A Simple Question

January 6, 2023 1:00 PM

Can you think of any examples of something that is efficient but ineffective? Or, effective, but inefficient? It can be a process, a system, a policy, something that occurs in nature, relationships, anything. At first glance, this reminds me of a logic problem, but I'm not sure.
posted by CollectiveMind to Computers & Internet (35 answers total)

Simple but inefficient: secretaries who print emails for bosses.

Effective but inefficient: driving to everything, if you consider all the external costs. Very simple for the end-user. Comfortable in all weather. Personalized. It's pretty effective.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:06 PM on January 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

For effective but inefficient, my vote is for government services. The postal system especially, but whenever I hear people talk about "making government as lean and efficient as the corporate world" I get so angry. It's a service, it is supposed to cost money not make it.

Anyway, the effectiveness can be debated, especially with regard to welfare systems and healthcare (in the US and elsewhere) but incremental improvements to peoples' lives are still improvements, and efficiency over all else should not be the end goal.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 1:06 PM on January 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Effective but inefficient: driving to everything, if you consider all the external costs. Very simple for the end-user. Comfortable in all weather. Personalized. It's pretty effective.
Sorry forgot to complete my thought: but inefficient if you consider the time expended.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:07 PM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Handwashing dishes is effective but water-inefficient with modern dishwashers.
posted by epj at 1:07 PM on January 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

You would need to formally define "efficient" and "effective" to answer this question. Efficiency is often formally defined in engineering as various forms of unit of work achieved vs theoretically achievable work. Effectiveness is not usually formally defined.

That said, in the spirit of your question, I will throw out two options from the areas I'm familiar with - electrical engineering:

• Electric/resistance heaters. They are nearly 100% efficient (in that they convert nearly 100% of the power into them into heat). They are ineffective at what most people care about though - energy costs. For electric-powered heating systems, heat pumps can move significantly more heat energy into a room than an equivalently powered resistance heaters (often by a factor of 2-3x as much). Hence, heat pumps will be cheaper than resistance heaters, even if resistance heaters are nearly 100% efficient. Similarly, in most areas, gas is cheaper to buy than electricity on a per-energy-unit basis. So, even an old/inefficient gas furnaces with closer to 50-75% efficiency will be cheaper than a 100% efficient electric heater.
• Computers. From an energy efficiency standpoint, computers are nearly 0% efficient. Nearly all of the power into a computer gets converted to heat, not into what you care about (screens and applications). However, most people would say computers are very effective and useful to them.

posted by saeculorum at 1:10 PM on January 6, 2023 [15 favorites]

Another example is a large number of power supplies for cheap consumer devices are very inefficient (specifically using linear regulators or zener diode regulators), but are effective at doing what they need to do - provide cheap consumer electronic devices. Most people are unwilling to pay more for their consumer electronics, even if it decreases their home electric bill.
posted by saeculorum at 1:17 PM on January 6, 2023

Medical care. Hospice is effective but inefficient. Neonatal treatment is incredibly cost inefficient given that babies are not in short supply. Treatment of most chronic diseases is effective but terribly inefficient; I cost my national health service vastly more than I pay in taxes, and given that I'm going through about 30K in drugs each year and can expect to live another 30 years but probably will go on disability before retirement age, this is likely to just get more inefficient.
posted by DarlingBri at 1:19 PM on January 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

An election in a democracy probably looks very strange to outsiders, takes a long time, costs a huge amount of energy and stress, ends up with a lot of hurt feelings and tears, but in the end it will end with a result most people are happy with. (Inefficient but effective).

An election in a non-democracy is much easier. Everyone votes, the Single Party gets 95%, the Leader wins again, but who knows whether most people are satisfied with the result? (Effective, but inefficient).
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 1:22 PM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

There was a book a while back, made out of plastic paper. I forget the name. They used cherry tree reproduction as an example of effective but inefficient. A carpet of pink flowers beneath the cherry tree symbolizing the inefficiency.
posted by aniola at 1:24 PM on January 6, 2023

My own personal example is children. Children are quite inefficient, but very effective learners.
posted by aniola at 1:25 PM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Low pressure sodium lighting is the most efficient lighting we have but is absolutely ghastly because it is almost completely monochromatic. It is used for some outdoor lighting including highways and parking structures but even there because it makes everything look the same colour it can be a safety hazard.
posted by Mitheral at 1:32 PM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

A big drafty wood fireplace or outdoor bonfire will effectively keep you warm, but most of the energy isn't going into heating you.

A large stone building will effectively shelter you, but it isn't efficient compared to structures that less labor and materials to build.

A muscle car will transport you, but *kermit flailing*.

Incandescent light bulbs vs leds.

Checking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_efficiency and

such as an internal combustion engine, steam turbine, steam engine, boiler, furnace, refrigerator, ACs etc.

Any setup which has a low thermal efficiency or even a high thermal efficiency but you only need a small fraction of the output - only need heating/AC for one room, etc.
posted by sebastienbailard at 1:33 PM on January 6, 2023

In several herbals, I’ve seen the following gloss on Witch Hazel: "good for everything, but not very."

And there’s also 'jack of all trades, master of none.'

'The best is the enemy of the good' is usually attributed to Voltaire.

It’s tempting to say that the uncertainty principle is the ultimate progenitor of all binary trade offs in the physical world, but the 2nd law of thermodynamics (implicitly invoked by saeculorum) might have an even better claim.
posted by jamjam at 1:33 PM on January 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Homeopathic medications are both extremely efficient and completely ineffective.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 1:41 PM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

The canonical example of something both effective and inefficient is evolution by natural selection, surely? Maybe my perspective is biased but given the science based nature of some of the responses I am genuinely surprised to be the first on this thread to mention this.
posted by Erinaceus europaeus at 1:42 PM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Creating art can be very effective (the result) and very inefficient (the process).
posted by Thorzdad at 1:46 PM on January 6, 2023

One more thing about the 2nd law.

In order to achieve the ultimate efficiency promised by the Carnot cycle, changes in the system must proceed "quasi-statically" — in other words, infinitely slowly, which seems like the lowest possible effectiveness.
posted by jamjam at 1:46 PM on January 6, 2023

If you want tangible examples of effective but inefficient, Rube Goldberg machines would give you lots of examples.
posted by raccoon409 at 2:04 PM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

1:1 or very small group education ... effective in that you can target the lessons to the individuals' needs and they would learn best, but not efficient in that you need a lot of teachers to cover a classroom full of kids.
posted by mccxxiii at 2:10 PM on January 6, 2023

Skimming the first paragraph of

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_conversion_efficiency

Energy conversion efficiency (η) is the ratio between the useful output of an energy conversion machine and the input, in energy terms. The input, as well as the useful output may be chemical, electric power, mechanical work, light (radiation), or heat. The resulting value, η (eta), ranges between 0 and 1.[1][2][3]

The phrase "crushing a nut/driving a nail with a sledgehammer" comes to mind, and, apparently if more obscurely"Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?":

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/289167/saying-for-using-an-overly-powerful-tool-to-fix-a-minor-problem
posted by sebastienbailard at 2:16 PM on January 6, 2023

I think laundry dryers count as effective, but inefficient. It's a big waste of power to use it to dry clothing, and then the heat isn't even used for anything else - like heating the house! But it's effective, because everyone has dry clothing.
posted by Toddles at 2:32 PM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Effective but inefficient: if you want to burn X calories per day, doing that just by walking, rather than a more intensive form of cardio (leaving aside personal preferences). A Rube Goldberg machine (leaving aside its aesthetic value).

Efficient but ineffective: 13 votes for speaker in 4 days.
posted by virve at 2:56 PM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Any manual task that can be replaced by a machine that does an equivalent job faster is an effective but inefficient manual task (the two that come to mind are cutting grass and shoveling snow).

Efficient but ineffective is harder, since efficiency is itself a kind of effective result. At that point shades of definition become more important.
posted by grog at 3:30 PM on January 6, 2023

Quoth the wife: "'Effective but inefficient' is having surge capacity in your infrastructure. All kinds of infrastructure, from the electrical grid, to your health care system, to your transit system."
posted by sebastienbailard at 3:31 PM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Mitochondria! Our muscles are very effective— we’ve built civilizations with our strong bodies, but only 25% of the energy we burn actually generates useful work— the other 75% percent is used trying too cool us down from the waste heat they generate.
posted by Static Vagabond at 3:39 PM on January 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

war: efficient, not effective
diplomacy: effective, not efficient

(sometimes)
posted by pjenks at 3:41 PM on January 6, 2023

Jevons paradox: "In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use increases its demand, increasing, rather than reducing, resource use."
posted by glibhamdreck at 3:47 PM on January 6, 2023

There are a number of algorithms and approaches to mathematical problem solving that are inefficient but effective. K-means clustering, which is an algorithm that groups data points into a number (k) of similar clusters -- for instance, imagine grouping the major cities in the US spatially by latitude and longitude. The clusters are dependent on the original locations chosen to start the clusters -- if the three starting cities were DC, SF and KC, the clusters would probably wind up splitting the country into thirds east-west; if the three cities were Minneapolis, KC and Houston, the country might get split north-south; if the three starting cities were NYC, Boston and Philly, there might be a cluster 'stuck' in New England; and so on. One common solution is to just pick the starting points randomly, run the algorithm (which is quick), and repeat a few dozen times, keeping the best score.

Other examples include random forest machine learning, simulated annealing, combinatorial optimization, and some genetic algorithms and Monte Carlo simulations. In general, the approach is for a computer to solve a large number of simple problems quickly in a dumb way, and then take the smartest answers. A piece of software I work with will make a billion very simple decisions to produce a very complex-high quality result by throwing away the 99.9% of the decisions that don't make the result better. And it's fast, because the decisions are simple and a computer loves nothing more than doing a billion simple math problems quick as a bunny.
posted by Superilla at 4:28 PM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

My favorite way of cooking is often very inefficient, but very effective. Cooking may be one of the best examples of efficiency vs effectiveness in that it can encompass all types of food production. Fast food is designed to be a very efficient method of delivering large quantities of food at calculated rates, yet it's often not very healthy food. Preparing all your food from scratch can be seen as very inefficient-- you're spending so much time purchasing and prepping food just to eat it, but you get to decide exactly what's going in your food. It's endless, which is why discussions on the value of cooking here on MF are often just this question from one viewpoint or another.
posted by winesong at 4:31 PM on January 6, 2023

I would argue that many government systems are effective and efficient. For example, Garbage in my town is picked up by the city. Once a week, one truck goes down the street, picking up everyone’s bins with its robot arm.
My coworker lives in a city that has deregulated private garbage pickup, so once a week 6-8 different garbage trucks from different companies go down the street, picking up garbage from a couple houses on each block. Yes, everyone gets their garbage picked up(so technically effective) but horribly inefficient.
posted by rockindata at 6:15 PM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Fran McCaffery's motion offense. I've seen it described as hyper efficient because it generates easy baskets for the players that run it. But that's from a purely basketball perspective. IMO, the offense may be effective, but its incredibly inefficient vis-a-vis points per unit of energy expended. McCaffery's teams have been notorious for mid-season swoons and I believe it's because the offense they run wears them down.
posted by Stuka at 6:15 PM on January 6, 2023

Personal interventions are effective and inefficient. Things like therapy, mediation, anything that requires trust and relationships to make a change. Very effective, very inefficient.

When a business calls something "hard to scale" they are often pointing out an effective solution that is inefficient (like hiring new customer service representatives to fix customer problems)
posted by mwahlalala at 6:19 PM on January 6, 2023

Deciding how much you trust people or how safe they are by things like their gender or whether they belong to the same group as you (religion or ethnic or similar) rather than more closely examining their behavior and values is a common efficient but (in my experience) ineffective shortcut.
posted by needs more cowbell at 6:54 PM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

→ There was a book a while back, made out of plastic paper. I forget the name

Cradle to Cradle. It brought me out in hives because a previous library borrower had a cat, and the plastic pages were covered in cat hair because of static attraction.

Effective but inefficient: not just the thermal cycle efficiency, but the solar efficiency of fossil fuels is terrible. Dukes has estimated it takes 90 tonnes of ancient plant material to make 1 US gallon of gasoline.
posted by scruss at 8:18 PM on January 6, 2023

Skipping routine maintenance on any complex system (your car, your body, a big computer network, etc.) is efficient, in that it saves a ton of time you'd otherwise spend checking on it and updating it and keeping an eye out for possible improvements, but ineffective because eventually the system will fail catastrophically. So for example, it's incredibly efficient to never exercise, because it saves a lot of time (and it's efficient for your body: burns fewer calories, etc.) but never getting any exercise will almost certainly shorten your lifespan, so if your goal is to not die, it's ineffective at that.
posted by decathecting at 11:08 AM on January 11, 2023