Don’t Work Hard, Work Intelligent

Don’t Work Hard. Work Intelligent. Wait a second. What exactly is the message being conveyed here? Feel free to sabotage the product for the sake of making your own job easier? This worker just removed 47.64% of the material from the object he was assigned to transport! If one of his co-workers removed 47.64% of his cube to simply make a smaller cube, he’d move faster, too. And probably get fired for it. If the worker is going to carve up his cube, why not carve a cylinder? It’d be just as mobile as a sphere, but he’d only have to remove 21.46% of the material. And it would require less work to carve. While we’re on the subject, though, how quickly did this worker carve a sphere out of a cube? Evidently he didn’t lose much headway. And he did it with that little pen-knife? Seriously? Do you know how difficult it is to carve a perfect sphere from a cube? That’s some Ron Swanson shit right there. If the ultimate goal was to deliver a whole cube, then the worker has already failed. If the goal was to deliver as much of the material as quickly as possible, then he should have cut 4 edges off the cube (removing only 11.76%). An octagonal prism rolls just fine, with less material and time wasted. But, for all we know, when the workers arrive at their destination, they may be required to stack the objects. In this case, our so-called intelligent worker has delivered an object that won’t stack. Bravo, intelligent worker! Bravo! Oh, and it should read: “Work Intelligently.”

На изображении несколько рабочих перемещают кубы, а один из них катит шар, вырезанный из куба. Справа саркастически разбирается лозунг «не работай усердно, работай умно»: попытка сэкономить усилия уничтожает полезность предмета, а математические рассуждения доводят идею до абсурда. Мем используют как реакцию на чрезмерно буквальное или ошибочное применение принципа эффективности. EN: Several workers are moving cubes, while one of them rolls a sphere carved from a cube. The text sarcastically analyzes the slogan “Don’t work hard, work intelligently”: trying to save effort destroys the object’s usefulness, while mathematical reasoning takes the idea to absurd extremes. The meme is used as a reaction to overly literal or misguided attempts at efficiency.

• @beobanka / 17795 2022-06-13