The Optimization Trap: Why Too Much Efficiency Makes Us Fragile
The Great Simplification #230 with Olivier Hamant
For decades, modern civilization has treated efficiency as an unquestioned good: the leaner, faster, and more optimized anything is – from supply chains to your morning routine – the better. But emerging systems science argues that this obsession with performance is actually making humanity more brittle. What if the over-optimization baked into our economies, our agriculture, our institutions, and even our own bodies is at the root of our shared predicament, and how can nature’s intelligence show us a different way?
In this episode, I’m joined by biologist and biophysicist Olivier Hamant to explore why living systems prioritize robustness over performance, and what that means for a civilization built almost entirely in the opposite direction. Olivier distinguishes performance (efficacy plus efficiency) from robustness (the capacity to remain stable and viable despite fluctuation), and he points out that nature rarely selects for the most efficient organism; it selects for the most adaptable one. Together, Olivier and I also trace how cheap, abundant energy allowed human societies to substitute the “safety net” of resource abundance for the safety net that living systems actually rely on: diversity, redundancy, and cooperation. As the twenty-first century moves from an era of stable averages into an era of volatility and standard deviation, Olivier argues that the path forward likely isn’t degrowth or continued growth, but a third way: economies and institutions designed to be robust and adaptable to risk, rather than avoid it.
What wisdom have we forgotten for the sake of maximizing material output and efficiency? How has our search for optimization affected our quality of life, and what do we risk by continuing down this same path? Most importantly, could balancing our focus on performance and robustness be the key to reframing our relationship with the entire Earth, bringing more stability, rest, and meaning to our lives?
Want to dive deeper into the concepts covered in this episode? Follow along with the Show Notes & Links to Learn More, which you can find at the bottom of the page for every episode of The Great Simplification, or you can download them here.
In case you missed it…
Last week, I took on a tension I have been navigating for years, at the heart of communicating about the metacrisis: the hazards that arise from sharing true information with a global audience. Building on my earlier episode, “The Limits to Podcasting,” where I first described a “triple information hazard,” this Frankly outlined twelve distinct risks that emerge when honest insights about the more-than-human predicament are broadcast at scale. Drawing on philosopher Nick Bostrom’s concept of an “information hazard,” I explained why certain ideas become dangerous precisely because they are true, and why the era of AI raises the stakes, as everything said publicly is now ingested as training data and metabolized by the superorganism.
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Perhaps we need to "define our terms", or create new ones, but efficiency is always a good thing. If you insulate a house to Net Zero building standards, (including R-40 insulation and 1 ACH air tightness in a blower door test), then you reduce energy needed to heat and cool the house by 90%. "Reduction is the best production". It is more efficient to reduce the power needed, than generate it "more efficiently".
As a systems designer, I'm very cautious about using the words "optimisation" and "efficiency" without due care, and in a negative light.
Loggers will say "clearcutting is more efficient". It is not. It is the least efficient way of protecting the forest, the planet, the jobs, and the wildlife. It is the most efficient way to increase quarterly corporate profits, by externalising costs such as "dead planet" or "job loss".
So efficiency and optimisation are not the problem. Corporate capture of government and the "infinite growth model" are the problem.