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Bill Gates said, "I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." What's a real-life example of this? (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I was working as a stockboy in a supermarket and when we had to fill the milk cooler people would bust open a 12 pack of milk cartons and put them in one by one.

On my first day I just placed the 12 pack in the cooler and cut the plastic off on one side with my box cutter and yanked it from under it and the look of the store manager and the other employee who was training me was pure bewilderment.

From that day everyone did it my way.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Literally anything innovative.
Laziness is the root of all invention.

We didn't invent the wheel because it allowed us to work more- we invented it because it was easier than carrying the same load before.
Computers? we invented the abacus because counting that much on hands is difficult. Easier to use an abacus. and computers were just one more step along that journey. Sure... it enables very much more complex math...
... computer modeling/simulation? invented because it's less work than building physical models and testing that way. (especially if you consider expenses as being a measure of other kinds of work- like fund raising.)

there's very few things that were innovative, that weren't ultimately developed because somebody had an idea for easing workloads.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You can call it laziness sure. But it’s closer to thermodynamics. A system is finding its lowest free energy configuration.

It’s not laziness to think of new things - like doing a simulation instead of a physical model takes a ton of work up front. It’s only worth it IF it works as a better solution, and it may not. This type of “activation energy” then leading to lower energy configurations is common in nature.

Laziness in this case would be to just keep building physical models because that is easier than thinking of the maths, validation, etc of working on a simulation.

I guess I just disagree with Bill entirely on this one.