That answer must surely be "No," because while the quality of this
mailing list is extremely high, the messages aren't models of
sterling conciseness. I assume that conciseness is most efficient
for getting your point across and maximizing the efficiency of the
readers, as well. Given that this hasn't been happening, we, who
are thinking a lot about these things, must be choosing not to
maximize efficiency. [For the writer, it's much more time and
effort to write concisely. But the overall efficiency of the
mailing list, given that each writer is writing to dozens of readers,
would be improved by such effort. Unfortunately, requiring that
level of writing would also greatly cut down on people's willingness
to contribute.]
> This is not to say that we should be inefficient for the sake of
> inefficiency. It just seems to me that when we take a *systemic*
> view of learning organizations (such as nature) that are healthy
> and maintain themselves for long periods of time, we will see many
> things which would be considered "inefficient" if considered with
> a more narrow view.
If you've read "The Goal" and are familiar with the theory of
constraints, there's the viewpoint that system processes should
synchronize to the bottlenecks in the system. This means that
everything except the bottlenecks will have "wasted" time (i.e.
inefficiency). Analyzing at the level of the individual resources,
this seems inefficient. But from the overall system operation, it's
actually most efficient.
- Stever
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Stever Robbins stever@mit.edu stever@verstek.com
Accept no substitutes! http://www.nlp.com/NLP/stever.html
"You're only young once, but you can be immature forever."