The tails come apart. If you aim for extremes, you wind up selecting against other forms of goodness. It's not robust. This is bad both for your goals, if you are incorrect about your goals at all, and socially bad, because it moves you off of (?)cooperative ground(?) where seeking your values correlates with seeking theirs.

A thoughtful discussion of efficiency. Points for metacognition: "If efficiency has really earned its poor reputation, I wonder if I should be more worried about this."

This discussion seems (to me) to conflate a number of issues that it seems to me should be separated, in the manner of a scalar getting substituted for a vector, or, even better, a dynamic vector field (i.e., tensor).

Issues conflated seem to me (I could be wrong) to include:

[1] Substitution of mathematical optimization for human values -- the difference twixt quantity and quality. Is this an issue we ought to worry about when we discuss efficiency?  If so, how should we tackle it?

[2] Difference twixt making purely mechanical or mathematical or natural processes more efficient, and making social processes more efficient.  

[3] The potential incommensurability of applying  a mathematical optimization method like an optimal point or optimal set of values (usually obtained in the calculus of variations by setting the derivative to zero, or in a set of simultaneous linear equations by solving them all at once (e.g., Kantorovich's optimization program for the Soviet economy in the 1950s-1960s) to human activities.  

[4] The proven mathematical problems with applying optima and efficiency to ranking problems and other examples of human choice. 

Let me try to give specific examples of these issues.

1 - Substitution of mathematical optimization for human values -- rape is more efficient than marriage. Slavery is with torture as motivation is more efficient than workplace bonuses. The maximally efficient solution to global warming includes killing roughly 6 billion of the world's people. And so on. You can immediately see the problem here. Imagine a hypothetical superhuman AI given the task of eliminating crime in a large city. "Easy," the AI says, "kill everyone."  So you respond, OK, but we want another solution. "Fine," the AI retorts, "just put everyone in the city in jail." OK, you say, but that's not gonna work either, we need another solution. "Sure, just sedate everyone in the city 24/7/365."  And it spirals downhill from there.

The problem here is that every problem in the real world has invisible constraints which involve unspoken social values. Moreover, different cultures solve the same problems in very different ways depending on their social values.  For instance, in America we try to minimize out-of-wedlock births by distributing birth control and increasing education and making abortion expensive and difficult to obtain. Japan, however, minimizes out-of-wedlock births by socially stigmatizing it. As a result, Japan has a much lower out-of-wedlock birth rate than America, but this solution (which very efficient for Japan) does not carry over to America because of the difference in our cultures.

2 - "This intrigues me, because in what I take to be its explicit definition, ‘efficiency’ is almost the definition of goodness manifest. The efficiency of a process is the rate with which it turns what you have into what you want."

For a purely mechanical or mathematical or natural process, this definition works. For example, we can numerically measure the efficiency of a Carnot engine very well.  In part this is because purely mechanical or mathematical or natural efficiency can be unambiguously defined, and in part it's because the system isn't reflexive and typically doesn't change its behavior when being measured/observed by humans.

The Keynesian beauty contest exemplifies the problem with reflexivity in human systems:

"It is not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one's judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees." (Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936). 

As Nassim Taleb has noted, game theory fails when predictions become warnings which change the participants' behavior. "Fooled by Randomness," Taleb, N., 2008.

For human systems, this definition of efficiency also seems to fail because different human observers will arrive at different numerical measures for efficiency depending on their value systems, and in part because of Goodhart's Law, which tells us that "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."  Also Campbell's Law, which states that "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Examples here involve defining efficiency of, say, the economy -- does efficiency mean maximizing GDP?  Or maximizing individual happiness? Or minimizing global warming?  Or producing the greatest good for the greatest number of people?  There's no one obvious "right" answer here, which creates problems. The classic example of Goodhart's Law is the Soviet nail factory that demanded maximum unit production, so the workers responded by manufacturing millions of tiny 1-millimeter-long nails per day.  The factory then changed to demanding maximum weight of the individual unit, so the factor workers responded by producing a handful of useless 500-kilogram nails per day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law

3 - Maximizing efficiency means optimizing some value or set of values, and this proves highly dependent on our ability to generate objective numbers from processes or systems. With non-human processes or systems, like an engine or a chemical reaction, we have well-defined and reliable ways of doing this: enthalpy, Carnot efficiency, mechanical static and dynamic friction, and so on. With human processes, applying the methods of science and mathematics becomes extremely dubious.  Science depends on objectively measuring quantities in a reproducible way. Social systems tend to resist objective measurement and also tend not to be reproducible, when we're talking about large-scale social processes like the French Revolution or the Industrial Revolution or the American Civil War, etc.  Was the American Civil War the most efficient way of ending U.S. slavery?  Was the French Revolution the most efficient way of redistributing income in 18th century France? These judgments depends not only on human values, but on counterfactuals that involve guesses, since we can't re-run history via a time machine. This would seem to place a hard limit on our ability to measure, let alone define, efficiency in these contexts.

4 - "I usually wince when people criticize efficiency, and think they are confused and should be criticizing the goal that is being pursued efficiently. Which does seem basically always true."

Maximizing efficiency has in many cases been shown to be mathematical impossible. For example, the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu Theorem tells us"the excess demand curve for a market populated with utility-maximizing rational agents can take the shape of any function that is continuous, has homogeneity degree zero, and is in accordance with Walras's law.^[5] This implies that market processes will not necessarily reach a unique and stable equilibrium point." If the system has no unique stable equilibrium point, the search for an optimal equilibrium, viz., Pareto optimum, would appear to be futile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenschein%E2%80%93Mantel%E2%80%93Debreu_theorem

This tends to explain why game theory is junk science and why the Nash Equilibrium seldom shows up in the real world. 

https://www.businessinsider.com/prisoners-dilemma-in-real-life-2013-7Secy. 

All tests of the Prisoner's Dilemma with real-world subject shows that the overwhelming majority of people prefer to cooperate rather than defect, going back to the original RAND test using RAND secretaries, which failed to confirm the conclusions of John Nash's original paper.  As neuroeconomics researchers have noted, "The only subjects who react as Nash predicted are sociopaths and economists." (The paper is "Neuroeconomics," but I can't immediately find a link to it right now.)

"While it is common to report that experimental subjects do not make choices that comport with Nash equilibrium strategies (or even von Neumann-Morgenstern utility maximization), we should not infert hat human reasoning is thus somehow flawed. It is perhaps the case that ourexisting, deductive,modelsof human reasoning are too limited. Humans are able to solve many tasks that are quite difficult."

http://mccubbins.us/mccubbins_files/icai2012.pdf

Efficiency measures like Pareto optimiality and the Nash equilibrium use a definition of efficiency that's not only far too limited to account for human reason, but which fails at a basic mathematical level. Viz., Arrow's Impossibilty Theorem:
 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem

Another essential problem with applying efficiency to any human endeavour is that data is always to some extend theory-driven, and thus our data always depends on the theoretical framework we use to decide which data to measure and how. We cannot measure everything, so in any experiment we must choose which variables to measure and which to exclude from consideration. This leads to quagmires like Secy. of Defense Robert McNamara's incorrect use of body counts to measure the progress of the Viet Nam war:

https://chronotopeblog.com/2015/04/04/the-mcnamara-fallacy-and-the-problem-with-numbers-in-education/

https://www.technologyreview.com/2013/05/31/178263/the-dictatorship-of-data/

This is a problem which besets the entire rationality community, in my opinion. Mathematician Cathy O'Neil has written eloquently about it in her book Weapons of Math Destruction:

https://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Math-Destruction-Increases-Inequality/dp/0553418815

In the real world, most economic/social issues to which the mathematical tools of efficiency get applied tend to be so-called wicked problems. "In planning and policy, a wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. It refers to an idea or problem that cannot be fixed, where there is no single solution to the problem; and "wicked" denotes resistance to resolution, rather than evil.^[1] Another definition is "a problem whose social complexity means that it has no determinable stopping point."

"Wicked Problems". Management Science. 14 (4): B-141–B-146, C. West Churchman, 1967.

Churchman defined wicked problems as having the following characteristics:

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse.
4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation"; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every attempt counts significantly.
6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution.
10. The social planner has no right to be wrong (i.e., planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).

Purely mathematical/scientific measurements and definitions of efficiency appear to become extremely problematic in these situations (speaking for myself).
 

Goodhart effects are robust and it takes very little optimization pressure for them to show up.

It might be instructive to consider some specific examples. An internal combustion engine is particularly easy to analyze, for instance. The efficiency with which fuel is turned to kinetic energy is almost entirely determined by temperature gradient between the engine and its surroundings. This means that, apart from better cooling technologies, the only way to make an engine more efficient is to make it less powerful. In practice, we also make entire vehicles more fuel efficient by making them lighter and more aerodynamic. 

But the "goal" of an engine in many cases is just to produce the most power. If you're trying to win a race, get into orbit, you're limited by how much thrust or torque you can generate per unit of mass and time. This goal is directly antithetical to efficiency. 

While I don't think this generalizes to the extent that efficiency as a goal is always antithetical to whatever you're really trying to optimize, it is at least in most cases orthogonal to whatever you're actually trying to optimize. 

My friends circle has less universal distaste for the idea of efficiency, and it seems to be quite contextual in popular media ("If you can be one thing, be efficient." -- Wayne, Letterkenny).  

I think it's not popular in far-mode discussions because it's explicitly about tradeoffs.  Acknowledging that there are competing desires kind of sucks when you want to signal wholehearted support for whatever harebrained idea your friends or parents are supporting now.  It's extremely popular in near-mode planning - nobody I know argues in favor of waste (OK, that's not true - we'll argue any side of any issue, just for drill.  But when we're trying to actually do something, efficiency is accepted as important.)

The efficiency of a process is the rate with which it turns what you have into what you want.

This definition seems to imply that what you have is not what you want (fair enough, I guess), and that the process is a means to get what you want, and the process itself is also not a part of what you want.

Since life is a process (I do not believe that the one who dies with the most toys wins), efficiency under this definition is trading away a part of life for some end result that you want.  (And I think that people tend to object to efficiency in human things, not in purely mechanical things.)  May or may not be a good trade, but intuitively, a process that is less efficient in producing the end result but more life-affirming (for lack of a better word) sounds good to me, and I don't agree that efficiency is definitionally equivalent to goodness.  There is a tradeoff.

(On the other hand, if you consider the process as part of the end result, and the process as producing itself, and the efficiency as the rate with which the process produces itself in a form that's what you want, I suppose you can get around this definitionally, but I find that definition less intuitive and more difficult to work with, as you can probably tell by the awkward way I described it.  I don't think this is usually what is meant by efficiency.)

I think it is a combination of the following things that often happen in the name of "efficiency":

• Goodhart's law;
• optimization for values that are not yours;
• premature optimization;
• removal of slack.

Note that the typical context when people consider "efficiency" explicitly is when it is forced on them by some authority. (If you want to do something more efficiently for yourself, you would probably just call it a "better" or "smarter" way of doing things.)

It is likely that the authority's goals are not well aligned with yours, and "efficiency" means taking away part of your money or freedom, so that they can have greater profit or easier job. Sometimes the authority defends their solution as improving things for you, but your potential disagreement would be predictably ignored; they have already made their decision, and the important people have approved it, so the debate is over.

In context of employment, "efficiency" usually means that you will have to use cheaper tools or cheaper ingredients, your work will be monitored to make sure you are not taking breaks or otherwise stealing company time, there will be more micromanagement, possibly some of your colleagues will be fired and their tasks will be distributed among the remaining ones, while everyone's salary remains constant. (Except for the managers who organized the whole thing; those will get huge bonuses.)

In context of services, "efficiency" means that the provider of service will shift some of their costs on you.

Of course none of this is popular.

I have often remarked "If we had viable third parties in this country, and there was a party that held no policy positions whatsoever but just vowed to make government more efficient, I would vote for them every time".  I feel that this is the forgotten element in so many things.  We argue between American health-insurance healthcare and single-payer healthcare, but I believe both systems could be really good if they were run efficiently, and both systems could be horrific abominations if they are run inefficiently.  

I really wish politicians would establish clear KPIs and track their progress against those KPIs.  Even if the KPIs change from administration to administration, having clear goals and optimizing for them would be a huge benefit. 

Despite being an EA and valuing efficiency in parts of my life and the world, I share the intimate rejection of efficiency in certain context that you're describing (and not getting). Like, I don't want a date with my girlfriend to be efficient. Now, you might answer that it's because I'm talking about efficiency with regard to time management or money, and not about "having a great time with my girlfriend". But my point is that "having a great time with my girlfriend" is the kind of objective for which the efficiency framing doesn't seem appropriate. Indeed it's not buying me anything and creates a shitload of pitfalls in which to fall (Goodhart, all that).

I would advise you to have a look at philosopher Joseph Heath's work. He has a book, "The Efficient Society", where, according to Wikipedia, "[h]e argues that Canada's successes as a nation are largely attributable to its commitment to efficiency as a value". In "Morality, Competition, and the Firm" he also discusses the central role of efficiency on ethics (business' and beyond).