In
"Efficiency
and Completion Time," I discussed how the amount of time it
takes to complete a generic task typically takes longer than the
minimum possible time. I've since explored
the math behind that observation, and how it might vary across
the world's population using insights described in "Changing
People."
It
turns out that what I called the "efficiency" of performing
a task is equivalent to what we commonly know as a compounding
interest rate on a credit card we're not paying off, where we are exponentially depleting the remaining
amount of the task. If efficiency varies randomly from zero to one
across the population, then the 68% of people in the central bulge of
the bell curve will have efficiencies between about 0.4 and 0.6. That
is, a typical person will accomplish between 40% and 60% of the
remaining part of a task during a period of time that is the best
case for accomplishing the entire task, which includes preparation
and perfect luck. Very skilled people working on state-of-the-art
projects, in my experience, are at the high end of "typical"
efficiency, which is at the low end of the top 16% of the population
that includes only one person who can achieve the task in the
best-case time.
Realistically
there is a limit to luck, which based on my testing experience is
around 95%. This means that multiple attempts at a task are unlikely
to all achieve more than 95% of it. Typical people take about 3 to 6
times as long as the best case to complete 95% of a task. Only 47
people on our whole planet could accomplish 95% of a task in the
best-case time or less (notably, at the beginning of civilization
this number was ten – at least two breeding couples – with this
efficiency).
Of
course, tasks are extremely variable, which would seem to make these
kinds of comparisons meaningless. That variability is, however,
covered by the definition of best-case time, which includes the
influence of such things as technological aids, the education
available to the population, and inherent complexity. Efficiency is
explicitly tied to just what humans can do, which is subject to
finitely limited physical and mental capabilities that influence the
performance of all tasks, so the time to complete a task must be
measured as the time that humans are involved in activities that
support it, which includes education, skill development, and
acquisition of resources.
It
is also important to note that each person may not have the same
efficiency for all tasks: for example, someone with 20% efficiency
for one task may have 80% efficiency for another task; the bell curve
simply represents the number of people who have given
efficiencies. Tasks may also have common aspects that allow people to
have about the same efficiency for multiple tasks, especially those
that enable them to meet their basic needs in a natural environment.
In
this context, our social infrastructure, which includes education,
can be seen as a means of accelerating the effective completion level
of common tasks to a point where further action on specific tasks
takes a reasonable amount of time, especially those that affect the
goals of the society – the most critical being its survival. This
also involves preparing people to cooperate (another common task) so
they can collectively benefit from each other's strengths (high
efficiencies), and offset each other's weaknesses (low efficiencies)
under changing conditions that force adaptation through performance
of modified or additional tasks. With a random distribution of
efficiencies across the world's population, it would take seven times
the best time to prepare 99% of the population to do a common task in
the best time; that factor, and the limit of time available (perhaps
13 hours per day) would determine how many common tasks could be
prepared for.
One
of the most common tasks in human history is our joint effort to
dominate the natural world, which materially translates into
maximizing our consumption of ecological resources (our ecological
footprint). Our achievement of the task on a per-person basis has
accelerated, with the best-case time since the beginning of
civilization shrinking through radical changes from more than 220,000
years to around one year, and the appearance that we may have already
achieved the task around 2011 and are now going backwards.
