Decomplication: How to Find Simple Solutions to “Hard” Problems (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Decomplication: How to Find Simple Solutions to “Hard” Problems (2016)

nateliason.com

55 pointsWA22 comments

Today I learned that being a human with actual psychology and living in the modern world is "artificial complexity" and that if I would just stop that all of my problems would have simple (but no easier) solutions.

Every normal human understands that "how do I lose weight?" has an implied "while being a normal human with impulses, desires, limited time and willpower, who also has many other goals they are trying to simultaneously satisfy". That problem is fundamentally complex and literally shaming people ("then you have no one to blame for failure but yourself") for being a human in society is counterproductive and harmful.

Practically every overweight or underfinanced person in the world already has a rich fount of shame for those attributes because society keeps telling them it's their fault and that shame is a source of complexity when it comes to solving the problem.

It sounds you're saying the article was oversimplifying complex problems because in the real world it's not so easy to just eat less/better and move more to loose weight. I think you may be missing the distinction he was making between simple and easy. I think fundamentally the problem of loosing weight is not particularly complex[1]. But for many people it is quite hard to do. We may have psychological issues with choosing the right foods, we may have other things we want or need to do instead of exercising, there could be many things that make it hard to do the things we need to to be healthy. And because it's hard for us we are vulnerable to someone selling us an 'easy' solution.

Of course, solving our psychological issues, or finding the time or willpower to exercise, or making the money to buy healthy food or the time to cook it are all different problems. And those problems can be quite complex.

1. This recent HN discussion goes into it in more detail. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597975

I understand the distinction between simple and easy. Digging a pool in your back yard is simple. It's not easy. (The author is incorrect about running marathons. Running a marathon is complex.)

> I think fundamentally the problem of loosing weight is not particularly complex.

My point is that any definition of "fundamental" in this sentence that discards the essential humanity and cultural context of the person losing weight ends up with a "problem" that is in no meaningful, actionable way based in reality.

The fact that it is a real living breathing human who has a life and a day job who is trying to lose weight is essential complexity.

Arguing otherwise is akin to saying that putting an astronaut on the moon is simple: just fire a ballistic missile at it. Oh, what, the astronaut needs oxygen, hydration, and can only handle a certain amount of acceleration before turning into a reddish paste? Well, that's just "artificial" complexity and it's their fault for having a body that is so poorly engineered.

This article reminds me of the 80/20 rule: 80% of the result is achieved with 20% of the effort. You might not need the result's last 20%. Skip that excruciating, complicated 80% effort to get it.

Coffee is a good example for me. I like a decent cup, or a drinkable espresso beverage. So I bought a cheap, good condition Gaggia Classic Pro espresso machine; a quality hand grinder; and an AeroPress. Learned to operate all 3. Boom, decent coffee & espresso.

Can I crush tasting competitions or make fancy latte art? Nah. Being "80% of a barista" is fine to me. I don't need to spend ten large on equipment and hundreds (thousands?) of hours becoming 20% more of an expert. I'm having fun, don't spend $15/day on coffee, and my family enjoys the result. That'll do, pig. That'll do.

Does this rule apply to surgery or financial security systems? Hope not. But you get the idea. I make coffee and Folgers it ain't. Maybe keeping "good enough" and the 80/20 rule in mind could simplify our lives.

> Does this rule apply to surgery or financial security systems?

There are, in fact, places in the world where people die of relatively simple diseases and infections. I should think that a person with just 1-2 year of elementary medical knowledge armed with WHO's Essential Medications would undoubtedly save more than 80% of lives in those areas.

I'm pretty similar with coffee; all you really need is a decent grinder and reasonable control over water temperature, and immersion brews (like the Aeropress) are really hard to completely screw up, so you can focus on buying good quality coffee and on experiencing the variety in flavours.

While I've managed to avoid an expensive espresso addiction, I do still do pourovers every once in a while even though I'm not that good at them because they're just fun to do, and I can totally understand people putting tons of money and effort into perfecting their coffee experience.

How do you cure cancer? Well, cancer is a complex disease, made of cells which are nominally "yours" but which are actively trying to proliferate as much as possible, causing knock-on effects...

Or, in the words of this article, "BULLSHIT! Just kill the cancer cells while leaving the healthy cells alive! Simple! Anything beyond that is artificial complexity! DA-EPOCH-R? DAE overcomplicated BuLLshiT! I know best!"

The kind of over-simplification this article promotes leads directly to outcomes like Steve Jobs fruit-curing himself into an early grave because he thought he'd outsmarted a kind of cancer that would have been pretty damn treatable had he had an ounce of humility.

every problem has a solution that is simple, elegant and wrong.

Some people call them "silver bullets": appealing illusions that problems may be more manageable than they are. Unfortunately, many silver bullets per problem can be formulated. They are considered one of the nourishing of populism.

You want a metal-to-be-defined bullet against them? Education. So one gets used to meet problems that look simple but reveal their difficulty once you tackle them.

Huh? The author specifically says organic chemistry is actually complex.

How to be an successful entrepreneur - sell something people want

How to be a successful engineer - fix problems people are willing to pay for

There you have it

I am not sure if this is sarcasm but both of your statements imply that success has to be related to profit/money. I think that is deeply flawed.

You can take any activity and break it down into extremely large number of parts that interact with each other in complex ways.

Let's take handwriting for example. There are a lot of anatomy: muscles, joints as pivots and bones as levers, a lot of physics in a ball pen and the manufacture of pens can explained to the chemistry of plastics and beyond. Ink absorption in paper depends on how many factors?

Now imagine a product, book, course, whatever, that expands on the above paragraph in an effort to teach you how to write. As absurd as it sounds that's the recipe for a lot of commercial stuff out there. Technically correct in describing things but absolutely zero help for the task.

I think you have hit on a very important point. When you break down a "task" into very many constituent parts, its "perceived" complexity and difficulty goes up. Many "tasks" are intuitively simple and do not need to be reduced further. Doing so only hampers the performance of the "task" itself. The 80/20 rule applies here.

This "Artificial Complexity" is man-made and is the reason for our out-of-control Consumerism and its detrimental fall-outs.

This is... just plain wrong.

Example: sleep. Insomnia has a history which predates Shakespeare.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/266971

In fact sleep patterns used to be different. It was normal to wake up for an hour or two in the middle of the night. But people went to sleep much earlier - typically around 7-8pm, woke up for an hour or two about four hours later, and went back to sleep again.

In spite of this insomnia was a known problem.

https://www.medievalists.net/2016/01/how-did-people-sleep-in...

So clearly going back to this pattern won't necessarily make everyone sleep better. And so "modernity" is not the issue, and the problem does not have a simple solution.

Likewise weight loss. Telling overweight people to eat less is like telling an alcoholic to drink less, or a depressed person to cheer up. It's pointless, silly, and naive and it won't work.

The real issue with weight loss is a combination of motivation and psychological reprogramming, with some addictive elements, plus education about nutrition. Also peer pressure. And access to healthy vs unhealthy foods.

There may also be underlying medical issues related to metabolism. (And - ironically - sleep patterns also make a difference.)

Again, it's not a simple problem.

This is not to say that tech non-solutions are better. But the idea that you can reduce issues that millions struggle with daily to a simple motivational sentence isn't any more realistic.

Or helpful.

You're confusing simple with easy. The article is talking about complexity.

From first hand experience I can tell you weight loss is simple. It's just not easy. It's a process in which you learn how you can eat less and/or healthier in a manner that works for you starting from your access to food, habits, schedule, what food makes you feel good or not, etc. It's a lot of work, but the process is simple, you try things and see what works for you.

I've seen research that suggests that the simple solution to weight loss is "have a gene that prevents it or live in a low-pollution location for ten years".

No one's confused. Saying something is simple and very hard at the same time helps people make exactly 0 progress.

It just comes off as pedantic/dumb well-actually-ism.

Yeah, fat people know about calories in/calories out. That in itself doesn't make them slimmer.

Actually it helps a lot in steering them away from complex bullshit that generates decision paralysis. I you read books about the latest diet fad or take a course, or buy weight loss products, you are actually consuming a lot of energy and willpower that you could use in simple lifestyle changes like "first step drop all junk food and sugar".

Most people don't have metabolic issues, yet steadily gaining weight.

South Korea vs. North Korea clearly shows the effect of food availability. Same genetics.

No one said the solution was easy, only that the solution was simple. But very hard.

But which one is easier to live with?

(1) "this is in my control, but it is too hard, and I am too weak to do it", or (2) "this is NOT in my control, and I'm failing due to the circumstances, in spite of doing the most possible"

> So clearly going back to this pattern won't necessarily make everyone sleep better. And so "modernity" is not the issue, and the problem does not have a simple solution.

Yes, you can have a sleep pathology, and overweight can be the symptom of a pathology too - not to mention that you might have no weight problem at all, it might be that your genetic heritage makes you an outlier ; just as there are "naturally" skinny people or people that only need 5 hours of sleep.

But the thing TFA questions is the exploitation of mere difficulties experienced by healthy people. Basically it says, stop buying snake oil.

> Telling overweight people to eat less is like telling an alcoholic to drink less, or a depressed person to cheer up. It's pointless, silly, and naive and it won't work.

Those are used as, indeed, simple examples - which include topics that are not related to health and well-being.

The real message, though, is that you should analyze the problem you have before falling for snake oil. If you can't figure out by yourself what are the root causes of your problem, it resists a priori reasoning and you are probably in the left part of the "law of decomplication" curve - a person with a specific problem (i.e. a pathology). In this case, sure, the right move is to go see a specialist.

> What if we asked: “how do you manage your finances?”

> These problems are complex and you need a monumental amount of information to get them right.

> Bullshit.

Exactly. Just stop being poor. It's such a simple solution to a 'hard' problem. Not being poor gives you access to 'paying someone' to make it easier to further stop you from being poor. Just break the cycle and stop being poor! Simple

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