Perfection is fragile

Every engineer knows that there is a tension between robustness and efficiency.

Perfect efficiency means zero redundancy and high risk of failure.

That holds true for banks, just-in-time delivery systems, power grids, economies and virtually everything else.

Unfortunately many systems in the real world tend to become extremely optimized (by some metric—generally the one driving compensation levels) and highly fragile because the failure costs are externalized.

We need to be more vigilant about this. If engineers built bridges as reliably as banks work, thousands would die every year as they collapsed, and the engineers would be in jail.

Good engineers don’t assume the wrong probability distribution when assessing risks and then act surprised when there’s a ‘once in a million year’ event every five years.

My good friend, the brilliant Ashwin Parameswaran, has already said more than I ever could on this topic, so please read his two blogs.