The imp of optimization

Sean Voisen | seanvoisen.com | Aug 01, 2025

The brilliance of the “Imp of the Perverse” lies in Poe’s realization that we can sabotage our own interests through excessive self-consciousness. That is, hyper-awareness—paying too much or too close of attention to something—can sometimes work to our detriment. In the case of the narrator in Poe’s story, it is his excessive focus on his own thoughts of what he should not do that leads to his hasty confession and ultimate demise. But tools of measurement can also nudge us towards unhealthy compulsive hyper-awareness as well.

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I walk to think. I walk to take a break. I walk to get away from my computer, to see the world outside, to take in fresh air, to feel the warmth of the sun on my skin, and to listen to the chirping of the birds. I derive joy in walking precisely because it is not an activity I have to do, something I need to check off my list, something to track, or something I need to optimize. It is, as I said, a ritual. And the purpose of a personal ritual is the ritual itself. It is an anchoring in time and space, a means of enriching lived experience through savoring and presence. It is not to be optimized away.

What is a production process?

Brian Potter | Construction Physics | Nov 13, 2025

Outside of the small number of things we can obtain directly from nature, all products of civilization are the result of some sort of production process—some series of transformations that take in raw materials, energy, labor, and information and produce goods and services. At first glance, services might seem far removed from the production of physical goods like cars or shoes, but the same basic model applies. A house cleaner, for example, goes through a specific series of steps—cleaning the bedrooms, then the bathrooms, then the kitchen—using various inputs—labor, electricity, cleaning products—to transform an input—a dirty house—into an output—a clean one. These processes might be comparatively simple, such as the production of light bulb blanks, or exceptionally complex, with hundreds or even thousands of steps. One 19th-century watch factory boasted that its watches “required 3,700 distinct operations to produce,” while a 1940s Cadillac — a relatively simple automobile by modern standards — required nearly 60,000 separate operations.

Even everyday objects can mask a great deal of production complexity. In his book The Toaster Project, Thomas Thwaites disassembles a $7 toaster to find that it contains 404 parts made up of more than a hundred different materials. And if we follow the chain of production further back, to the processes required to make the various input materials (and the processes to make the inputs for those processes, and so on), we find a sprawling mass of complexity for even the simplest products of civilization. In his famous 1958 essay “I, Pencil,” Leonard Read notes that a full accounting of the inputs required to make an ordinary pencil—the steel used to make the tools to harvest the cedar, the ships used to transport the graphite from Sri Lanka to the factory, the agricultural equipment used to grow the castor beans to produce the lacquer—involves the work of millions of people all over the world.