The Complexity Paradox (1998)

https://www.asktog.com/columns/011complexity.html

by declanhaigh • 6 years ago

43 17 6 years ago

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RyanShook• 6 years ago

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.“ Steve Jobs

srtjstjsj2• 6 years ago

Why do people put celebrity names on common sense proverbs just because the celebrity said it once?

waynesonfire2• 6 years ago

Why not? Should they instead quote their neighbor Joe Six Pack? This is a technique called Appeal to Authority and you can read about it on wikipedia.

tnr232• 6 years ago

Complexity is easy to build.

dexen2• 6 years ago

As somebody who gave two honest attempt at building a PRNG... no, not quite. Building complexity -- especially one that isn't trivally reducible -- is quite hard.

tnr232• 6 years ago

You are mixing hard with complex. A PRNG is very simple (not complex) and hard (not easy).

waynesonfire2• 6 years ago

What does trivially reducible mean?

A PRNG is inherently complex and winners of https://www.ioccc.org/ are a class of complexity you deem reducible. This competition involves building complexity and since there are winners it's feasible to claim that to win it is "hard". Since this straddles a form of art, placing a value judgement as easy vs hard seems invalid.

The reason I'm thinking about this is because I recognize that adding accidental complexity is far easier than removing it. In fact, I spend a significant amount of time "trivially reducing" such complexity.

ctw• 6 years ago

I’ve come across a similar line of thought while reading about capitalism. When technology improves such that it takes less time to perform work, there are three possible outcomes:

1. The labourers finish the work in less time and get more leisure time (production and labourers stay constant, time spent decreases)

2. Some of the labourers are fired since fewer are needed to perform the same work in the same amount of time now (time and production stay constant, labourers decrease)

3. The same amount of labourers work the same amount of time, but produce more due to the increased efficiency. (time and labourers stay constant, production increases)

In my experience, unless you work for yourself, outcome 1 will never happen. Outcome 3 is desirable from a broader perspective because that extra production must be benefitting someone. But I don’t see any upside to option 2. Some people lose their jobs and there’s no extra production. I guess you could argue it would have been a waste for them to continue working on something that could be done more efficiently without them, so in the long term it works out, but in the short term they lose.

pdonis• 6 years ago

I don’t see any upside to option 2.

That's because you're stopping too soon with option 2. There are actually two sub-options to option 2:

2a. Some of the laborers are fired, and they can't find any other work so they now aren't producing anything (time and production stay constant, laborers decrease).

2b. Some of the laborers are fired, and that means a pool of unused labor now exists, which entrepreneurs hire to do new jobs that couldn't be done at all before because there was no labor available (time and laborers stay constant, production increases).

Outcome 2a will virtually never happen in a healthy economy because there are always more things that people want, so there are always additional things that could be produced if labor were available. So what actually happens, at least in a healthy economy, is outcome 2b. If you're seeing outcome 2a, it means the economy is not healthy: something is preventing the natural process of labor that is no longer needed for existing production being redirected into new production. Almost always that something is the government.

gfody• 6 years ago

1 could happen at a lifestyle company, theyre out there but rare (and never hiring obv)

eternalban• 6 years ago

This is a principle, not a paradox. The principle is simply that there is an inherent complexity to any construct, and, that the burden of complexity can be shifted to optimal domains.

As an analog, consider analysis of harmonic systems. A complex wave form in time-domain, vs the same signal considered in frequency-domain, via Fourier Transforms.

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

(So, here, quite a lot of the time-domain complexity is handled by very complex mathematical machinery that supports FT. The new picture in frequency domain is “simple”, but the FT machinery is hardly that. The total system complexity is asserted to be equivalent.)

The name of the game with complexity is to shift the burden of complexity to a capability domain that is within one’s reach.

astrobe_• 6 years ago

I don't think this is a good analogy. FT is like changing the reference frame. Similarly, the movement of planets are more easily described in an heliocentric model than in an Earth-centric model. You can write the transform between those two models, but this does not increase the complexity of the solar system itself: you don't add features, which is exactly the issue with software.

A slightly better analogy would be the shift from Newtonian physics to relativist physics, that describes more accurately how things move. However, you still don't add complexity to the described thing, you just discover more of its complexity and get a more complex description as a result.

What we have here is simply the effect of something we know one expect of as Parkinson's law [1], which is a specific case of the Induced demand phenomenon [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

srtjstjsj2• 6 years ago

The article is missing the key factor that people will accept some level of crap (in their computer, or it their car) to obtain value, and that minimizing complexity strictly for its own sake is almost no one's goal except monks.

tolstoyevsky• 6 years ago

I understood exactly the opposite point from the article - it's saying the exact thing you're saying, people will accept a CONSTANT AMOUNT of crap to get to their goals, and technology doesn't change this. It only changes how far people can get with that constant amount of crap they're willing to put up with.

The Complexity Paradox (1998)

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