Waste heat

When we say a machine or an electrical component is inefficient, we mean two things. The first is that it's not being as effective as it could be; it's wasting energy. But the second, and perhaps less obvious, is that it's putting energy somewhere we don't want it. Energy can't be created or destroyed, so it has to go somewhere. The only way a machine can be inefficient is if it's turning energy into something you don't want. Usually, that's waste heat.

It's worth thinking about this by analogy to personal efficiency, which I wrote about in The right place at the right time. Mostly, we think of personal efficiency in terms of how much we get done, how effectively we turn the resources we have into the outcomes we want. But to say we are inefficient also implies that some of the resources we have go into outcomes we don't want. What does that look like?

One example is misformed habits. If we want to be working but we're actually goofing off on the internet, we're feeding our optimiser with the inputs necessary for it to become an effective internet timewaster. Over time we begin to get better and better at it, until it becomes easier than other work. Internet timewasting is an easy target, but working as a carpenter when you want to be a jazz pianist is the same; the energy that could be going to improving your scales is going to improving your biscuit joints.

Another is strategies built up around inefficency. We can draw lines that are straight in the first place, or we can get so good at wobbly lines that they start to work well enough. If we know we're not going to succeed at our task, we find strategies to make failure more palatable. Similarly, if we know we're going to perform our task inefficiently, we find ways to make up for it. If we build our road in the wrong direction, curving it around to the right direction is easier than starting over. Eventually we get really good at curvy roads, but no better at straight ones.

Yet another, and perhaps the best analogy for waste heat, is frustration. It even feels like a kind of mental heat. When you're trying to achieve something, but you can't bring your resources to bear on it properly, often those resources turn into frustration. The more you put into it, the more frustrated you become. If you're asked to design a nuclear reactor, probably you're not going to feel frustrated when it's not very good. But when you know you had the resources, but you couldn't use them effectively, that's heat.

This is the frustration of screwing up a simple task because you rushed it, trying to manipulate a tiny screw with a big clumsy hand, or being stuck in traffic with a car that just wants to go. It's all that energy pumped into an inefficient machine; some tiny proportion sunk into the task, and the rest vented into the air.