When efficiency becomes the supreme value, it crowds out everything that actually makes systems robust and humane.
It’s weird intellectual laziness disguised as sophistication. Like, “we’ve solved it, just optimize for the single metric!” But real systems – whether they’re societies, ecosystems, or self-driving cars – are irreducibly complex.
The obsession with efficiency creates blindness to interdependencies, to edge cases, to the messy realities that don’t fit the clean model. It’s literally being blind, by refusing to see things that are obvious, acting like a toddler in a tantrum.
It’s why engineered systems fail catastrophically rather than gracefully degrading. It’s why societies that optimize for pure economic efficiency end up weakened, brittle and cruel.
And there’s something almost masturbatory about efficiency worship – this self-congratulatory feeling of having cut through all the “unnecessary” complexity to find the One True Way. But complexity isn’t a bug to be eliminated; it’s often where resilience and adaptation live.
The horrible deadly Tesla failures for example have always been by design, idiocy dressed up as visionary. Musk gets to feel like an emperor for rejecting a “complex” multi-sensor approach, yet meanwhile his cars are literally stopping in intersections and speeding through school zones mowing down children.
The efficiency ideology revealed him as dumb, unable to process basic feedback that the redundancy and “inefficient” backup systems are actually what safety requires.
Historians recognize this. It’s really just an old white supremacist authoritarian impulse that reality must conform to their elegant racist theory of total control, rather than the theory of power adapting to actual human reality.
It’s about a worldview that sees nuance, interdependence, and adaptive complexity as weaknesses rather than strengths.
Whether it’s Nixon’s toxic racist urban planning that bulldozes neighborhoods for “efficient” highways, or economic policies of Reagan that treat human beings as optimization variables, or colonial projects that reduce rich societies to resource extraction opportunities. The feedback loop of oppressive white men is broken by design.
When your system is built around the assumption that you’ve already found the One True Way, then any evidence that contradicts that becomes noise to be filtered out rather than signal to be heeded for true innovations.
Tesla’s dumb deadly Robotaxis stopping in intersections, driving “scary as hell” on the wrong side of the road and committing crimes… aren’t sensor bugs because causing harm to society is classified as an inconvenient fact within a deeply racist ideological edifice.
DOGE is simply a racist DOG whistle.
I came for the computer security and stayed for the national security. This blog is a true gold mine. Thank you for your service.
What I find particularly chilling about the Tesla situation is how it represents apartheid in its most literally mechanized form. These aren’t just policy abstractions because these are actual machines programmed with this reductive racist and harmful worldview, rolling through neighborhoods and school zones to kill.
The fact Tesla is “committing crimes” and willfully endangering children isn’t a bug in their system, it’s the inevitable result of apatheid as a design philosophy that treats white kids as gods and non-white kids as roadkill — refuses to acknowledge societal complexity and interdependence.
The feedback loop is broken exactly as you describe such that when harm occurs, it gets reclassified as necessary cost rather than evidence that the fundamental approach is wrong. SpaceX is nothing but explosive failures, X is nothing but toxic hate speech.
Tesla turns children in school zones into statistical noise rather than a reason to question whether old and cheap consumer cameras are adequate to protect human life.
You’ve opened this analyst’s eyes. Now I see the same pattern from hateful urban renewal to deadly apartheid to the real motivation of DOGE, that they are trying to force reality to conform to race theory, no matter how many people are killed.