Layers of abstraction in technology not always cost in performance, when you look historically and system wide. For example the fact that digital technologies we're modularized(physics+lithography/transistors/gates/../cpu's/software developed without tight coupling/optimization) allowed faster improvements across the whole stack , according to some researchers, who also think, that in general, modular technologies advance faster. And modularity always requires some standardization.
And as for education, i don't think standardization always leads for performance loss. For example ,the area of reading has seen a lot of research, and one of the results is "direct instruction", one of the best methods to teach reading, and is a highly standardized method.
But maybe what's your saying is true for standardized tests in current implementation.
You always trade something off when you're abstracting. Some things become easier, but at the expense of other things becoming more difficult.
To use your example - more modularized technologies are more flexible and can be developed faster, but they no longer use resources efficiently. A modular CPU design makes design process easier, but a particular modular CPU will not outperform a hypothetical "mudball" CPU designed so that each transistor has close-to-optimal utilization (with "optimal" defined by requirements).
Or compare standard coding practices vs. the code demoscene people write for constrained machines, in which a single variable can have 20 meanings, each code line does 10 things in parallel, and sometimes compiled code is itself its own data source.
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The way I see it, building abstractions on top of something is shifting around difficulty distributions in the space of things you could do with that thing.
Sure, in the small, a few developers working - fully optimizing stuff usually works better.
But on bigger design spaces, when you let hundreds of thousands of people collaborate, create bigger markets faster, and grab more revenue - you enable a much more detailed exploration of the design space.
And often, you discover hidden gold. But also - if you've discovered you've made a terrible mistake in your abstractions - you can often fix that, maybe in the next generation.
And as for education, i don't think standardization always leads for performance loss. For example ,the area of reading has seen a lot of research, and one of the results is "direct instruction", one of the best methods to teach reading, and is a highly standardized method.
But maybe what's your saying is true for standardized tests in current implementation.