Automation = lowers the intelligence needed to do things (eg calculator)
Leverage = lowers the force needed to do things (eg bicycle)
What do you call something like a table, which positions work at the right height to do things, lowering I guess mechanical awkwardness?
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Replying to
What do you call a roof that keeps sun or rain off you?
These passive environmental reshapers are 90% of the built environment, but we don’t have a word like automation or leveraged to describe the introduction into an environment.
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It’s like “affordancification” or “conveniencification”
Add a table, roof, handles, put things in human-sized form factors (shape/size)
Make environment human-scale so average energy expenditure goes down
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Hmm. Domestication (of wilderness) might be the word I’m looking for. Reshaping the wild environment to unassisted human abilities. Then you can add leverage (basic tools) and automation (advanced tools).
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Looking for the process verb, not the outcome noun.
I think domesticate is it, though we normally only use it for living things.
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I’d guess basic existence in a typically domesticated environment is like 1/2 the basal metabolic rate. Like sitting on chairs with backs as opposed to floor.
Basic passive thermal regulation alone (clothes, shelter, fire) probably lower temperature regulation costs massively.
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Question occurred to me via following line line of thought:
1. I’m unusually exhausted/low energy this week
2. It’s damn paperwork shit again
3. Maybe it’s not me but part of the environment that demands unusually high energy
4. It’s too primitive for leverage/automation
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I’d like to domesticate my exposure to bureaucracy, customer service, paperwork etc
An admin assistant is not so much automation or leverage (the job calls for trusted conscientious more than intelligence or leverage) but domestication. It’s just a very expensive solution.
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It feels weird to say an admin assistant job is closer to a table than a lever or robot, but think about it. There is zero leverage (they take as much time as you would), and no real automation (an admin wouldn’t do arithmetic any faster than me, unlike a calculator)
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Like a “table” an admin presents docs for signatures or simplified calendaring choices etc. The ground is just very uneven and shifting. A good admin is like a chair and table on the surface of a churning swamp.
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Not that I would really know. I’ve never had a dedicated admin, just a shared one across a workgroup that was really the manager’s admin doing the rest of us occasional support favors (even the word “support” is revealing here)
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Also interesting that deferred decisions in a procedural setting are said to be “tabled.”
An admin probably keeps track of it and brings it up again, but the function is serving like an abstract table holding a thing securely across time.
A table is a stable delay-space.
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