Computers reduce efficiency: Case Studies of the Solow Paradox | Locklin on science
I’ve harped on this in my sidewinder and slide rule blergs, as well as older ones: very often, using a computard is a recipe for failure, and old fashioned techniques are more efficient and useful. The sidewinder guys at China Lake actually called this out in their accounts of the place going to seed: computers and carpets ruined the place’s productivity and most of all innovation. I’ve mentioned my own anecdotes of CAD failures, and the general failings of computers in a design cycle. This is an early realization of mine; even before the internet existed as a distraction. In my first serious programming projects I had a lot of good experiences literally writing out the Fortran on a giant brown paper trashbag cut up and stapled into a scroll-like object, compared to people who would laboriously use WATCOM or Emacs or whatever people were using in those days as an IDE, looking through the toilet paper tube of 640×480 90s era monitors. I attributed this to simply being able to look at the whole thing at a glance, but for all I know, writing it with a pencil and engaging my hand’s proprioceptors, or not looking at a hypnotically flickering screen were the magic ingredients. I’m beginning to think the latter things are more important than people realize.
RAND corporation did a study of the failings of CAD in design of British nuclear submarines. Before computard/CAD tools, people would use the old timey techniques of drafting in 2-d on a piece of paper, and building scale models to see how pieces fit together. Literally laboriously using weird T-square tools and a pencil and building plaster models was faster than using advanced computard technology. Again, this is something I’ve actually experienced in building experimental physics gizmos. You can spend months on a design in Solidworks and make something impossible to fabricate which doesn’t line up with the rest of the system: I’ve seen it happen. Dude with a tape measure can fix it in a few hours if it’s a one-off; somehow these problems don’t come up with models and slide-rule and paper design. This was admitted in Parliament in their investigations of the cost overruns on their Astute class submarines. It boggles my mind that people still don’t realize this is a real problem. We get mindless repetitions that “software is eating everything” like some kind of mantra despite evidence to the contrary. Instead of studying the problem, it’s simply dismissed. Nobody trains in non-CAD drafting any more so we can’t exactly go back to that.
