dive into something that plenty of people would mistake for being incredibly simple. There are a lot of psychological and workflow-related hurdles that he talks about having to deal with when writing in that way that can be relevant for just about any artist out there, in my opinion.
They aint useless then, they flesh out the characters
Same here, much of my writing comes straight from the cuff as my thought process takes the store wherever it decides to go, I learned to create an outline first so the book doesn't stray too far from what I planned, but sometimes I have had to adjust the outline as the story evolves. Many scenes get deleted during editing, so things end up coherent.
I have OCD, and I have a bit of an efficiency complex. I hated how much of my time spent during Covid was "wasted" and how long it can take me to reach goals I've had for years. That's kinda the thing with efficiency obsession; it doesn't take into account personal flaws and needs that are too specific to be put into an equation. I'm also autistic, so that makes for a fun combo to deal with when unrealistic expectation are put on me by myself and others.
I like your user name and profile picture 🥗
It's like I can feel the lettuce just by looking at those 🤔
Please don’t condense this at all. I needed every syllable. Thank you. My depressed teenage heart needed this validation. Graduating from college with a Computer Science degree made this even more relatable. Thank You!!!!!
Are you good at math?
Hahahahha, taking this into computer science is not a good idea lol, this python guys are incredible
"Take children away from their parents to a state guardianship" is literally something we did to our First Nations people in Australia.
Such extremes aren't necessarily automatically rejected, we need to be careful we don't and aren't repeating such tragedies.
This was done to various Native American tribes in the United States as well; some could argue (as I do) that it’s still happening.
canada too, called residential schools and the 60s scoop. currently this practice has only been used to enact eugenics (generalization)
I think the real issue is not "efficiency" but rather our views on what is efficient and what is waste. Taking a break can often be efficient as it means that when you go back to work you work more effectively. And the output might be greater even if the input is also greater
Exactly. Like how you come back from a vacation recharged because you’re giving your brain a conscious break from the familiar and routine.
Good observation. Efficiency thinking is oftentimes single-minded. This is a blessing and a curse, as the same single-mindedness leads to it's ineffectiveness.
@@quinndepatten4442 yeah i agree! another example (like breaks mentioned above)-- although it might be considered "more efficient" to optimize every second of a worker's day to be as productive as possible, they will quit as soon as they find a job that is less stressful. ppl tend to stay much longer in jobs that are slower paced and less hectic. the resources it takes to be constantly hiring and training a revolving door of new staff could perhaps be reallocated to higher wages and just... making the workplace less insanely demanding so ppl will enjoy their jobs and stay longer. this is very applicable to the food industry
@@clairemacphee4273 But then that is not efficiency (to some)... Efficiency is dependent on what we address as relevant in a model and what relationships those variables have within the model. If someone told me that it was efficient to make a worker as productive as possible throughout a day only to make them more stressful, I would say the model is failing to reflect on stress when determine efficient allocation of ones time, effort, and cognition, at a temporal level. The issue is not the concept of efficiency, its what we consider to be relevant for the sake of it in its own right. Economists, managerial scientists, and psychologists are very aware of this.
I watched the whole video thinking about the tale of the lumberjack competition, where the young, stronger guy was smashing his axe ferociously while the old guy cut a few trees and sat to rest and sharpen his axe.
The young guy kept teasing the old one that he was too slow.
In the end, the times off resting and sharpening the axe actually made him more efficient, and the old guy had cut more trees then the new one.
I know it's a bad time to talk about cutting more trees, but it's an old tale.
The point is, what is perceived as inefficiency can actually increase output in the same amount of time, with less effort - becoming actually more efficient.
Time off "looking out the window" is especially productive for creative professionals, for example.
I'm in the 40 minute mark and she still hasn't touched this side of the conversation.
This quote from Mark Manson stuck with me:
"Priorities determine problems. If you're not satisfied with the Problems you currently face in your life, then take a long, hard look at the Priorities that put those problems there."
Efficiency is a problem, because how do you give someone a hug efficiently? How do you tell someone you love them efficiently? Or smile? Or laugh efficiently? How do you mourn or grieve efficiently? Or hold someone's hand efficiently? So many things that make life worth living take as much time as they need, and are often lacking in the world because we're too busy rushing from one thing from the next. Sometimes we waste what is valuable by saving time to do something else.
"How do perform [expression] efficiently" the questions my autistic ass asks himself so he can get out of things he doesn't like doing and back to things he does
i feel like the whole obsession with efficiency thing could very easily slide into eugenics very quickly if we’re not careful
I have no doubt that most of the leaders on this planet would love to be able to socially engineer us into accepting a Soylent Green style world.
Yeah whenever I try to redesign the world in my head to make everyone as efficient and happy as possible, I end up slipping into a lil' bit of eugenics. Which is especially weird because I'm autistic...
Singapore's death penalty laws for drug trafficking is often defended on the grounds that "drugs will destroy Singapore, there must be no compromise", and many Singaporeans defend it on the grounds that "Singapore has one of the lowest crime rates in the world in regards to drug trafficking".
Duterte's vigilante justice against drug addicts made some Filipinos remark that "they have never seen their streets so clean" and that his methods "though crude, produced results".
Forget eugenics, it can go into totalitarianism.
@@macro144p hey there, I'm autistic too lol. I agree, the same thing happens to me all the time. I think the best way to make our world more efficient is to make its systems more inclusive. I don't completely know what "inclusive" means to me yet, though.
The best way to improve our society is to abandon the concept of "return on investment" as much as possible in as many different areas as we can
As a teacher that takes adhd medication this is gives me a lot to think about in so many different ways. Thank you for your energy and thoughts on this topic, I feel like I can be better to myself and others because of it.
I always recommend the book "The Tyranny of Metrics" by Jerry Muller. It's a historical examination of how the pursuit of efficiency robs the lower levels of any organization of its autonomy and leads to organizations where no one is making decisions, only processing metrics and doing what the metrics tell them to do.
And also, wants you create those metrics, they become the target in and of themselves to be optimized towards, rather than a measure of the actual target. Which is how you get things like 'teaching to the test.'
ty for the book suggestion.
Yup. We live in a rat race for that one metric that is supposedly incomparable to any other and infinitely valuable - money.
isnt that just capitalism?
Fox News?
Proctorio kicked me out of a test because a neighbor had decided to be nice and mow the lawn right under my window. It repaid that kindness by booting me out of my exam and making me jump through almost 20 minutes worth of hoops to get back into that test, time I lost to actually take that test after I had to argue the noise was not beneficial to my test taking or that I was otherwise using the noise of a lawnmower to cheat. I got completely pulled out of the flow of the test.
I scored just under 90% on the sections I took before the lawnmower incident, and close to 30% on the questions I had to take after that.
Did Proctorio do its job? I suppose.
Was it good? Absolutely not.
I assume that Proctorio is some kind of dystopian test monitoring app, and I'm sorry that you are going to school during a time when we feel it's necessary to use such an app.
Ah, I just got to the part in the video that explains Proctorio. Yuck.
They really optimized your grades didn't they?
You suppose the software was made to worsen test scores?
@@ericdecker2914 I personally don't think so. It's just a misguided dystopian attempt to make things "fair", by, of course, monitoring every single action you take and everything that is happening around you and feeding that into an algorithm. Far too many have drank the kool-aid and believe that algorithm=infallible.
I want your neighbour
Can I make a counterpoint? Looking out the window IS efficiency. The bad first draft IS efficiency. Taking extra time can result in better products, and the ability to make more products in the long run ('cuz you don't burn out and/or die from being worked to death). Taking time to explore a game and learn it for yourself instead of using a guide is more efficient because it does result in more much more enjoyment overall. Also long form essays are more efficient as it means I don't have to find a 'next video to watch' quite as often.
Efficiency has been engrained in me so much I had to spend a year in therapy before only now being able to start rediscovering my passion for learning away from viewing it as a "good" use of my time (thereby viewing any time away from learning as a "waste", which hugely impacted my self esteem as not a peak efficient machine, possibly affected by executive dysfunction who knows). This was incredibly insightful and cathartic
I'm a machinist with a background in programming, but I'm also an animator who writes as a hobby, and I really went through it with this video a little bit because... I really *enjoy* optimisation tasks, y'know? One of my favourite things at work is "oh, this part has not been run for like three years. I wonder if I could shave like three minutes off the runtime". I am the kind of person who will fiddle with the settings on my phone and my computer and my tools to get them to "perform better" -- to remove the little barriers on my way to doing things *quicker* and *easier*. It's like... solving a puzzle. This thing works, how can I make it work better? It's not necessarily about reaching perfection, it's more about the sustained effort of doing things the best they can be done.
However, I recognise that this mindset, as well as it serves me at work and as a working partner and as a helper for people... it does make me... *worse* at doing art, I think. I get anxiety about whether or not the story is firing on all cylinders, if it's working, if it's getting all the moods and emotions I want to get in there, and I get gridlocked, often simply because I'm trying to edit the paragraphs to be slimmer and more to the point rather than realising I can just add an aside, a few more paragraphs, make the conversation take a detour just to bring out some of that thematic flavour. I'm also not great at animating things that are languid and calm, or working with art that is meant to be intricate, b/c it's so easy for me to overthink it and decide that what I'm doing is superfluous and if I was just *better* at *art*, this thing would already be done.
And it's just kind of hard to reconcile those two things, y'know? People keep telling me to kill the capitalist in my head, but it's not *that*, it's about how I think efficiency and simplicity and minimalism and structure all have a beauty worth pursuing in their own way. Not necessarily to eliminate the "less efficient" way, but because they're intrinsically appealing to me. So, I really liked that this video was "in defense" of inefficiency rather than condemning efficiency, b/c that did give me a sense of relief -- mostly about my writing -- but didn't make me feel like I was just... wired *wrong* and not being a person right because optimising myself and my life is genuinely enjoyable for me.
:) you are a very good writer. I really liked this one.
There's a fun thing with machining, the fastest way may also use up your tools more, have worse precision for many reasons that aren't obvious. Maybe you could get it done with cheaper tools instead and still meet the precision requirements. Even with arguably very objective metrics you still have so many points to argue about. about what is the most important.
@@meneldal It's a balancing act of course. But from a business perspective where profit is the ultimate metric, finding the most efficient path for machining is a straightforward process. The argument usually always lies in the extremes, small, usually insignificant details or large changes of focus usually headed by issues outside of machining.
yeah, uh, with the CRT monitor on the thumbnail, I expected it to be some sort of defense of inefficient code (I cannot help trying to micro-optimize the code I write), but "efficiency" in the non-programming workplace is usually a buzzword for bad news for the employees
Programmer here. Can really relate to this, loving little optimizations. Overtime I realized that the perfectionist attitude towards everything would keep me from doing anything, and it's an ongoing struggle to accept the imperfection and just let things work and enjoy it. But for me efficiency is part of me, something I really enjoy, just need a break from it sometimes
@@Socsob yea you get it. I think it's a part of the nature of working with maths and numbers in general. Balancing time, resource use and elegance and serviceability is just inherently a compelling puzzle. IDK if I feel comfortable defending it a 'well SOME things SHOULD be as efficient as possible' b/c like you said, if we strive to perfection we will never reach it.
GOD
I'm so fucking
Happy you mentioned that art doesn't have to be utilitarian, I find it feels like people oftentimes break art down like it's a product. It almost feels like people don't want to engage with it emotionally and instead that a good story should just explain the plot but also be somehow original, and cut anything not directly related to the plot. I feel art doesn't need to explain every little thing and can have weird and "unnessecary" stuff in it because that's usually meant to have the audience feel a certain way.
Also when it comes to creating art I have to spend a LOT of time preparing to add more detain and stuff, it makes me constantly worry that I'm not fast enough, and it feels like online my art is rarely engaged with. Nobody wants to discuss my process or inspiration with me or wonder what I'm proud of, it feels like I'm encouraged to churn out content like a machine while nobody takes the time to understand why I love art so much and how important it is to me.
I'm also Neurodivergent, Autistic and ADHD, so efficiency is not how my brain operates and the fact that it's seen as the default, what you should aspire to it makes me feel broken to be expected top try and push my pace of life and focus to a pace my brain doesn't want to go at
You build the common ground of your followers. If only what you post is the piece, people interested in one's inspirations won't stick around or be discouraged to ask. We have accepted our unimportance to the creators and need to be reminded by them about the contrary
this. art to me is just what happens when you can’t just say something to feel like it’s conveying what you want, then resorting to whatever format people find fulfilling to further express those emotions. I play lots of piano and skateboard, and the idea of “wasted time” just isn’t a thing to me. those moments trying new weird things i just find fun, like improvising on piano, are when i feel like I really learn and progress. With skating, sure it’d be “efficient” to go to the park every day and practice the same thing over and over, as opposed to skating to school, around the town or whatnot-and a skatepark if i feel like it, the former would just burn me out and overwork my body, similar to the way workers are pushed to their limits in the pursuit of “efficiency”.
@ndoman3807 For me my main artistic practice is drawing. I also have a slight interest in competitive gaming and for both I kind of feel an odd push from others to do these things in a way I'm not big into.
Like, I want to improve at these skill. But I don't want to be THE BEST. I'd rather focus on learning more about the thing in a way that preserves what I enjoy about it rather than just optimizing it so hard that I feel like I'm turning a passion into a spreadsheet.
Like I only enjoy drawing certain things, not cause learning other stuff is too hard, I just never learned it cause I never felt like drawing it. This leads my skills super lopsided but it'd burn me out to do endless exercises just to figure out how to draw something I'll never draw. Same thing with comp gaming, I'd rather use a sub optimal weapon or character that I like, than one that's good. I'm one of those people who also cares way too much about character lore and aesthetic and pick my character with those things in mind rather than just breaking all that down to some numbers.
But a lot of what I'm exposed to with these hobbies online is the feeling that how I enjoy thing is wrong somehow, and I think that just sucks.
Most new people are ASD, its the inevitable result of civlization & its biochemical & electromagnetic industrialization....fertilizers, gmos, giant space-satelite EMF webs of frequencies constantly modulating our "biofields".
The only real reason its scene as a problem or even disability, is because generationally transitioning between practical political belief systems is, discombobulated,....like "ok grampa, thats cool you know how to repair a lawnmower by hand...but we have cell phones nowadays and the dinasaurs went extinct too BTW" 😸😸😸😂😂😂😂
unnecessary*
This really spoke very deeply to me. Recently I chose to follow a course in personal leadership from my college, and I was told in the first lesson that we would be following Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. One look at this book made me almost puke, but sadly I needed my education credits so I couldn't quit the course. Over the five workshops, the fanatical teacher told us (in between his bouts of bragging about how good his life is) that the way to live your life "effectively" is to set goals by writing them into a "personal mission statement" and to constantly think of all social interactions with others as withdrawals or deposits into a social bank account. I was shocked at the level of dehumanization and striving for just efficiency in something so fundamental as living your life.
I thought a lot about the things being taught, and I sort of rebelled against the course by refusing to actually set a mission statement and by writing down in most of the workbook that it wasn't teaching me anything and that I don't want to live this way. At the end of the course he asked us to fill out a form to give a grade about the class. I was *harsh*. Soon after, he pulled me aside because he somehow suspected that I was the one who filled out the overly negative review, and I had to defend myself against him.
I don't really know where I was going with this, but I just want to thank you for so concisely and beautifully expressing in a video essay all of the concerns I have with Covey and his obsession with living your life in service of pointless efficiencey towards goals that don't mean anything.
damn just bs it like every other class idk how u sacrificed ur grade
@@vanillafella4893 idk, personal integrity? I can't bullshit a paper on why I love his stuff so much because I genuinely hate the guy.
@@kwonunn4170I’m proud of you. Plus, if his life is super efficient, how loving or lonely is it? Right now I’m in a “I feel like I’m behind” phase and I feel like you represented me then without knowing it. Thanks. You were also so brave to defend yourself then.
That shit at the end was actually unethical on his part. I'm sorry that happened to you.
A little anecdote for the "efficiency" of testing in schools:
In school I used to make somewhat of an effort to pass all classes in the 3 first terms, so I could fully chill in the final 2-3 months of class. It was impossible to fail, at that point, in any subject. One day, during that period, my physics teacher was collecting a homework/paper (I don't remember exactly what) and he was calling people out to bring it to him name by name. Once he called my name I said "I did not do it, teacher". He asked why. I said "maybe because I already passed??". And... he accepted that??
Like, what? He accepted mild sass from a student that was blatantly ignoring all of his classes because of what? Because I wrote the right things on a paper 3 times this year?
Also, that same year, we had a small Chemistry quiz that was 20% of that term's grade. Once again, at that point, no fucks were given. I had expended them all during the year. I didn't know SHIT from the past 3 months of classes. It was multiple choice. I guessed all of them, didn't even read the questions. Somehow aced it (it was a short quiz), increasing my grades even more...
Standardized testing is worthless to determine whether a student should advance grades.
"even myself as I'm writing this" gave me such a shock regarding the temporality of the video essay as product. We see the essay as the video itself, but it's really the synthesis of various forms of labour over a period of time. Thank you for that.
This is very true and, it is my considered belief that it applies to all forms of public speaking. As one who has occasionally delivered lectures, I realize that I’m not addressing solely those sitting in the auditorium; I’m also addressing myself. So, when doing my research on the theme or topic, I endeavour to go to those sources which provide as much detail as possible and incorporate that into my manuscript, which, in turn, I convert into an outline. (Like Zoe, I tend to be verbose. My lecture manuscripts can be five to six hours; and my outlines can be three to four hours. Yet, I may be allotted only a few minutes to speak. I think that comes, in part, from being an “old soul”.)
I go about it this way because I need to know that I can understand what I’m saying. To be sure, I could restrict myself to a source which gives a mere abstract summary of the topic. But, of what real benefit is that to my audience or myself? The detailed consideration allows me to think-yes, think deeply-about the topic, both in terms of what I already know and in terms of what I may be learning just in the course of my research, as well as how the two connect or diverge.
People have come up to me after these lectures and explained that I helped them to look at various topics in different ways. They’ve asked where I found that and I typically reply that there was so much more I could have said, but I’ve been able to point them to the material I use as sources. In this way, we all can learn something. Indeed, in such instances, I tend to actually enjoy the “journey” more than even the “destination”.
Here's the thing. I definitely notice that our society is built on efficiency. Most of my jobs have been in food service, where my attention to detail is downright harming the goal of getting it done fast. I originally wanted to work in construction, and it took very little time to recognize how much time is wasted trying to optimize efficiency, because meeting the deadline is the most important thing. I can't be a good student the way I want to, because I don't work or learn efficiently, I have to have long conversations with people, redo the same work a ton of times to retain it longer, I read really slowly, ideally i can record and relisten to every lecture...none of that is ideal for a university setting
Yup. I'm just like this, too. It's frustrating trying to do the best job in the quickest amount of time. It's a fine line and my OCD usually plays against staying in the right side of that line.
Not entirely. We still use fossil fuels which aren't really efficient in the long run
Yes, because god forbid you actually learn some valuable insight from the lecture that can't be expressed on a sheet of paper.
Some of the most learned students get Fs for their effort, while motherfuckers coasting on chegg and AI see As effortlessly.
@@dylansearcy3966 yeah, there's a caveat to running everything efficiently; it has be efficient *now*. Our fossil fuel use, our city and traffic planning, our education, our daily life, it has to be efficient in time and/or money now even if doing it less time and money efficient will yield more efficiency (and God forbid there are other values at play) later
@vienlacrose and they get punished for cheating and people who work on learning the material do make good grades
To me, "wasted time" is arguing with people on the internet. It's not traditionally productive (doesn't make money), it perpetuates hatred and extremism, it NEVER does what it aims to accomplish (change the other person's mind), it's not enriching for your mind or spirit (whatever "spirit" means to you), is terrible for your mental health, takes time away from everything else (ie. work, leisure, family, friends), etc. etc. It's really the only thing I personally think is always a waste of time.
Most things we do are not a "waste" of time. Playing video games, watching movies, reading books, staring at birds outside the window, resting for a day -- those are things that give us much needed restful enjoyment.
As a university student, i wish professors could understand this sometimes. Like there is a reason why university students have too much stress. They have to balance several classes while professors expect them to be efficient and write papers as if they have all the time in the world. My recent semester which just ended was hell cause of this mindset. Also the unforgiving behaviour profs. and ultimately the schooling system has for mistakes just makes universities feel inhospitable for someone like me 😅. I wasnt able to get proper rest after doing a streasful paper because i had to be "efficient" and immediately move on to the next (which aids in my anxiety, physically and mentally) although my writing skills suck and are not a reflection of what i learned 😅. What im saying is, i wish i could show this video to certain prof. And the whole university system which expects total efficiency and neglects patience and true learning
One final observation about efficiency is that, I've noticed that people lose the plot. I'm thinking about pickup-artist scene, it's all about developing an effective strategy to get on as many dates as possible, without considering the reason one would go on a date to begin with. People try to be the "perfect guy" instead of being themselves. Worse off, because of this fundamental issue you end up with people who don't want you, they want "the perfect guy" which is an unsustainable facade.
The whole point of finding a date is to find someone you're happy with. But how can someone be happy with you if you aren't being you. How can you be happy if you aren't you?
As humans are satisficers (people who settle for good enough), some shitty situations are local extrema as to what they supposedly provide. For example, pickup artists may be so acclimated to the pickup artist world that they literally cannot function when on a normal date nor would they recognize their happiness is the fraction of the happiness they really want. Also, a pickup artist, by definition, must believe that their original self is not good enough to show out, and must mask it with bravado and gimmicks.
Side hustle is a euphemism for part-time job. Capital efficiently fooling us into believing we can all be billionaires if only we work hard enough. Thank you for the thoughtful essay ZB. I always enjoy listening. I can't multitask, so I really do nothing but listen. Keep on comrades:)
No matter how many side hustles you have, you will never earn money as effortlessly as someone who is already rich.
Literally NO ONE says we can all be billionaires, and guess what, if we all were, we'd all be poor af because money would mean nothing, and even if it did, there arent enough resources on the planet to satisfy the unlimited desires of 350 million American billionaires so having all that money would be pointless.
@@EnlightenedMinarchist Literally every "financial motivational speaker" does say we can all be billionaires if we just try really hard. Their explanation for why not everyone is one is that most people are lazy or self-victimizing or whatever, completely ignoring the fact that the system is specifically designed to stack as many cards against the average person as possible.
Oh, and ideally we would live in a world where money meant nothing, but not in the way you think.
@@ratfry Communist scum. Money is nothing more than a useful means of exchanging value.
@@EnlightenedMinarchist Literally every motivational speaker says you CAN be a billionaire, it's just your fault for not putting enough effort in.
You briefly mention the creative in this video and that really comes to heart for me. I'm both a traditional oil painter and a digital artist, but when I create in the different mediums I'm like two different people. The oil painter knows how to take his time and be happy to just ride the waves until he's done, while the digital artist tries to optimize his work so it can be posted quickly how the algorithms want. I've recently been craving a day were I go totally offline for a day and this video really spoke into that for me
Thank you ❤
Do it, it's wonderfull to go offline from time to time.
That was not my experience with digital art software. I’d screw around with every filter, masking layer, and tool for hours just to see what they could do. You can work on that mindset.
I love that this video is over an hour long. I love longer form videos. I love details. I hate the trend of "shorter is better". Sure, in some cases, it can be. But it definitely isn't inherently. I'm not saying shorts are not ever entertaining. But often, when watching shorts, I tend to wish they were longer. I wish they went into more detail. I like the topic they cover, but I want to know more. But there isn't any more, because it's all chopped down to just the basics. I don't want that. I don't like that.
When I was in high school, I learned to solve a Rubik's Cube. I took it with me everywhere, and played with it during class. (I had ones that didn't make much noise.) It helped me so much, to have something to do with my hands while listening to the teachers. I learned much better with it, especially since I wasn't focused on how bad my artistic skills were when I tried doodling instead. Half the time, I wouldn't even "solve" it, I'd just do various algorithms that were burned into my muscle memory. It was helpful for me. Teachers didn't understand that. Which was ridiculous, because the school I went to was mostly kids who were autistic or had ADHD. Everyone was neurodivergent, yet they weren't even really accepting of this kind of stuff. It was very frustrating. I don't think it's a hard concept to grasp, that someone can be learning better in a way that other people don't. Is your favorite color the same as mine? What about your daily routine? Do you look like me? Of course none of that is the same, because we are all unique. So why is it so hard for them to understand that our learning techniques can also be just as different as everything else.
I'm turning 30 this year. I'm so tired and jaded by "the daily grind". Everything is about profit and squeezing every penny out of every worker in the workforce. Getting as much value as possible out of every second. And that's how society looks at it, just in the moment. But the thing is, I think it's the opposite. Because if you're working someone to the bone, their health will decline, physically and mentally. They're going to break. Then they'll need to rest, or get medical treatment. And guess what you can't do during that? Work. Productivity. Efficiency. It's actually less efficient to work us to the bone. It's tiring. I don't think it makes sense at all, logically. Sure, in the very short term, it's the "best" way. But in the long run, it's probably the worst possible way for society to normalize "work-life balance". And yet, this is how we all live. Because everything revolves around capitalism and profit and just getting everyone to do as much as possible without actually caring about their well being. But when it's all about profits, and when everything is just so expensive, it's impossible for society to actually genuinely care about and help the everyday person.
I really hate the normalization of spying on students too. I do take exams for certifications in my field, and I get very very stressed out from them. Why? Not because I don't know the content. But because I'm autistic and I my personal space is not the most organized. But a lot of these tests require "nothing else on your desk". Hell, I can barely afford my $1800+ rent in my tiny studio apartment. There's not any space to keep other stuff that I usually have on my desk. Unless you want me to shove it on the floor. I don't have stuff on my desk for the sake of cheating. Some of it just helps my mental health. But no, because "anything on the desk could potentially be cheating", I can't have any of that. Which of course, makes my mental health worse, and keeps me from actually doing my best on the test. It's insane.
Credit scores are also super ridiculous. When you finish paying off your student loan, your credit score goes down, because you don't have it in your report anymore. Shouldn't you be rewarded for finishing paying off a loan? Also, if your loan is transferred to another provider (like mine was, without my choice or input), it closed my old account, which removed it from my credit history of over 10 years, and also added a brand new account, which again lowered my score. It's insane. That wasn't something in my control, and it had no bearing on how much money I actually borrowed, when I borrowed it, or how much I have paid or still owe. It's so dumb. I also have some credit cards. I pay them off in full every month. But I don't get anything for that on my credit score. Credit scores are pretty much made just to keep people in debt. The more accounts you pay off, the better, so you better have a lot of borrowed money. And if you're not borrowing, I guess you'll never buy a car or house. Not that anyone under 40 can really afford anything these days.
BTW I totally didn't "watch" almost any of the video. I listened carefully to all of it. But I was playing games on my phone and playing solitaire with a deck of cards. It's just so much easier to enjoy content like that. :)
I aint reading allat
@@GiovanniElia-rr1gp Then don't...?
Your transition into the “waste” section was STUPIDLY EFFECTIVE, phenomenal writing. Your presentation throughout is compelling, entertaining, and sensitively detailed- thank you for such an insightful video I’m so excited to follow your journey :))))
Wow, how efficient of her
And actually if you look into it capitalists are incredibly inefficient with resources and products. Since "efficient" means getting more money from people to them. Not making the most amount of people satisfied with the least amount of resources or labour used.
Some materials can be extracted super cheap and some labour is often kept down in wages or even outright enslaved. This means it's quite often more profitable to overproduce and destroy the excess.
I swear Zoey needs a full-time person whose whole job is make sure she takes care of herself and doesn't almost pass out.
I low-key feel like everyone could use one of those
Yup. Definitely need one too
Corgis are good at that. Whether YOU want to stop and take care of yourself, Corgis are bossier than most people. They have to be: they look "a thousand pounds of angry pot roast" in the face and persuade full grown bulls to go where the Corgi wants them to go. If you think you can out bossy a Corgi, you've got another think coming!
BTW, many thanks to Tom Lehrer for that famous phrase about pot roast!
My cat fills that role. When I get wiped she will just sit on me and refuse to move when I try to
@@Jon-id7ki I am always grateful that the cat bullies me into rest when I'm not doing well. He usually knows before I do.
23:04 i am zoe's number one fan
what you said immediately after that resonated so much. im autistic and becuse of other learning disabilities i was allowed to have my laptop for note taking durrning classes. somtimes in high school i would open up a game of online solitaire becuse it's easier for me to pay attention to things i dont care about if i have somthing to stim with; like say; a game that littraly requires color+numbers 1-10 recognition and nothing else. any time a teacher saw that i got in big trouble and no one ever listened when i tried to explain that i was doing it *to* pay attention
“It's one of those things a person has to do; sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.”
~The Zoo Story by Edward Ablee
This quote has stayed with me for the 20+ years since I was first shown this play.
At first i connected with it because my brain meanders in storytelling, but it all felt important still……even though others would disagree.
It’s also now my first thought when I see businesses and places try to enact efficiency polices. Six Sigma. Lean. The badges they wear of being the least wasteful…..and the least human.
Sadly, there are many children who have been & still are removed from their families due to being poor or in marginalized communities that don't get the resources for them all to flourish. "Saving" these children so they can have a "productive" life is not helping.
Yes, those who are suffering abuse &/or toxic environments should be helped! But if the toxic & unhealthy environment is caused by lack of societal & government support, that requires a different set of solutions!
BTW, loving the video! You're awesome Zoe!💜🙌🏾🌈✊🏾💜
I would have liked to see us uplift the down-trodden communities decades ago. Instead, we had 2 pointless and very expensive wars, threw a bunch of money into political money-laundering schemes, big pharma, big agri, bankers, etc. I think we're running out of time to turn this ship around.
So many of my friends are annoyed by the way I play games with suboptimal builds, or stop halfway through to pick it up months later when I "feel" it's more appropriate to continue a story, and this really helped me got a bit more in touch with that odd, poorly understood part of my mind. Amazing video, thank you so much!
Yeah me too, it always takes me 2 or 3 times longer to finish a game because I don't rush it, and in multiplayer/co-op games I'm always at the bottom of the scoreboard because I just don't care about outperforming everyone else.
I had a friend who'd watch videos of the game BEFORE playing it so he would already know what to do and could be more efficient, spoiling himself the pleasure of discovery. I don't understandt that mentality. I enjoy games on my free time, I don't rush them to play the next one as fast as I can...
I don't look at efficient builds, I don't follow the meta, I just want to experience the game by myself.
Haven’t finished the video yet but it is already making me feel better about myself. I always push myself to do something “productive” so much so that I literally had to go to the ER because all the stress was giving me really bad heart palpitations. I’m trying my best to not do everything, but it’s hard.
I feel like my brain has been broken.
going to the ER is efficient, having to go to the ER is not. death is really inefficient too. so take better care of yourself
Ugh, the part about the professor calling out doodling. I used to be bullied in middle school for being weird (i.e. neurodivergent) and there was one teacher who participated in it. He was a trash adult but good at teaching I’ll give him that. I was doodling while listening to his class and laughing along, and this bastard singles me out and says “You’re not doing a good job pretending to listen just because you’re laughing along”.
It still brings me rage to this day. Actually, More rage because I see now that I was a Child, barely 13, being bullied by a grown ass man.
"When I was writing those shitty paragraphs, I could've been writing these awesome, amazing paragraphs."
This is the most relatable distillation of what it feels like to revise one's own work that I've ever heard. Thank you for making this.
Those moments during revision when you hit upon "ohhhh, _that's_ how this needs to look" feel really nice.
tbh sometimes while reviewing I feel like that's not even me, whatever I'm seeing is so bad it must be someone else's work. That's where real learning is done I think
My passion for life has always come from _spreading out_ and exploring countless ways to _do and be._ Comparing notes on the subjectivity of life. Efficiency instead demands _narrowing to the single fastest_ (and most negligent) point.
I've been confronting the problem of relentless efficiency by slipping through the cracks. As a patient, I've always hated when care providers try to speedrun me rather than engaging with me emotionally, so I tried to treat my patients how _I'd_ want to be treated. I lost my job because I wasn't efficient enough. (And because I needed to get medical attention _decades earlier_ than I am now).
People even bring the grindset to the games I play. There's a great video called Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft that outlines the difference between optimal, reward-oriented play, and _unstructured_ play.
Dan from Folding Ideas is great. I could see him and Zoe making some great videos together.
I feel like too many people use the excuse of unstructured play to justify why they suck at the game. I often don't play according to the meta and will still outperform everyone else (or mostly everyone else), and my point is that the individual can rise above the meta, since we aren't even at the top top anyway, so mindlessly following the meta as an average player is just you being dumb.
You can branch out and still perform better than 95% of people.... but this same people still think "wow, you suck for not following the meta." My 'friend' acts like this. he acts like WoW is a super hard game to play and I come back after not playing for years, ignore the meta, don't look up the 'best way to play' my character, but still out perform him.
It really gets under his skin, which is so weird; just fcking play the game. He acts like you need to have an IQ of 150 to be good at WoW. I actually have a degree in physics, and he acts like he is smarter than me because he plays WoW more than me and tells me how WoW requires a really high intelligence. It is so weird; I think he has in inferiority complex, because WoW is not a hard game to play at all; it is a really easy game to be quite good at
@@pyropulseIXXI Being graded on sucking/not sucking at the game is still highly structured though. It can feel like a rat race sometimes.
When I pull out the fishing pole and play with my cats, there is no such metric. I play to enjoy the physics of the toy, and empathize with the joy my cats are feeling. _That_ is the mindset I've always brought to games, and as games get increasingly more structured, that's becoming more and more rare. My best friend and I used to stay up all night ignoring the story objectives in Halo 2 in favor of _golfing with plasma grenades._ I used to spend hours mining for glitches to throw myself out of bounds. Absolute stupid fun.
It seems like nowadays, everything's about grinding % damage increases on your gear or boosting your gamerscore/e-peen, and many games don't let you screw around or even _play_ unless you activate an objective that's going to grade you. Truly unstructured play means _not being graded._
1:00:38 onward is the most poignant passage I've ever come across on youtube, or anywhere. Ever. You just got to move an emotionally numb and immature silly little man. I got goosebumps and tears of absolute joy listening to you. This is LITERALLY the 1st time I've come across your channel, just... Thank you! I love you Zoe.
Something I've been thinking about efficiency lately is that there is often an inverse relationship between how efficient a thing is made to be and how robust it is.
So for example, the bit about a baker who doesn't stop for a moment to glance out the window when putting in a pan of muffins. That brief moment of time they spend looking out the window is "inefficient" in that it doesn't help the muffins get baked any more quickly. However, it is also a bit of a buffer, a bit of flexible time done around the task that can absorb shocks. If you have a bakery kitchen that is running at absolutely maximum efficiency, all the little moments of spare time reclaimed and transformed into moments of absolute productive time, using the absolutely minimum number of staff possible to achieve the maximum output of baked goods... then any small disruption in the operation of that bakery will bring everything screeching to a halt.
If the bakers are allowed no spare time at their tasks, if there are no more people on shift than are absolutely minimally necessary to get everything done, then the bakery will have a higher output *provided absolutely nothing ever goes wrong.* But if there's problem, maybe someone drops a tray, a delivery driver is late, the electricity briefly browns out, whatever, it creates a ripple effect that goes through the whole environment and brings everything to a stop. Those little spare moments of time one might glance out the window, or the extra staff on hand who aren't constantly doing something or another, they serve as a kind of padding around the tasks they are there to perform, a way for the system to absorb little disruptions without grinding everything to a halt. As Cory Doctorow put it, such maximally-efficient systems "Work well but fail badly."
I feel like this is something that even the types who think in terms of maximizing productivity via efficiency often forget, and they do so at peril. A little inefficiency at the micro-scale can be more efficient at the macro-scale because it has that kind of slack in it.
I mean we have a real life large scale example in living memory. When the pandemic hit entire industries came grinding to a total hault because in the obsession and drive for ultimate efficiency they created systems that were fundamentally incapable of dealing with even them smallest disruptions in their supply chains.
@@NormandyFoxtrot Perfect example!
Something I've oft fantasized about now that I am out of school: walking up to a teacher and asking "why should I want to be part of the world you are preparing me to join?"
Whole lotta "we are preparing you for the real world" with zero telling us why that real world was preferable to just Not Being anymore.
Still hate the term "real world" I do.
Relatable. Additionally, I dislike the phrase "real world" as well for the reasons you mentioned as well as the fact that history is full of people who didn't like something about the world they were living in and decided to do something about it. These people were inventors, and innovators who might have received pushback in their time, but whose contributions to their fields or industries created improvements to the way things were done. They were sometimes also activists and leaders or public servants and policy makers who used strikes, or boycotts, or speeches, or formed movements to call for changes that improved society in some way.
We would read about these figures in school, maybe do book reports on them and be tested on what they did, but then there was also this implication that while what they did was good, society doesn't need to be improved anymore and everything is fine now, so you better not rock the boat and you better do as you are told.
People who cease to be cease to be able to prefer anything at all.
My experience is that "the real world" is an efficient engine of misery and pain designed to crush the human soul.
Often when a teacher says "real world" they are referring to their reality, not yours.
I'd say make your own reality but that sounds a little too grifty or sm. I think that school only really teaches you one thing in the end and that's that the state wants you to shut up and take it. They want you to be either a good little minimum wage worker or a military Dimothy. At least thats the message when you go to a poor school like I did.
Sure they'll go off on tangents about success or going to college but that's not the purpose of school when you're poor, when you're poor the purpose is to teach you how to act, how to stay in line, how to take it...
Oop anyway.
Hey, just one quick note about Quibi: at the time there wasnt really enough demand for high budget short form content to drive its inception. A far more likely goal (cited by its founders as a positive but not a main objective) was to get around union protections that exist for actors and writers. Its pretty obvious when you try to watch what programming they produced. Most of their projects were pretty obviously written for a traditionally formatted movie or TV show, but split into parts so they could classify them as short form content, which doesnt carry some of the rights for associated workers that traditional episodes or movies do.
Interesting.
Reminds me of how Zoe pointed out that adjunct adjunct professors get underpaid over the course of several semesters if each semester they don't know whether or not they'll still be hired.
The cumulative time some adjunct professors spend at an institution implicitly telegraphs that they're regarded as equally capable as their tenured colleagues, but their time spent at the institution is split into parts, not unlike the media on Quibi, so that the professors can be classified as lesser than their tenured peers, so that they don't have to be as generously compensated.
There was an update to Taylorism which we learnt in our engineering course.
Taylorism divided and specialised labour, turning workers into automata effectively, but it came with the downside that managers weren’t quite in touch with what was happening on the floor, in addition to worker unhappiness.
Toyota developed their LEAN management system partly as a response to what they saw as a flaw in Taylorism. While still rooted in efficiency, it’s focused on continuous improvement and listening to workers, involving them in the process. It had the added benefit of being better than Taylorism from a profit perspective, as shown by mid century dominance of Japanese auto makers over Taylorist American manufacturers (who then updated their practices). While still management driven, it was certainly a move away from being mindless automata
I feel efficiency is a good thing, but what we’re measuring to calculate that efficiency metric is wrong (gdp and profit). Other factors should be accounted into it like worker happiness and wider factors like environmental, social and economic sustainability.
Oddly enough this kind of reminds me of something my manager told me when I worked in the environmental department of a paper mill. It was in regards to our wastewater treatment plant and how most of our necessary bugs and microbiobes were killed due to irresponsible chemical dumping. My manager told me that everyone else was expecting it to be up and ready to go after we did everything we could to improve the system almost as if it were like any other machine in the mill, it isn’t; It is an ecosystem we have to support and it takes much time to build back up after dumping incidents.
TLDR we can’t treat living organisms as efficient machines
Engineer here, and one of our mottos around the office is "better is the enemy of good." If we design something and it does its job, then there's no need to go back and re-iterate to make it better or more efficient.
Obviously reiteration is a normal part of the process to make something work, but there's a point where you are spending a ton of time to improve something that already works, and you're better off just moving to a new project.
I’m studying economics, intentions for a PhD, but my goal is to re-humanize the field and it’s concepts. This video is beautiful, and makes it clear I don’t have a mountain to climb, but rather several light-years to traverse at a very human pace….
Good luck.
As a student in a pandemic, I feel the need to report that, unlike the rest of the children in my school, the quarantine was the best stage of my life. I put my cell phone in front of the computer screen and while I was watching anime with my headphones on, I took note of The most important thing in class then I wrote on a small piece of paper on my screen, with all the free time it was also the time where I read the most and learned things and laughed, now I can't because I have to prepare for university and I'm afraid because I don't know if I can survive the insufferable sadness that the education system is for me but I can't earn more time because for my parents and for the system it's a waste
Zoe is such a warm and gentle presence it’s so bizarre to hear her curse. I admit it does help drive her points home, though. As someone pondering leaving academia, this topic hits hard, and this is a fabulous representation
Hey look, a 1 hour video essay on the obsession with perfect use of time that contributes to roughly half of my anxiety disorder. I absolutely love it.
You're a very strong writer, one of the strongest on RUclips. I never zone out when I listen to you in the background, like I do with so many other content creators. Great job!
Despite having ADHD and struggling with keeping my focus on long form content, this was such a valuable video, thank you so much for putting all this effort into making it! I had to take a few breaks but I knew it was important, vital even, to watch the full length version, not the short version. There's so much that is simply lost. Just because it may contain the same information, doesn't mean it tells the same story. Similar to what you said: just because it's concise, doesn't mean it's better.
Most of my RUclips viewing is done while I'm at work. Time that would otherwise be wasted on working is instead made, at least partially, into leisure time during which I get to enjoy videos like yours (but mostly about board games; thanks, NPI)!
Welp I did it again. Got stoned and ended up in the comments writing a comment to feed the algorithm and to show my excitement and support of this video and your project’s greater success overall. I’m particularly excited about this topic due to the people around me at this point in my life. I can think of a few people who may enjoy this one in particular as well.
This video persuaded me to not use a typewriter ever again. Thanks Zoe 💜
As a little PSA meant especially for those who struggle with how many mistakes they make or how inefficient they perform tasks, I’m going to try to dive a little deeper into a lesson I was taught very early. The lesson as I was taught it (for those looking for a TLDR) is that it’s okay to make a mistake if you learned something. Fundamentally, our brains are what we have recently begun calling Neural Networks, after the brains we studied to develop the theory. I realize that’s tautological and somewhat recursive, but it’s important because we’ve learned a lot recently about how brains work compared to other form of information processing. Although we have been tempted since the creation of the first Turing machines to compare our brains to computers or processors, this is a misleading comparison because of one very important distinction: computers operate deterministically, and brains do not. This means that given the same input a different brain or the same brain at a different time is unlikely to produce the same output. This (I swear I’m getting to the point), is because brains more or less rely on what might be best described as tiny committees, the consensus of which leads to a decision. This is to say that there is a significant (and necessary) element of chaos in the normal function of a brain. As we have learned, brains learn by splitting decisions into tiny decision fragments, assigning a relationship between the input and output of each decision fragment and then making an uninformed decision. The results of the uninformed decision are observed and then the decision factors deemed relevant to the result are adjusted and the decision/observation process repeats. The result of the adjustment is that over time, successive decisions will be more likely to result in “successful” outcomes. What this means, though, in addition to Zoe’s point about measuring the wrong thing when deciding success, is that because the learning process is partially random and never results in a perfectly efficient decision (though it will trend towards perfect for as long as accurate feedback is present), a brain will never “always be right”. From this we get the old adage “to err is human” or “we all make mistakes”. What I’m trying to say is that if you’ve made a mistake, you don’t need to feel bad about it forever, no matter how bad the mistake was: after a certain degree of “punishment” (that’s the actual term for negative reinforcement in the learning process), further “training” based on the single decision will actually be counter-productive. In artificial neural nets, it can be observed clearly: continuous punishment results in the net refusing to produce an answer (technically, depending on the model it might produce a near equivalent, such as a zero or negative value, but that’s not relevant). What can be useful, however, is further analysis of the results and the decision process. Perhaps one of the most interesting features (also sometimes one of the more destructive ones) of human brains is their ability to shift rapidly and radically with a change in perspective or perception. This means that if you reevaluate a formative memory from your past and come up with a different interpretation, it can result in you relearning a different lesson than you took away from the event at the time. Needless to say, this can be greatly useful if you’ve been struggling with a past mistake, but it’s important to recognize that if nothing has significantly changed since the event in question, your brain is very unlikely to produce the kind of new interpretation you need and you will therefore find that going out and having new experiences is necessary before you can have this sort of revelation. This, of course, can be boiled down to “don’t dwell on your mistakes” and “time heals all wounds”, but I have found it quite useful to understand some of the whys and whatfors involved.
So, if you’re looking fir some kind of simple formula for all this, here’s what I’ve got: if you’ve made a mistake, don’t go beating yourself up about it; by recognizing that it is a mistake, you’ve already started learning from it and there is no more need to feel bad (the “bad” feeling, in case you didn’t pick up on this, is the negative reinforcement of your decision fragments being applied; the sensation of your neurons readjusting to prevent similar mistakes). Instead, consider briefly what you can gather about what happened and why it happened. Once you think you have an understanding of why it happened, if you can think of a better way you could have reacted then STOP: if you’ve thought of a better way to do it and resolved to do that in the future then you have supplemented the negative reinforcement with positive reinforcement and further consideration of the event is unlikely to result in further learning, at least until you get more information about the event or a new perspective on information you have. If you have understood what happened but have been unable to come up with a better way you could have reacted, again, STOP: there may not be a better reaction and what happened was not a mistake but instead a chance event or, if there was a better reaction after all, your brain’s recursive learning process will eventually make it apparent and you don’t need to spend more time on active consideration. If you’ve gathered all the information about the event that is available and you still have not understood what occurred, again, STOP: if things you have learned already would allow you to understand what happened, that would have happened already. If an event you do not understand bothers you, congratulations; you’ve experienced curiosity and should seek new learning: seek the advice of others you think may have a better understanding or else get scientific and start experimenting to get more data to draw conclusions from. If, after all this, you still can’t help but think about a mistake you’ve made and it’s getting you down, try meditating on it. No, I don’t mean you have to go to religion or learn Zen; I mean set aside some time specifically to ponder it. By doing this, you will likely find that it is easier to not think about it during the rest or your day (since, after all, you’re already going to do that later) and you can arrange to be in a better frame of mind for pondering when it is time to ponder. Btw, there are actually different kinds of meditation, I was shocked to find out; meditation can be the pursuit of an empty mind, or it can be actively trying to ponder deep or difficult problems or it can be the process of falling asleep or the process of trying to set aside distractions for the purpose of increasing focus or a combination of any of those and probably some other things I forgot to mention. Just thought it was worth mentioning.
Just found your channel. This video was really good and gave me a lot to think about. Thank you.
i’ve read the book, “the hate u give” by angie thomas, and have seen a lot of people confused on why mavericks rose plant kept coming up. i feel like our world has put such a horrible seed in our minds that we can’t appreciate symbolism anymore. the roses in my opinion represented change and growth in the main character, starr and the future that we can make. and yet, it was thrown away by most of the people who read the book. it’s a shame, really.
I still hate roses despite that fact I read that book last year because I have fallen into rosebushes too many times and the flowers are mid at best
@@IndustrialParrot2816 Well then... haha
The vast majority of people just don't get it unless you explicitly spell it out to them
my freshman ap-English class read this a couple years ago and most people’s complaint about the book was that it dragged on or that many parts of it didn’t contribute to the story. this video had me thinking about that and I honestly don’t think the world-building would’ve held up as well without all those parts
One time, when I was a child, I was bored in social studies and started reading ahead in the textbook. My teacher tried to call me out with a question, assuming I must not be paying attention. I answered immediately and continued reading.
Goodness. This was so powerful. I have never been able to understand the appeal of short videos... I want them long! No way will there be enough nuance for my tastes in a shorter one. The developments are, to my mind, truly chilling... thank you so much for shining a light, and for making this
"Playing a song at two times speed doesn't make it sound twice as good." That line managed to hit me exactly where it could hurt the most. Holy shit.
I feel like with the overwhelming enthusiasm toward generative AI right now, this might be one of the most important and relevant messages that needs to be reiterated right now. This one really hit the spot.
As someone with undiagnosed adhd, the "getting in trouble for doodling/doodling helps focus" thing is so relatable.
I think the best way to sum up this video is this: efficiency is a tool, and when all you have is a hammer... Well, it sounds like you refuse to be a nail, and I absolutely vibe with that
I used to doodle in my notebooks all the time, and it helped me remember where certain notes were and what the subject was. This made it more useful for studying and homework. People really shouldn't be stopped from doodling unless it's bringing their grades down.
I have a bachelor's in Industrial Engineering but by senior year, I realized that all the recommendations I made in case studies about how "you can use this workers time elsewhere" just meant that worker would be fired. And then I didn't really feel good about IE anymore and no longer wished to pursue a career in it. There are things it can be used positively for like ergonomics and factory layouts but it's mostly used today to see how many workers can be cut out of a supply chain while keeping it functional and adaptable to risk
I think that's why I instead vibe with civil engineering (which I did study, up to a master's degree level, currently looking for work). I always find large infrastructure projects fascinating, and I like that my work is ultimately meant for the public good. We need to spend a lot of time planning and iterating designs before coming up with a (hopefully) final version to send out for construction. Efficiency is just one of many factors considered, we gotta balance out against policy priorities, environmental protection, safety, sustainability, the unique characteristics of a particular project, and so on.
on the topic of your lecture, I remember one time in high school, a teacher got annoyed that I wasn't taking notes because she thought that I must not be paying attention. I told her I didn't get much out of writing notes, and she asked me to prove it by explaining the concept she'd been talking about earlier in class, and I did, because I *had* been paying attention.
that's not a story I'm telling to show off, it wasn't that impressive (although it was funny): it's just to relate my experience of teachers just not expecting or understanding that some students might learn in even slightly different ways.
Yeah, a better teacher will investigate whether you are actually taking in the lesson, not whether you appear to be taking it in.
On the other hand, there is also an argument to be made that it's better for you to have access to a copy of the material in a form you understand 6 months later when you're revising for exams, or ten years later when a situation comes up in your job which you dimly remember having been covered in a lecture ages ago, even if it means you struggle more with understanding it in the moment. It's the difference between learning it at the time and being able to remember/reproduce/apply it later.
All that information can be re-discovered. Classroom lectures aren’t full of secret knowledge.
Digital notes detract from retention, and handwritten notes are more for the exercise of capture than for future reference.
In 11 years of note-taking classroom instruction (HS, college, MA, PHD), I have never referred to prior semester notebooks nor did I use them in the decade afterwards.
Now, my own research note database - yes, but that’s a wholly different exercise.
So, no, if active listening is better for retention, that’s best for the learner. The argument that “notes might be useful someday” is not a good reason to reduce engagement and retention.
@@johnmickey5017 I have referred to past notes on occasion.
But it's not my intention to claim that note taking is the universal one true way of attending in class - only to point out that the ability to explain the material during the lecture isn't a perfect measure of your long-term grasp of it either.
The goal is for students to... well, cynically, the goal is for students to know the material long enough to pass an exam on it (and to build on it if it's a prerequisite for a lates course), but ideally, the goal is for students to learn the material well enough to still understand it years later.
Back in my day, one meme in circulation was the following definition: "Lecture. n. A means of transferring information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student without passing through the minds of either."
I had the same exact habit as you in high school: drawing while listening rather than taking notes. I always did well on tests so it seemed like it wasn't an issue.
I never really did well in math class though, the balance of daily homework i never did to tests i could usually manage B pluses on always got me like D or C average grades.
I remember one semester freshmam year I followed my usual habit, just "goof off", doodle while listening to the lectures, never taking notes and then taking the semester 1 final netted me a C on the test.
2nd semester I vowed to do things the "right way", i took notes, filled out the study guides and pre-tests leading up to the final, actually went home and "studied", rereading my notes and doing practice problems.
I took the final and wound up getting a D.
Looking back now as a 31 yo this is obviously proof of my own neurodivergence and the US education systems inability to teach in a way that accounted for any other mode of learning.
But, boy I'll tell ya, that moment there negatively impacted the way I viewed my own education.
As a drafter/designer, I love your earrings. Also, as a drafter/designer I am currently being CRUSHED under the weight of our industry's demanding and breakneck requirement to continuously work faster and faster, while also maintaining the same degree of professional detail and accuracy. We keep losing entire departments of drafters who get literally used up like they are disposable, or people having to quit before they commit die. It's a real problem.
Currently at 27:07, but I would like to say this:
If you're fully present in whatever it is you're doing, you're not wasting time. That is engagement in purposeful action, no matter what anyone else might opine. That is the essence of living, not simply waiting to die.
growing up, I got punished for drawing during school. I did really well in school, but eventually it all fell apart. Instead of taking the time to punish me, they could have taken the time to help me learn the skills I would eventually need. There's been so much negative reinforcement in my life, and very little positive reinforcement.
I'm a very conflicted person, on one hand I have a fixation on optimization, and on the other, I can't stay organized for extended periods. I'm organized chaos, a walking contradiction. There was a method to my madness, but it is all but lost on me now. My pursuit of perfection leaves only disorder in it's wake. Behold! I am the fifth horseman, Absentmindedness. . . I just seem to have misplaced my horse. I am many things, and none of them make can agree to disagree. Someone send help.
Holy shit I agree so much with that "I am many thing, and none of them can agree to disagree". I always try to look at other's people perspective, but the problem with this is that if you take it to it's extreme, like I have done, is that you end up sometimes invalidating and ignoring your own perspective because "it wouldn't be fair". I feel like I'm juggling so many complex and contradictory points of view at once, and I have to simultaneously not fully accept nor fully reject any of them. It's a living hell, every single day.
I am choosing to believe that 23:04 is completely unscripted, and that peanut butter windows was simply the most threatening thing Zoe could think off the top of her head.
This hit him and made me cry. I wasn't raised the best and also dealing with stuff at work and all of this is just amazing. The amount of work and passion put into this video must have been immense and I'm grateful for it. Thank you
As a current high schooler, thanks for bringing up problems like this with our education system. The culture within and around school is really bad, and it doesn't look like it's getting much better. My state has really been cracking down on public schools, private school vouchers, banning social-emotional learning, refusing to accept trans students' identities, and I hope more people can come across your videos and understand the real importance of public schools.
I think parents should be allowed to send their child to alternative schools, e.g. charter schools, but the government shouldn't dictate the best way of doing things.
Many public school teachers only care about the money, and how parents choosing to send their kids to charter schools instead of public schools reduces funding for public schools (so there's still the same amount per student), and how charter schools aren't controlled by the teachers' unions.
This episode reminds me of the Issac Asimov short story “The Fun They Had”. The kids have customized teaching programs in their homes. Then one of the kids discovers a book about schools in the past where they had human teachers and kids played together. The protagonist then feels like something is missing in the way schools are taught in her time vs her ancestors. If we’re not careful, we could fall into that same trap. I can easily say we’re already halfway there - that Silicon Valley school gives me chills just thinking about it.
Your doodling story is very relatable as well. I recently had a similar experience with my grad program. I use a lot of media & fiction references to make sense of tricky concepts. I made use of some of those references in my precapstone presentation. My professor docked my grade because she didn’t get (initially) why I used those references. Looking back, I should’ve explained the reference a little better. But because my grade got hit with what I do naturally, I subconsciously avoided making any media references whatsoever in future projects. But the consequence of that was me losing focus and steam for the capstone project to the point of getting cynical about it and its purpose. Watching you video made me realize my biggest mistake and has given me time to rectify it - being more myself in my work. I’m gonna digest as much media as I can and see what creative ways I can better explain my thought process to my peers and my professor. All I can say is thank you for this.
Edit - I say initially because I think she eventually figured out what I was trying to do and recommended a book for my current class based on my capstone project.
Holy fuck i actually had the fun they had in my english textbook. Back then I just dismissed it as another technology bad story. But it being about how the quest for efficiency rips away humanity is actually something I never thought about but now i feel bad for dismissing it because it actually has a point
I would type things up on my laptop in a gen ed sociology class. I took an extra year for college, taking general requirement classes I'd waited on and taking extra fun electives I'd wanted... This professor taught the book, so very little deviation from what I'd read the night before if -any- so it was pretty dull.
He tried calling me out on my laptop use, so I explained it straight out. He asked a few questions, and when I answered them all correctly (including some about his most recent discussion with other members of the class) he left me alone the rest of the day.
To anyone reading this, if you're paying for an education, stand up for learning the way you need to learn. If the professor is failing you, it's your right as a paying customer to demand better.
I don’t know why people are saying that this is a boring dystopia, it’s so cool how there’s this group of people who treat the body like a machine and we the people need to fight back, like that would make an amazing dystopia novel
I personally prefer long-form content, stuff from 20min up to a couple hours. I can set it on for a while and not worry about having to change what I'm watching/listening to frequently
Edit: Okay the bit at 22:34 was so great, I was playing Stardew while watching, and THEN you made the crunchy PB threat. Love it, amazing, please make absolutely bonkers threats in future videos
An amazingly clear breakdown of the dangers of overoptimisation and the importance of stepping back once in a while. Love your work Zoe!
The vast majority of the videos I watch are more than half an hour long, and the ones I enjoy the most and the first ones I click on are usually over an hour long.
This video has been a catalyst for me profoundly changing my worldview and putting pieces together in a way that I've been struggling to for the last couple months (at least). I had no idea how obsessed i was with this idea of efficiency that permeates our culture, to the point where i think it was preventing me from having the patience to let myself grow and mature. So many things clicked into place in my head after i sat with this video, and i finally feel like I'm moving forward from this headspace I've been stagnating in for so long. So i just wanted to thank you for unwittingly changing my life with this beautiful video essay.
I kinda love that this is over an hour long (none of it wasted), and kinda hate that I've trained myself to hear & comprehend everything at 1.5x speed 😆😭😆
Made me think about learning, and all the different kinds of "waste" that go into it. Off the time of my head: time, supplies, attention, sometimes your health (depending on what you're learning). Mistakes/failure are often associated with waste, but the older I get the more I appreciate that progress or success (however those things are quantified...?) has to be at least partially measured by the number & scale of failures in the pursuit. Can't speak for everyone, but nothing sticks in my head like something learned thru personal failure; conversely, I typically learn little or nothing from successes (few & far between as they might be).
I do love me some creative inefficiency too tho, iykyk 😎
*top of my head wtf
Hi Zoe, I haven’t watched the video yet (it only just popped up), but as someone who has dealt with severe depression in the last few years that stopped me from working, this is something I’ve been personally processing. I used to feel (and still do to some extent) that I have to do everything and that my life revolved around maximizing my output. however, this outlook on life became untenable with my depression. I was bedridden for 18 hours a day at points. I had so much guilt well up inside me around the idea that I wasn’t spending my time well. Relationships with work and how we engage with it our needed for our wellbeing.
Just wanted to say I've been there too. Totally bedridden all day for weeks despite being physically fine. The feelings of shame and guilt that accompany that behavior just make depression worse and it's honestly just awful.
Didn't really have anything constructive or insightful to add, but I always find it makes me feel better when I see other people have been there because there's very deep feelings involved but they're hard to discuss or even admit with the average person.
9th I
The video really resonated with me. I can't work right now due to health issues, so I've fixated on creative productivity to "compensate." There's been some skill gains, but also a cycle of emotionally crashing and burning.
I got to the part about smearing crunchy peanut butter on the windows and I have to tell you, I was tempted for a moment, Zoe. Glorious.
In an overengineered world, Zoe reminds us of what it is to be human. I enjoy how your videos make me challenge my perspectives.
This video is quite eye opening to me. Even though I've always thought that efficiency is flawed, because it entirely depends on its definition, I trapped myself in an obsession with it. I get strong anxiety if I feel like I'm being inefficient. I've been working on calming myself down, etc. However, a lot of my friends feel this way, but they're also deeper into the pit. They're always so busy. Never free to talk for even a bit. It's... Solitary and stressful
I am zoe's number one fan bacause i wake up two hours early everyday just to sit down and drink coffee while watching something. Inefficiency is my life bro.