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Comment by widforss | Hacker News Reader

I tend to avoid people who comes up with simple solutions based on their ideology. Folks who are honest about not having a simple solution makes a much more intelligent impression on me.

Does this comment make me a hypocrite?

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It doesn't make you a hypocrite if that's one heuristic you use to judge people among many. There's actually research on expert judgement showing that experts who are able to find lots of "On the other hand" reasons are more likely to produce accurate forecasts.

http://www.chforum.org/library/choice12.shtml

"Folks who are honest about not having a simple solution makes a much more intelligent impression on me."

This works because problems with simple solution don't stay problems for long.

Problem: I'm dehydrated.

Solution: I drink (potable) water.

Problem solved.

(Don't get distracted by all the other potential bad solutions, we're just talking about how this specific simple solution does work.)

If it's a pervasive problem that has plagued humanity since the dawn of civilization, then simple solutions probably won't work, no. I'll cop that I lean libertarian but ultimately the very popular "let's just free market at it" and "let's just government at it" are equally stupid solutions to any hard problem.

What about people who come up with complex solutions based on their ideology?

What about situations where a simple solution would be the most effective and appropriate?

Would you be averse to it just because it is simple?

The solution may be simple, but the reasoning to justify that it is the most effective is probably not.

I would say that it would depend. I'm primarily thinking of big picture political questions, and in that general area I feel that simple answers are mostly flawed answers.

However, in engineering, I apply the *nix philosophy of less is more. But this post isn't very technical.

Potentially, yes? Especially if it's a long-standing complex problem. History is full of oversold simple solutions. Hearing "just do .." should immediately alert you to the possibility that the speaker hasn't understood your situation.

Also the policy / solutions promoters need to be asked and need to answer the questions:

1) what are the trade-offs 2) what are the potential unintended consequences 3) what happens if the boundary conditions are approached like 60 years later, very few people do X, many people do X

>History is full of oversold simple solutions.

Of course, history is also full of people insisting, "No, hold on, it's far more complicated than that!" and then being totally wrong.

For instance, people spent a very long time believing that a difficult-to-model combination of many different factors produced stomach ulcers. Then an experiment was done, and voila, the real cause was Helicobacter pylori.

Simplicity (or, in fact, regularization) is helpful far more often than it's harmful.

In the case of stomach ulcers it actually is more complicated. Helicobacter pylori is the most common cause, but not the only cause:

http://www.uptodate.com/contents/association-between-helicob...

No. Your comment doesn't use any magical concepts for which I have no model. I think I entirely understood it. It's simplicity is incidental but allowed for that. People who come up with simple solutions based on Their Own Ideology are a different thing. Their solutions aren't simple. They're lies that you want to believe contingent on lies you don't know you don't want to believe. Generated mosty for control, of self or others, and never for awareness.

I think it's a good social heuristic.

> magical concepts

Depends on how you define magical concepts. Are the magical because they are too complex and require too many assumptions?

For example, by your definition, is it ok to have faith that would be associated with a religion, if that faith is based on a wide variety of experiences and acceptance of the existence of others worldviews?

The only reason to have an ideology is to use it to produce solutions. You should be wary of solutions that are just too simple for the problem (irrespective of ideology,) or the rejection of solutions based solely on ideology.

Yes, but we are all hypocrites, so don't feel too badly about it.

The problem with not having a simple solution is that humans are wired to take action based on simple solutions. Here's a test for your theory of mind. Can you imagine that someone else thinks, "I know I'm not completely right, but I also know that the best way to lead this group forward is to present a simple solution as if it is right." How would they act?

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