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> Jevon’s Paradox

I've now seen this referenced two dozen times today which is well up from the 0 times I've seen it over the past year.

Is there some recent article referencing it that everyone is regurgitating?



Satya Nadella posted about it on Twitter.

https://x.com/satyanadella/status/1883753899255046301


Which seems pretty self-serving, and at the very least, premature.


Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but also because everyone is writing about GPU demand and Jevon's paradox is an easy way to express the idea in a trite keyword.


Most people know Jevon’s Paradox there is just rarely an opportunity to bring it up, similar to Poe’s Law.


I never knew there was an actual term for this, but I knew of the concept in my professional work because this situation often plays out when the government widens roads here in the States. Ostensibly the road widening is intended to lower congestion, but instead it often just causes more people to live there and use it, thereby increasing congestion.

Probably a decent amount of professions have some variation of this, so it probably is accurate to say most people know OF Jevon’s Paradox because it’s pretty easy to dig up examples of it. But probably much fewer know it’s actual name, or even that it has a name


IMHO it happens as long as you can find use cases that were previously unfeasible due cost or availability constraints.

At some point the thing no longer brings any benefits because other costs or limitations overtake. for example, even faster broadband is no longer that big of a deal because your experience on most websites is now limited by their servers ability to process your request. However maybe in the future the costs and speeds will be so amazing that all the user devices will become thin clients and no one will care about their devices processing power, therefore one more increase in demand can happen.


I’d bet most people don’t know what a paradox is.




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