Esteban Küber 
Efficiency is the removal of redundancy. Redundancy is a necessary element of resilient systems. The unbounded search for efficiency has one result: brittleness.
During the COVID lockdowns, and to a lesser degree when the Evergiven got stuck, we saw to how much the Just In Time invisible chains of production and distribution around us affect our lives. As climate change significantly disrupt farming throughout the world, we'll continue to see similar effects.
I'm all for global chains of distribution: specialization is real and you won't ever grow bananas in Alaska (even if Iceland showed it is technically possible last century), manufacture a computer chip in Paris or produce wine in Greenland, but we as consumers have to accept and understand that having pineapple out of season anywhere in the planet is not reasonable at the prices we're used to paying. In some French super markets I've seen signs on the produce next to the price with the country of origin and helpful information of when the growing season is. I found that as an excellent nudge for the almost entirely fictional homo economicus. I'd like us to surface that information to everyone for everything. Maybe that way people would understand just how connected we are.
But that interconnectedness and search for "efficiency" is not only in financial or production systems, it exists in software, hardware, any kind of industry, and in governments. When we "engineer out" expertise out of government to the private sector, government then lacks that expertise entirely. When we engineer away redundancy from software, we end up with software that can fail in catastrophic ways.
One thing I keep seeing is the same lessons being learned across different disciplines: pilots and doctors learning about the importance of checklists, road and industrial machine engineers learning about safe by default design, industrial and software UX designers learning about how to best make machines and humans talk to each other. We need more cross pollination. Across industries. Across borders. Across people. That's how we build a better future. And for that we need to listen.
Eleanor Saitta@ekuber
Are you familiar with the Resilience Engineering Association? If not, I have a real treat for you.
Are you familiar with the Resilience Engineering Association? If not, I have a real treat for you.
@dymaxion i am not!
@ekuber
It's a cross-and multi-disciplinary group looking at how high-reliability organizations can, do, and should work, how systems fall, and how the human parts of those systems help them not fail completely.
https://www.resilience-engineering-association.org/
Good starting places in the literature are Dekker's "A Field Guide to 'Human Error'", the Woods paper "The Theory of Graceful Extensibility: Basic Rules that Govern Adaptive Systems", and (from a different end of the community) Leveson's Engineering a Safer World.
NaClKnight 🧂⚔️🥊