Tonight, SciBarCamp begins, and in one sense I consider myself unprepared. Of course, since the planning for Saturday and Sunday happens tonight, we could all be woefully unprepared. But the unpreparedness is largely the lack of formal materials. What I'm going to bring forward is this very topic, and that is something I've been exploring for over two years.
Efficiency Risk.
Those of you who have already searched on the term will quickly find that this term appears mainly in two ways. The first is where the two words are separated by punctuation, and they are not together as a pair. I have yet to find a good way to eliminate those results from the searches. The second use appears to be a reference to 'the risk of missing out on efficiency'.
That's not it either.
The definition will certainly be in flux. These are early days, here. But the essential idea is that the pursuit of efficiency often leads to outcomes far different than desired or expected. And - most critical - these outcomes end up preventing the achievement of the very goals that the pursuit of efficiency was intended to lead to in the first place.
Optimization Risk. Ah, yes. A close second. But I prefer Efficiency Risk for two related reasons. The first is that optimization is a process, not a condition. Something may by described as efficient, even though it was never optimized. Some of my examples (yes, yet to come) suggest that efficiency risk can be identified even when there is no optimization as a process. The second reason is that optimization risk - usually via the term 'premature optimization' - is already heavily identified with the computing space. Many of the features of efficiency risk fit here, but I see efficiency risk as far more encompassing than optimization risk.
Until tonight then...