During the COVID pandemic, the phrase “flatten the curve” became popular. In the cartoon above, you could take the opposite of flattening the curve as “narrowing of the curve” A standard normal distribution has a variance of 1. The shape of the curve is its variance. In a standard normal distribution the probability of the mean, the highest value is 46%. If the probability needed to be higher, then if the mean is the most efficient solution, in order to increase the probability of efficiency, then you might be tempted to decrease the resiliency, the variance.
If you decrease the probability, e.g. “flatten the curve”, you lower the probability of most efficient solution (most efficient for the spread of the virus that is!) but you increase the variance. If the variance is infinite, then the most efficient solution would be just as probable as any other solution.
It is tempting to increase efficiency, the probability of the most efficient solution. I said that engineers favor efficiency and I am a licensed engineer, so I am certainly aware of the temptation. But in doing so you should not decrease the variance and increase the probability of toppling that most efficient solution.
To quote the old commercial, “It is not nice to fool Mother
Nature”. Pursue efficiency AND resiliency. Seek the most efficient solution but do so
such that the variance is still 1.0, i.e. is a standard normal distribution.
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