It's related to Goodhart's Law:

Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

This is often the result of attempting to overoptimize a system. You can optimize a race car to a huge degree, because you know exactly what you want it to do.

You can't optimize a schooling system, because you don't know exactly what you want it to do. A little noise is a good thing, because the you want a little wiggle room for teachers to sidestep the dictums of education czars, and students to sidestep the dictums of teachers.

The Greeks solved this quite a few years ago, with sortition. Under sortition (injecting noise into elections - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition), Bush and Gore would have been forced to pay "paper, scissors, rock" for the presidency. Under the US's more pure democracy, they would have been tempted to make all kind of Faustian bargains with sordid players to nail down the last 0.01% of votes.

Randomization means that the last percent is just not worth chasing, so players in a competition won't be tempted to bend the rules for a tiny advantage.

The same process could be used for tests. If you allocate places in desirable courses (say medicine) randomly to anyone above a certain score, the top students won't bother drilling as hard just to get the top score.

Stocks are the same - quants wouldn't sweat timing as much if their placement in order books was randomized. It would be more efficient to pay attention to fundamental value than momentary fluctuations if they weren't guaranteed to make large profits on the momentary fluctuations. Some would still work on timing, but not as many.

Patents are just bad policy badly implemented at the moment, not over-optimized.

The first problem with the article here is that some of the buttons (Move To, Copy To) did not exist previously. They are also extensions of existing functions (Move, Copy) - so concluding that half the UI is covered by buttons that were not used is an inaccurate assumption.

Secondly, the actions are being moved from the context menu to the ribbon. Most new computer users find it very hard to remember additional, non intuitive actions like right clicking & context menus. Each of these is a 'modifier' that power users are used to, but which make the mental model of file manipulation much harder for beginners to wrap their heads around. They have to remember to apply these modifiers to see if the functions they want exist. Moving the functions into a contextually aware ribbon will make life much easier for these users.

Third, Move, Copy, Delete & Rename occupy the center of the ribbon. These are the most used commands (by far) and rightfully occupy center stage. Power users will call it clutter, but it will be extremely helpful for beginners.

[Disclaimer: MSFT Employee, but I do not work on Windows]

I really admire how much Notch seems to understand opposing viewpoints that most people would simply make inflammatory posts about. His diplomacy here, as well as with Bethesda, has been stellar: Not "Steam is a DRM-ridden mess that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, bwa ha ha!", but instead, "I understand why they'd want to control their platform." Not "Bethesda are an Orwellian corporate giant trying to crush the little guy, bwa ha ha!", but instead, "This is probably just lawyers being lawyers." Never a bridge burned. What respect and maturity! Hats off to you, Notch. I'm proud to be a part of the same community of developers as you.