The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simplicity

http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/02/unreasonable-effectiveness-of.html

by john_horton • 15 years ago

21 7 15 years ago

behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com

chalst2• 15 years ago

Hoisted from that page's comments:

    However, due to the nature of the publications today, nobody is going to be honest and say: "You know what, we really thought that this advanced technique was going to be better. We tried our best, as you can see, but the improvement is really tiny." 
    There should be some credible way of reporting negative findings, which are surprising.

There are journals, such as the Journal of Negative Results (http://www.jnr-eeb.org/index.php/jnr) for ecology, that do try to fill this gap. But they don't have the same impact value.

This is fair enough, up to a point: you should be aiming for results that will change the field.

john_horton• 15 years ago

I wonder if some of the benefits of simplicity come from the reduced probability of making errors. I know that in my own research, I always try to use simple methods or at least augment more complex methods with graphics and simple methods.

That being said, I think it is useful to know the complex methods, even if you don't use them.

petervandijck• 15 years ago

His examples are awesome. HN might be a good example too. Up/downvotes seems easy to improve upon, but perhaps most "improvements" would hardly make a dent.

drbaskin• 15 years ago

The title of this post seems to be a reference to the famous paper of Wigner titled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences." It is a very readable paper and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_...

chalst2• 15 years ago

"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of X" has become a snowclone (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000350.h...).

Check Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=%22the+unreasonable+effec...)

JoeAltmaier• 15 years ago

US accidentally dropped a hydrogen bomb in the ocean (11 atomic bombs have been lost by the US total). Taking the opinion of fishermen, pilots, Navy officers, weather men etc, and simply averaging their estimations on a map the bomb was found in a day.

ehsanul• 15 years ago

Counterexample: I doubt the current implementation of pagerank+additions at Google is all that simple.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simplicity

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