I recently came upon three domains arguing for simplicity:
1. A professor noted the need for technology to assist physicians in decision making. He explained the human mind can only effectively track 5–9 variables at a time. In fact more recent studies has set that to 4 variables and beyond that people can compensate with chunking information. Yet the care of medicine faces information overload with a deluge of information becoming increasingly available to physicians. As a physicist by training, he expressed the analogy of physicists themselves as essential reductionists (citing Maxwell's equations).
2. This same week, design professors reviewed motivations to simplify designs: Hick's Law, Ockham Razor, affordance, constraints, signal-to-noise-ratio, making function readily visible, etc. There is a call to meet the needs of the lowest common denominator in society.
3. At the XOXO Conference, Twitter founder Ev Williams expressed the following key to success:
“Here’s the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar internet company,” he said. “Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time…Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.” (Wired)
Cost of Simplicity
Continuing on the Wired article, Ev Williams noted that automation reduces steps, allowing people to think less. Along the lines of thinking less, the New York Times highlighted the increased dependence on referential memory, where instead of remembering a piece of information per se, an individual would remember where information can be retrieved. Examples of this are"googling" something we don't know and using GPS guided directions. The increased dependence on technology for easy information access may result in less actual learning. Schools have also recognized this and increasingly allow open book tests, cheatsheets, take home tests, etc. noting that in real life practice, items such as formulas can be found by reference so there is no need for memorization. They also note that the focus of education should be on understanding, application, and synthesis—critical thinking not rote memorization. In addition, there is an increasing amount of items available to learn as the knowledge base of society ever widens. I witnessed the tradeoff of such a dependency at a hackathon. Amidst this 36-hour push, the popular programming web forum, Stackoverflow, went down for 1–2 hours and directly because of this downtime, development slowed to a crawl for a multitude of teams (even those with C.S. majors and Ph.D. candidates). Certainly, hackathons are often periods of experimentation and trying out new coding languages but even for seasoned developers, Stackoverflow has become integral source of referential memory in their workflow.
Is there a Place for Complexity?
There is a place for simplicity but I propose there is also a place for complexity. Philosopher Ravi Zacharias once noted that truth has no obligation to be simple. Some truths are complex, some difficult to grasp. Some problems have difficult solutions. I think this is why certain ideas are better conveyed in story form because it's complexity within an accessible framework. Even looking at physics, which may be reducible, it's a reducibility which builds upon levels of understanding and abstraction that often make it inaccessible. The same can be said for mathematics. (As an aside, much of physics remains unknown to the general public; see Henry Reich of the Youtube channel MinutePhysics decry how antiquated physics education is among U.S. high schools by not requiring education beyond what was known in the year 1865). The informatics professor noted that in contrast to physicists, "biologists enjoy wallowing in complexity." I recall how successful yields in the field of solid state devices require less than 1% error rate, whereas in organic/biological experiments which produced yields greater than 80% were considered a success because of the variations or number of variables involved in biological systems. Complexity does not just have a role in comprehension but also in aesthetics. Beauty can also be found in complexity. I spoke with a Ph.D. candidate in music theory about this and asked her if her understanding of music turns her experience of music to a mere cerebral exercise. However, she replied that a deeper understanding of music in fact gives her greater enjoyment and appreciation of music.
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