Efficient Design aka No One Makes Do With What They Have

"Efficient design" is a trope, a specific type of magical, conspiratorial thinking that intersects with principles of human-centered design, communication and storytelling.

Conspiracy theories often have a narrative appeal because they can soothe a complex social world with simple explanations. (Or at least simple in comparison.) It's stressful to "know" that the world is ending, but at least you have some idea of how or why or maybe when. It's stressful to "know" that "they" are taking over, but at least you have some idea of who. Even when you're wrong, you can always hold onto hope that you will be right tomorrow. The book "When Prophecy Fails" is the go-to reference here because of its depiction of a religious group dissolving after their apocalyptic predictions don't happen. An actionable answer, even if it is wrong, is more soothing than no answer or an unactionable answer. Conspiracy theories are stories with endings that claim to make sense at times when lived experience does not.

One of the most narratively appealing conspiracy theory tropes is something I call efficient design.

The trope goes like this: a use for an object implies a design, and a design for an object implies a use. You can’t understand one without the other. We don’t repurpose tools and ideas beyond their original contexts. A feature that is well-suited to its environment must have been designed for that environment. Things happen spontaneously, not over time. There are no such things as design constraints or design perspectives.

Therefore, the conspiracy-minded reader says, the truth is efficient. If something is inefficient, (sloppy, redundant, unnecessary or otherwise unpleasant,) it's suspicious. Worse, if something is inefficient, it’s like that on purpose.

This is the assumption that connects an observation (that some behavior or event in the real world is unpleasant or unjust) and its first conspiratorial branches (that something hidden must be responsible for that unpleasantness).

There should be a simpler, more efficient answer to the world’s mysteries.

If you have a pen on every desk in an office, it’s safe to think that everyone uses a pen - or that the company sees some value in making sure everyone has a pen. A use implies a design.

But if some desks have pens and some don’t, then matters like population, access or taste come into play. This is even more the case if some desks have pens, some have pencils, some have dry erase markers, some have paintbrushes… The unique writing tools at each desk represent how those people choose to do their work. A design implies a use.

It might be a coincidence that any single desk has a pen. But if the desks that don’t have pens have other features in common, is it still a coincidence? Or is it something else? And so on…

More important than suspicion because the tools are in a pattern, efficient design expects that the tools should be in a legible pattern and is suspicious if they are not.

For the philosophers in the audience: I'm not claiming to do anything rigorous here. This is basically just teleology in other contexts.

For the writers in the audience: the assumption of efficient design takes “the purpose of a system is what it does” and extrapolates backwards to find a purpose. Or you might think of it as trying to resurrect a dead author. Or you might think of it as looking for Chekov's ammunition - a knight entering the charred ruins of a castle and looking for a dragon, constantly hyping up the final battle against an imposing opponent. Less of a seed, more an ingredient of the soil.

But we’ve already run into our first problem: we can't ignore that this assumption works out of order. It tries to justify a preconception the reader already has.

If you aren’t a philosopher or a writer, don’t worry at all. I’m going to walk you through some examples.

Context 1: Impossible Sharing

The next thing I thought of was hyper-diffusion. This is a conspiratorial belief that different cultures could not have independently created various designs, like pyramids, across centuries and continents. These designs are “too complex” or “too intricate” for the “primitive” native peoples to make. Instead, they supposedly came from a single source. The next step from there is often, but not always, some additional conspiracy theory: Atlantis, aliens, etc.

According to believers, complex artifacts must come from a globe-spanning ancient civilization with access to technology far surpassing their contemporaries - and still surpassing modern humans. Except there is some pretty obvious evidence that this didn't happen: there's no genetic evidence in the fossil record for aliens. And crops are still highly regional before the Columbian Exchange in ways that teacher aliens moving around the planet would have impacted. And there are gaps in time between when places like pyramids were made. The aliens must be shy.

Archaeologists find artifacts with clean, precise geometry and sloppy, broken geometry. But you know what? It’s possible to be good by accident.

This is why I said efficient design isn’t a conspiracy theory itself but a trope that can conspiratorial-ize knowledge (like history) into nonsense.

The line of thinking ignores possibilities that a complex design was not made all at once, but often over weeks, years, decades. Skilled artisans may dedicate all of their time to a single project. Before industrial technologies like factories or assembly lines codified our modern capitalist economies, artists could take years to make art.

This conspiracy also ignores architectural limitations - as in, there isn't a lot of room for storage or engines or other alien technology inside a pyramid. It's a fancy tomb, a beautiful work of art and a wonder of the ancient world, but it's not more than that.

Efficient design doesn't allow for this.

No one ever makes a mistake or starts something they can’t finish or comes up with a similar design because of constraints. There is no political, social or religious context that could explain similar designs. There is no nuance or lived experience that can complicate a design. Words are always etymological, never contextual. The technology of the time is always enough for designers to do exactly what they want. None of that can be true – because if it is, if some of our tools and experiences do not have a perfectly efficient design, we might want to change some of them.

Efficient design turns an unbearable ambiguity (for example, "we don't know what this is, and we might never know for sure") into a more comfortable certainty ("it's definitely aliens"), no matter how warranted that certainty is. The search for efficient design is a paranoia, responding to confusion with disproportionate fear and unwarranted suspicion. If a fantastic good is the work of aliens and so is a fantastic evil, why not also the non-fantastic, everyday parts of life? At what point do the masterminds just give up trying to control everything? If they do control everything, is your knowledge of their control also part of the plan and likewise accounted for?

When something goes wrong, malfunction might be a reasonable explanation that satisfies a need for simplicity, but sabotage is more efficient - now there is a person you can point at and blame and yell at, even if that doesn't fix the wrong (sometimes it even makes things worse!). It's scarier to think that people don't notice you much at all than to think everyone is out to get you.

And we might not be so willing to call out an inefficiency when we benefit from it.

Context 2: The Mayan Calendar says the world is going to end in 2012

You remember this, right? When the world was supposed to end in 2012 because a calendar ran out of space? The "Mayan calendar" (supposedly) says that the world is ending December 21st, 2012. They made a whole movie about it and everything.

Except there are a few problems. Besides our perfect hindsight, since the world did not actually end in 2012.

There were people pointing out over a year in advance that we had no reason to seriously think the end of the Mayan calendar meant the end of the world. We have since found Mayan calendars (plural) that use different counting methods. Even Mayan people did not think the calendar had any special significance. Pop culture picked up on the spookiest option and turned it into an apocalypse scare.

I think there's another interesting question here: Why Mayans? There are other cultures with calendars that have stopped or predicted the end of the world, and we don't treat all of them with the same seriousness.

I think the point was that it is another culture, one that a (white) American audience could speculate on and fret over without having to take that culture on its word about what it does - and doesn't - believe.

Part of the appeal of doomsday conspiracy theories is not just that the world is going to end but that the world is going to end soon. In our lifetime! Or else so far away from our lifetime that no one will bother to double-check. If you want urgency and inspiring action, you can have it! If you want serenity and absolution by leaving the work to another generation, you can have it, too! Conspiracies are flexible.

And quick side question for people who get caught up in this version of efficient design: do you care as much about your prediction of the end of the world as you do about climate change?

Mayans and other Central American cultures are easy to project ideas onto because they are already part of a colonial imagination. Conspiracy theories fit ideas we already have about the world, not the other way around. Our hopes and fears and prejudices inform the story a conspiracy tells. I'm already caught up on the exposition - tell me something new!

Context 3: Life Left To Chance

You might get mad at me for this one.

I was originally thinking of efficient design in the context of creationist skepticism – the efforts to prove that human evolution is impossible and that God created the universe – although this essay is not dedicated specifically to defending evolution. (This skepticism is sometimes also called intelligent design, and I did choose the name "efficient design" as a nod to that structure of argument.)

A common rebuttal of human evolution is that human eyes are complex organs and are "irreducibly complex".  You can’t make an eye much simpler than it already is, supposedly. They have a lot of parts and are sensitive to particles like dust. They have features that allow their continued use in noisy, distracting conditions - humans can still see for some distance at night, without much if any sunlight. Humans can see underwater when swimming. While many humans need some accessible technology like glasses or contact lenses to see more clearly, many don't. How can all of those features be left to chance by evolution? How could an eye be so efficient - like technologies and tools we know are designed - without also having a design?

I got this specific talking point and the structure of its rebuttal from this Belief It or Not video.

The answer is simply that natural features are not left to chance. An animal uses their eyes so they can avoid hungry predators or environmental hazards. And there are simpler eyes that just don’t work as well as others. Even eyes that can see a little bit are better than eyes that can't see at all. So having eyes - and more complex eyes - helps animals fit better into their environment. Olm salamanders don't have eyes and instead sense fish around them with chemical receptors. The animals that don’t have the complex eyes they need - or some other sensory organs to replace them - die. And humans especially use more than one cue besides our eyes alone for looking and seeing. It's brain and head and body as much as eyeball. 

Animals can evolve complex features (and systems of features that work together) over time because those complex features help them survive. Each individual animal makes do with the features they have so they can survive. They were not perfectly able to survive from the start. The species change because random features are naturally selected by the environment, and no individual animal is perfect. Assuming that animals were perfect from the start is putting the cart before the horse. Design does not prove a designer.

Animals don’t all have the same solutions to their environmental problems - again, some have complex eyes, some have other sensory organs - but they all have some solution or else they die. “More suited to their environment” doesn’t always imply "better" (for a given value of better) or “similar in other ways”. They have to survive with their own features. But that's not possible if no one makes do with that they have.

Evolution doesn’t happen all at once, like making a designed artifact, and is not under a time limit. Complexity is not always desirable in context. Redundancy is sometimes useful. Human design generally tries to avoid these in ways natural selection doesn’t. The fact that we’ve also found chemical ingredients for life in other places in our solar system pokes holes in the idea that life as we know it could not have happened any other way. Suspicion that evolution "takes too long" or "could only have happened here" is arbitrary.

The non-evolution intelligent design explanations can't account for animals with wide varieties of ecological niche despite genetic similarities, as an example.

This is not a biology or anthropology class. I don't really care what your personal beliefs are about human evolution. I used this context because it has already been thoroughly discussed and debunked, and the justifications for inerrant creationism assume the thing they try to justify. Creationism is not a conspiracy theory. I don’t think someone is a conspiracy theorist just because they believe God created the universe. But if you think God created the universe because it’s easier to understand than the biochemistry and anthropology, you are using efficient design. If you can recognize efficient design tendencies here, you can start to find them in other places, too.

Conclusion

We've been through one blatant conspiracy theory, one pop culture doomsday trend that wasn't true, and one misunderstood scientific concept. Efficient design appears in each of them.

And you can see efficient design in both classic and contemporary conspiracy theories.

Faking the moon landing instead of actually going to the moon (we did actually go to the moon). Flat earth and its political implications (the earth is not flat). The classic talking point “why have stricter gun laws if criminals won’t follow the laws in the first place?” (because laws actually make it easier to stop criminals). A supposedly “rushed” COVID-19 vaccine (it wasn’t). Taylor Swift the supposedly gay industry plant (she isn’t a plant, and we can’t meaningfully speculate about her sexuality). Trans-vestigation, especially in sports (another thing we can’t meaningfully speculate on).

Some of these are decades old. Others are still soup de jour.

Efficient design underpins them all as the assumption that if an anomaly is complicated, confusing or counter-intuitive, it must be wrong. And when you call out a conspiracy for what it is and the defense from the conspiracist is that they’re “just asking questions”, “just looking for the truth” or other skeptical language, they are invoking efficient design.

This is bad vibes dressed up like logic.

A conspiracy theory is not just agreement or disagreement with an observation. Efficient design is the mechanism that lets you substitute desire for explanation with desire for blame. It assigns intention and malice to inconveniences and neutrality to benefits.

An inherent distrust prompts a search for efficiency, especially when that distrust takes the form of an attack on a particular conception of freedom: don’t “we” (for a given community) have the “right” (or ability to complain) to “know the truth” (that already confirms what you want to believe)? And an expectation of efficiency prompts distrust when that expectation - often unwarranted in the first place - isn’t met. But the most efficient answer isn’t necessarily the most true, and the wild sprawling of conspiracy is still often less complicated than true history.

Instead, conspiracy is often more dedicated to constructing a narrative through gish gallop and then “uncovering” it than other sources of information, which are limited by the truth despite all the biases you can imagine. Nothing is simply as it appears, flaws and all. Nobody has long careers or scientific precedent or simple popular appeal. Certainly, nobody does what they said and wrote they were doing. No one makes do with what they have. If a perfect solution doesn’t explain everything, someone must be hiding something. There is no messy context. There is only efficient design.

The idea that conspiracy theories are reactions to a lack of information doesn’t account for pernicious misinformation after we have more clarity. Efficient design has already filled the gap.

These are all different ways of expressing similar types of anxiety about the world without good faith understanding about why that anxiety exists. It comments on injustice and disregards the causes of that injustice. Easy to imagine something is “right, real, natural and true”, when it benefits you. Just as easy to imagine something is wrong, trivial, artificial and fake because you already don’t like it.

Philosopher Natalie Wynn of the ContraPoints YouTube channel describes conspiratorial ideas like "argument from anomalies" (an assertion that anything strange is part of the evil plot) and "intentionalism" (an assertion that anything evil is part of a plan). I think these are two parts of the same idea that I've been calling efficient design. She also emphasizes the projection and scapegoating involved in conspiracy theories. Someone is to blame for the evil, and we have a moral obligation to destroy them with no guilt of our own. She calls conspiracism "a parody of critical thinking", and I agree with her. This is what efficient design does for a conspiracy-minded person.

Evolution seems too inefficient of an explanation at first blush. It can’t be a coincidence. Human-centered design seems too efficient to be a coincidence. The conspiracy-minded person is expecting some amount of efficiency and spontaneity (how much depends on the conspiracy at hand) that they aren’t getting.

And if efficiency and spontaneity aren't showing up on their own, then someone planned it, even if it’s a hurricane. If the game is rigged, maybe you need to rig it back in your favor. Maybe you need to stop the evil yourself. Or give it a helping hand…

From this impulse, you can get other fallacies, like either-or. “If you don’t personally know exactly how the pyramids were made, how do you know they weren’t made by aliens?” This sounds just like a theodicy argument: either the aliens are not bothering to communicate with and help us, are all wiped out, or there are just no aliens.

“Knowledge that you’re being controlled also being part of the plan” from before is another part of the conspiratorial bend of alien belief.

The truth is some designs are inefficient on purpose. That’s why there are passwords and multi-factor authentication when you try to log into a program. That’s why there are sometimes emergency backup systems when the power in your house goes out. That’s why our brains don’t remember every action and decision we take throughout the day but focuses on the emotional stuff. We make choices and we tell stories about what to keep, what not to keep. And our brains don’t always do what we would prefer. Sometimes apparent nonsense, waste and redundancy are useful - or at least make sense in context.

Even if you're exposed to a conspiracy theory, if you're willing to give it the time of day and think about taking it seriously, you have probably already been through a lot, which is why people who want to believe sometimes can't stop themselves. So let me be really clear: I don't think you're stupid for believing a conspiracy theory. I think you're in pain. You need people in your life who care about you - and those people need to help ease your pain AND they need to separate your feelings of pain from your nonsense pattern-seeking.

We also have to consider survivorship bias. Features that went into fangames like Super Smash Flash can end up validated when those same features show up in an official release, but they lose their sense of novelty in the process. Our inefficiencies don’t last as long because they stop working. If you're discovering "secret" information that "they don't want you to know about", how exactly is it getting into public view in the first place?

Some activities also have built-in opacity. I've never built a computer before. I'm much more interested in just having a computer that works and lets me write and play Super Smash Flash. If I know every single step of the process for building a computer and do not want to do it myself, I might have a tendency to micromanage [your canoe parable]. And it will stress me out. If I know little if anything about the process, I might misinterpret something and confuse myself further. Sometimes being more hands-on (like a conspiracy theory's skepticism of daily life encourages) makes life less efficient and less pleasant. I can get too worried to have a good time. And you can still put the computer parts together without really understanding how each part works on a technical level.

It's like the classic centipede thinking about their legs. When the automatic analog motion becomes discrete, the centipede stumbles over each of its many legs instead of crawling as one bug.

Features that are annoying on first impression are sometimes important parts of the design. Taking bits and pieces out of context, like a conspiracy theory's skepticism encourages, can lead you to ignore why those pieces work the way they do. (A similar example is physicist Angela Collier's video about "physics crackpots".) Nonsense makes people anxious and can lead them towards ever-increasing nonsense to soothe that anxiety. A conspiracy theory doesn't care whether the design is useful or not on its face, because it doesn't care about face value or relevant history. It projects emotional turmoil onto faces.

When I encounter a conspiracy theory, I can feel the allure of believing it. Because then, I don’t have to consider that I’m not the main character of the world - I’m a bit part that isn’t even at least memorably funny. Conspiracy refuses to accept that possibility and insists you are the main character of the universe. You're smart and powerful for figuring out the "truth". Everyone else is a narcissistic evil demon. They're all out to get you.

The random, disconnected, contradictory - and boring - chaos of the world is not efficient and is therefore a distraction from the simple answers, a coverup of the truth, a denial of exciting drama.

Efficient design works as a distraction by itself. Because in accelerating nonsense conspiracy theories, efficient design also ignores the scarier truths. There are real coverups, real collusions, real propaganda, real payoffs, and real institutional discrimination ignored in favor of flashier inefficiencies – or even "heroic" inefficiencies. Sometimes there really is a conspiracy all the way up to the highest seats of power, like in Watergate. Governments don't need to create a crisis to take advantage of the crisis, like in US foreign policy after 9/11. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Just because the 2008 financial crisis was a shitshow doesn't mean "the Jews are responsible". As April Rosenblum writes in her pamphlet "The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere", "In a world that’s very difficult to change, antisemitism makes things seem easy to solve." That does not make it valid or moral.

Those scary truths make this kind of thinking difficult to identify and root out. Again, efficient design isn't a conspiracy theory. It’s a trope that conspiracy uses to justify and perpetuate itself into other forms, especially accelerationism and bigotry.

Even worse, some things are just inefficient on accident.

Miscommunication, misunderstanding and memes haunt our cultural behavior. Designers unfortunately can’t predict all use cases or all pain points. Even the best designs don’t have everyone in mind. People simply have to adapt to the problems of the moment. Efficient design suggests if you have a question, your question should not just be answerable but easily answerable, whatever that means. If it's ambiguous or unexpected or slow, that's suspicious. Where's the efficiency? What are they really doing?

There are connections between the injustices of the world because they come from similar motivations. Late-stage capitalism is an extreme expression of greed. Anthropogenic climate change does the same for sloth. We can't dismiss them just because they're complicated and there is no real shadowy cabal we can blame all our worries on. We have to work together.

A bad experience is not conspiratorial. Pattern-seeking is not conspiratorial. Assuming undue intent - that is efficient design - is a first step into conspiracy.

The brave knight holding their shield steady against dragon fire doesn't realize they're staying safe by redirecting that fire into the other knights around them. Or, more seriously, a conspiracy theory assigns blame for frustrations to a scapegoat and then turns around to blame the scapegoat for being assigned at all. Conspiracy theories often feel like an explanation for injustice, sense for events that leave only nonsense and pain in their wake, but they hurt people who are already suffering and give themselves an excuse to hurt others without blame. A conspiracy theory looks like a community but is built on suspicion. It looks like truth but doesn’t allow the truth to be complicated. Conspiracy can feel like fire against the conspiracy-minded reader, but it's really the shield the reader uses to protect themselves against an unthinkable change. So, it feels like the world is against you when you express pain, you feel dragon fire and defend yourself again and again. "I'm being attacked just for asking questions", for example: feels like fire, but it's really a shield.

Shields offer agency and control in an uncontrollable situation, but they treat linking back up with reality as optional. They block your view of the fire and distract you from your pain. “They don’t want you to know the truth,” and neither does the conspiracy theorist. Some feelings of harm and confusion really are unjustifiable – so we need something else. Preventative strategies are great, but we don't always have that luxury.

Hesitant behavior doesn’t come from nowhere and can often come from bad experiences or exposure to nonsensical practices. But conspiracy cuts off the real world because there might be some dragon fire somewhere. Efficient design is a path between a hesitant behavior from a bad experience and the rationalizations that start building a shield. If you look at a bigotry or a paranoia and feel like it has skipped some steps along the way, this trope is how you are encouraged to ignore that. Why take the Mayan calendar at its word and none of the rest?

Conspiracy theories are the ultimate villain of the honest writer because they use storytelling tools as shields against curiosity and compassion. Drama that focuses on personal change, overwhelming villains, relatable heroes, setup and payoff of bespoke items, dramatic irony from people not knowing what seems inevitable in hindsight – when the reader encounters these elements within a conspiracy, the nonsense feels more plausible and satisfying, even if the content does not make sense. The bad guys are powerful enough to do whatever they want but still use secret codes and hidden messages to hide from the public because… it's camp? Really? If only the true patriots can figure out your crimes because of your brilliant subterfuge, why be coy? You would think the secrets that run the world should end up as public as possible as soon as possible. Conspiracies sound cool but fall apart when they don't match how we know humans behave. It's really easy to see how other people are manipulated by propaganda and to think ourselves immune. The people who think they are too smart to ever walk into dragon fire can still claim this as the flames rise around them.

Efficient design is the paranoid counterpart of Occam's razor – the simplest answer is most likely the truest. Truth and conspiracy are both explanations. Good stories can do lots of things that are not limited to "telling the truth". But then you have to acknowledge that the truth isn't your goal, and you can't pretend you're pursuing the truth when a conspiracy is as good as the truth. There is only first blush, and everything else must be a trick to hide the truth.

This conspiratorial search for efficiency is the opposite of curiosity. We cannot lose compassion in pursuit of efficiency. We cannot ignore experience in pursuit of simple answers. And we definitely cannot shift burden of proof onto other people to deny us when we deny reality. When the misfortunes of our lives offer quick, easy, efficient despair to soothe a pain in our hearts, we must love each other at our most hesitant, our most clumsy, and our most in need. There is no life hack for making the world a better place. There is a whole truthful life outside of parsimony.