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Comment by aleksiy123 | Hacker News Reader

Today I learned there’s a name for the general version of this idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory

At a certain point in a solution everything you do to optimize (“push”) in one area will cause a negative effect in a different area (“bulge”).

But this is a nice concrete example.

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Oh thank you for sharing! I had tried describing this earlier in my career and had call it "The complexity shell game" as in attempts to hide complexity only serve to move it around and to trick yourself it's gone. I would much rather use an existing standardized term, so I'm switching to Waterbed Theory, thank you!

I call it the conservation of effort. If you are able to save mental energy in one place, it necessarily has been spent in another.

That's not entirely true though. There are sometimes true wins in things like finding better perspectives, e.g. models that are both simpler and more accurate, good abstractions that separate concerns cleanly, stuff like that.

You still have to find these things though. Even if you didn't do it, someone, somewhere did spend all that mental energy. There are no shortcuts to saving effort in a closed environment. Same way you can't reduce total energy in a closed system. In fact these two are closely related.

This seems like it requires such narrow definitions of things like "closed environment" that it loses applicability to the real world. It's a heuristic worth considering, but not a universal principle.

It's not that hard though. Until we integrate extraterrestrial code into our package managers, you can call earth our closed environment. And if your company has strict offline and library requirements, you could even define it for your place of work.

Its amazing how humans come up with the same things independently.

My friend calls it the lump under the carpet. You can move it around, but you can never get rid of it.

I like minimal irreducible inherent complexity of a problem or a system (waterbed or zero-point would work I guess) and then you can derive some form of a law of conservation of complexity… if you can measure it. You can definitely feel it, though.

edit: see also ‘No Silver Bullet’ and its essential vs accidental complexity; but don’t disregard Kolmogorov, either, even if it isn’t strictly engineering.

Something that comes to mind right away is: the cloud will eliminate the complexity of managing OSes and hardware.

Instead it moved it to the complexity of devops and complicated cloud APIs.

I had heard of it in reference to auto sales being a balloon. If they show you a squeezed price, fees bulge on the other end of the deal.

It’s called constraints and tradeoffs yeah

Sure, but I like how this feels more tactile and how things may bulge in unexpected way.

Like pushing clay around into the right shape of the problem while it’s fighting you.

Constraints and tradeoff feels like the simplified textbook model.

You're getting downvoted but I had the same thought. This sounds like engineering. I do believe there are some cases where pushing the problem to a different place is the right thing to do, sometimes that different place is contextually better suited to that task, so you do actually gain performance or capability from moving the problem around.

v interesting. Thanks for sharing. I kept seeing this phenomenon of "no free lunches". TIL about the waterbed theory.

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