It's Too Easy - Part I - Why We Crave Complexity

 

Oh God!  Now he's doing pixel art.

I've spent a lot of blog time recently focusing my thoughts on whittling down the complexity of a given solution to get to its core essence.  Sounds easy in theory, but it's difficult in practice.  We humans, for some reason, are built to worship the byzantine.

Part of this is literally due to the makeup of the universe.  The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (my favorite law of all physical laws) states simply that things tend toward disorder (or, alternately, entropy always increases).

In less pretentious terms, imagine your bedroom in its common state - maybe a few clothes strewn around the room, maybe a little dust, maybe an unmade bed.  Now imagine letting it sit for 1000 years.  No one's allowed to enter it, but otherwise, you're literally letting nature take its course.  Now, imagine one of two scenarios:

In the first, you walk into the room, and the surfaces are pristine, the clothes are folded and put away, and you can bounce a quarter off the bed.

In the second, the elements have worn away the ceiling, allowing the room to flood and grow moldy.  A friendly family of raccoons has comfortably nested in the scant stuffing that once was your bed, and your poster of Samantha Fox is nowhere to be found.

Which scenario is more likely?  Obviously, the second, because it's highly, highly (did I mention highly) unlikely, the small original mess in your room would somehow become less messy through a combination of a virtuous earthquake and a benevolent tornado or two.  It's extremely plausible that your room would be a wreck, if your room even exists at all after a millenium.

This is entropy.  It's much, much harder to keep things organized than it is to let them fall into a shambles.  Chaos is the natural state we inhabit, so we grow comfortable with certain aspects of it and expect it. 

The other reason we choose the complex is because we believe it requires more effort or genius than the simple and straightforward.  What requires more artistry?  A plain marble facade or one carved in relief with intricate figures?  Aren't 1000+ page tomes considered the intellectual gold standard?  Isn't a model that handles all known exigencies and requires branch after branch of exceptional logic the best possible solution?

And creating something that's complex requires a lot of time, so that means we're working hard, right?  

There are certainly times when complexity is needed.  Most people can understand the basics of relativity and can quote the terms in E=mc^2, but it takes a lot more diligence to understand the math behind the concepts.  Expertise in a particular field is built either via understanding how simple components interact to form a complex whole or in understanding the intricacies of the edge cases of an otherwise straightforward model.  

But, in case it's not obvious, I'll argue the case that, more frequently than not, the simpler solution is better than the complex one - if you're lucky enough to be able to solve for that simple solution.

Until next time, my human and robot friends.