You don't need double-blind clinical trials to detect the effect of a guillotine. You don't really need a placebo group for penicillin. Caffeine's effect isn't some subtle long-term tweak. If you need a high-powered study to detect the effect, the medical intervention is almost certainly not worthwhile. NNT < NNH, whoops.
Likewise, if you have a new tool, such as autoCAD or robot car assemblers, you don't need sophisticated accounting to determine if it's useful. Just try it for a few minutes. You can safely decide based on a single test drive. Either it passes the guillotine test, or it doesn't. Here, grey is black: if you're not sure, that means you are sure and the answer is no.
It is very hard to convince me that CAD and similar programs don't cost more in labour than they save. It's not inherent; if you got a rich video game studio to make a CAD program it would probably be amazing. However, they got idiots to make the CAD programs instead, so... This was correct, as they were marketed for idiots and for use by idiots. Wasting time and being painful was in demand, thus what was supplied.
The rule of thumb I've heard is 2 years amortization. Any industrial intervention, even stuff like better windows, has to pay for itself within 2 years. If it's going to take longer, you will one way or another lose money on it. I suspect domestic or consumer investments work pretty much the same way.
That is, if something is going to 'revolutionize' a sector, you don't need sophisticated marketing copy to tell you this. You can just try it, and that is easily a sufficiently sophisticated test.
If nothing else, you save all the hassle of constantly chasing trends and growing pains and retraining costs. If something pays back in 2.5 years...and then you need to pick up something else that pays back in 2.5 years....you never get to the point where you're in the black. Meanwhile the ignorant dumbass who just kept on keepin on has edged you out, and will until his industrial implants reach beater age. (Which admittedly they will, because he's an ignorant dumbass.)
2 comments:
>we can't do the things of the past because it is literally more expensive to do them
>people (cheap) banned (price floor) in favor of machines (expensive)
passes the test even without talking about money
CAD users want to be novel and "futuristic" more than they want to ship their design. If they go out of business trying to be futuristic, so be it. Could have had a sane culture instead, but is life even worth living if you can't be batshit insane and get away with it?
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