This week’s Campfire Learn Together gathered around Zoe Bee’s video essay In Defense of Inefficiency — and it turned out to be one of those sessions where the material and the community felt genuinely made for each other.
We watched the first half of the video together, paused for a five-minute bodymind break, and then settled back in to finish. That rhythm — watch, rest, return — felt right for a topic about reclaiming the value of slowness, wandering, and the unmeasurable.
The Video Meets Our Glossary
Folks in the room noticed quickly how much Zoe Bee’s argument rhymes with language we’ve been building in the Stimpunks glossary. The video isn’t just a defense of taking your time — it’s a critique of what happens when efficiency becomes the supreme value, when systems are optimized so aggressively that they lose the capacity to do what they were actually for.
That’s exactly the territory our Efficiency page maps. As David Labaree puts it: “In the name of efficiency, we have increasingly disabled the ability of healthcare, industry, and education to carry out their missions effectively.” An efficient system that can no longer actually function is not a success. It’s a failure dressed up in productivity language.
The glossary goes further: effectiveness itself depends on a certain degree of inefficiency — on excess capacity, redundancy, and the ability to absorb difficulty rather than collapse under it. Zoe Bee arrives at something similar through a different door, asking what we lose when every moment must be optimized, every detour eliminated, every margin squeezed.
Metric Fixation: When Measurement Becomes the Mission
The conversation kept returning to Metric Fixation — the pattern where the drive to measure performance replaces actual judgment, and where teaching and learning get reduced to what is easiest to measure rather than what is important.
As Jerry Muller writes, metric fixation is the persistence of these beliefs despite their unintended negative consequences — because not everything that is important is measurable, and much that is measurable is unimportant. The efficiency myth and the metrics myth are cousins: both promise objectivity and control, both quietly hollow out the things they claim to improve.
Participants noted how sharply this lands in neurodivergent and disabled experience. When you think in tangents, when you need more time, when your productivity doesn’t chart the same curve — efficiency ideology doesn’t just inconvenience you. It pathologizes you.
The McNamara Fallacy, Live in Action
The McNamara Fallacy got named: the move of deciding that what can’t be counted doesn’t count. The video traces this logic through education, work, and everyday life — the way care, curiosity, rest, and relationship keep getting dropped from the ledger because they resist quantification.
As one framing in the glossary puts it: “I can’t measure it, so it must not be important.” That’s not neutral rationality. That’s a values choice, dressed up as objectivity.
What the Room Said
Folks were struck by how validating the video felt — in a “this confirms what we already know from our own lives and our own glossary” way. The language Zoe Bee uses to critique efficiency culture maps cleanly onto the Stimpunks framing of reductionism, pathology paradigm, and the dangers of mistaking what’s easy to see for what’s real.
The bodymind break midway through turned out to be its own small argument for the evening’s theme. We paused because our bodyminds needed it. We came back richer for the rest.
Related Reading
- Efficiency — Stimpunks Foundation
- Metric Fixation — Stimpunks Foundation
- McNamara Fallacy — Stimpunks Foundation
Reflection Prompts: In Defense of Inefficiency
Drawing on Zoe Bee’s video essay and the Stimpunks glossary on Efficiency, Metric Fixation, and the McNamara Fallacy.
On Efficiency and What Gets Lost
- When you hear the word “efficient,” what feelings come up for you? What images or memories does it bring?
- Think of something important to you — a relationship, a skill, a way of thinking — that would look “inefficient” by conventional standards. What would be lost if you tried to optimize it?
- The Stimpunks glossary notes that effectiveness often depends on inefficiency — on slack, redundancy, and excess capacity. Where have you experienced this in your own life? Where have you seen a system collapse because it was optimized too tightly?
- Zoe Bee’s essay asks us to defend inefficiency. What would you most want to defend?
On Metric Fixation and What Gets Counted
- Metric fixation replaces judgment acquired through personal experience and talent with numerical indicators of standardized performance. Where have you felt your own judgment — your lived experience, your expertise — dismissed in favor of a score or a number?
- Not everything that is important is measurable, and much that is measurable is unimportant. What is most important to you that resists being measured?
- Trying to force people to conform their work to preestablished numerical goals tends to stifle innovation and creativity. Can you think of a time when being measured changed the way you worked — or made you stop doing something you loved?
- Linda McNeil wrote that “measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning.” What have you learned that couldn’t have shown up on any test or report?
On the McNamara Fallacy and Who Gets Erased
- The McNamara Fallacy says: if I can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter. Where have you or your community been on the receiving end of that logic — rendered invisible because your experience couldn’t be quantified?
- What aspects of neurodivergent and disabled life are most routinely McNamara Fallacied — dismissed, deprioritized, or disbelieved because they’re hard to count?
- Metric fixation leads to a diversion of resources away from frontline producers toward managers, administrators, and those who gather and manipulate data. Who benefits when everything must be measured? Who loses?
On Neurodivergent Experience and Efficiency Culture
- How has efficiency ideology — the pressure to be productive, optimized, on schedule — shown up in your life as a neurodivergent or disabled person?
- Many neurodivergent ways of being (deep dives, tangential thinking, needing more time, needing rest) look “inefficient” to systems built around neurotypical norms. How do you reclaim or reframe those ways of being?
- Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Have you ever found yourself performing for a metric rather than doing the thing that actually mattered? What did that cost you?
On Slowness, Rest, and Bodymind Wisdom
- We paused midway through the video for a bodymind break. What does your bodymind ask for that efficiency culture tells you to suppress or ignore?
- What does a “slow” version of something you love look like? What becomes possible in slowness that isn’t possible at speed?
- If inefficiency is sometimes a form of care — for ourselves, for each other, for the work — what would it mean to build more of it into your daily life? Into community spaces?
Closing / Integrative
- What from the video or tonight’s conversation do you want to carry with you?
- Is there something you want to stop measuring — in yourself, in your work, in how you relate to others?
- What would it feel like to be in a world that valued what you can’t easily quantify about yourself?
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