Things Of Note #20

Complex Made Simple; Simple Made Easy

Hey Friends,

A question for you: Is it simple to be fit?

It is. Isn’t it?

I mean, here are the steps/actions to take: Eat healthy; Exercise [1]; Sleep well. Simple.

If you are like me, the first instinct (based on experience) is to protest. This seems too… simple. Yet there is a distinction here. We aren’t saying it is easy to be fit, we are saying it is simple.

Simple and easy aren’t the same thing. Simple—from simplex (literally “onefold” as opposed to duplex or complex i.e “multiple fold”)—is when there are few constituent parts and they aren’t tangled together. Easy on the other hand means requiring less effort.

Running every day—as an activity—is simple. But it sure as hell isn’t easy.

Now, when the problems we face have simple but not easy solutions, we tend to artificially ramp up the complexity—fed by our Complexity Bias—to avoid having to face it head on.

Complexity Bias: Why We Prefer Complicated to Simple

Farnam Street | 19 mins

Complexity bias is a logical fallacy that leads us to give undue credence to complex concepts.

We want to ascribe complexity to things when there is none because:

a) It allows us to avoid a problem or at least postpone it—a flight response. “Welp, the problem is complex. I need to first look up 10 articles with 10 tips on how to tackle it”.

b) We don’t want to acknowledge the world is entropic, that chaos is the norm, the default. (Also, see: Entropy vs Complexity).

This bias is also seen in our superstitions (Also animals in fact. See: Pigeon Superstition) as well as conspiracy theories where we are reading too much into randomness.

Conspiracy theories are the ultimate symptom of our desire to find complexity in the world. We don’t want to acknowledge that the world is entropic. Disasters happen and chaos is our natural state. The idea that hidden forces animate our lives is an appealing one. It seems rational.

The bias is also seen in our tendency to reach for jargon, in the particulars of how we use language to hide the simple ways in which our thinking, our work may be incorrect.

So what is the solution? The article suggests Occam’s Razor as an effective measure against this bias.

Though, for ways we have already complicated our lives, we might need to strive for Decomplication.

Decomplication: How to Find Simple Solutions to “Hard” Problems

Nat Eliason | 21 mins

This was a very thought-provoking essay.

The core solutions to many problems, maybe most problems, are extremely simple. In one paragraph each, you can explain how to lose weight, how to gain muscle, how to save money, how to be productive, how to sleep better, how to grow a website, and just about any other popular problem.
…

But, we don’t want to hear this. Through a combination of psychological biases, willpower depletion, and effective marketing, we’ve begun to believe that the simple things are difficult and complex and that we need swaths of information and expertise to solve them.

We’ve created and been sucked into a world of artificial complexity – one where topics are made more complex than they need to be in order to appeal to our biases and frustrations, and to help companies make more money.

We have made simple things complex by injecting artificial complexity into the mix. However, it needs to be noted that there are things that are truly complex (say, quantum mechanics). Here we are talking about things that are fundamentally simple but have been turned into a complex mess.

But where does this complexity come from?

There are three forces/stages to it:

• Failure and Challenge. We have a simple but hard to do solution. But we just can’t do it because of lack of willpower+motivation or because of our modern environment (it’s hard to avoid sugar when almost every food around us seems to have it) or some combination of those.

• Cognitive Dissonance. "When that difficulty leads to failure, Cognitive Dissonance kicks in, and our desire to not feel responsible for that failure causes us to seek out alternative explanations. … If you accept that the solution is simple (which it truly is), then you have no one to blame for failure but yourself".
  So you start to see it as a complex problem requiring complex solutions. It moves from being something simple and hard to something complex and hard.

• Money and Marketing. "Businesses thrive on artificial complexity.
  ...
  In many cases, if someone is selling something (product, training, course, etc), it benefits them to make the problem their product solves seem more complex than it is, while also making their solution easy, so that you feel like you need to buy what they’re selling". It is especially true when the product is mediocre. Companies can hide behind jargon and the seeming complexity of the problem.
  
  “Buy our sleep mask that automatically detects your sleep stages and adjusts the ambient ocular setting for optimal REM stages. And then you’ll sleep well”.
  
  They capitalize on people's tendency to make simple-hard things into complex-hard things by offering a complex-easy solution.

So then, how can we undo this artificial complexity? How can we decomplicate?

(Note: Decomplication is about turning simple things that have turned complex back to being simple. Simplification is about turning actually complex things into simple things).

i) By realistically assessing Complexity

We can decomplicate problems by exposing how they have been made complex by asking good questions.

• Does anyone profit from this being complex?

• Do I secretly know the simple solution?

• Am I assigning value to complexity?

• Is this something I've failed at?

ii) By realistically assessing Difficulty

• Do I control the variables that make this seem difficult?

• Am I treating this as difficult as an excuse for inaction, or to prevent cognitive dissonance?

• Have I failed at this before? (E.g. Have I succumbed to Learned Blankness?)

After we do that, we can find the simple solutions by a priori reasoning. In other words, by working from first principles.

E.g: “Removed from modern society, sleep is not a problem. If I can create a sleep environment as if I wasn’t in modernity, I should sleep fine”.

Nat then goes on to formulate two laws for complexity based on the observation that: “Most practical problems we run into daily aren't truly complex”. And that “the problems the greatest number of people experience tend to have the most artificial complexity”.

• The Law of Artificial Complexity: As the number of people experiencing a problem increases, so will the artificial complexity of the solution.

• The Law of Decomplication: The more people that are experiencing a problem, the simpler the solution should be.

Simple Made Easy

Rich Hickey | 1 hour

In this talk, Rich goes over how complexity creeps into our software, why simplicity matters, and how to achieve simplicity.

Even though it’s a talk about programming and software engineering, I see it as touching on something more general. In fact, watching it was what got me thinking about all of this.

Rich first starts with distinguishing simple vs complex and simple vs easy. We have covered it above but he also mentions something interesting: simple is objective, easy is subjective. Simple is something inherent to the task/formulation/concept. Easy is a relation between an individual and that target.

The way to get fit is simple for everyone but it might be easier for some people than others.

<Programming>

Why does Simplicity matter in Programming?

• Complex things are intertwined. As such, we have to consider them together which then undermines understanding. If two modules are highly coupled with each other, we have to put them both in our head when reasoning about how they behave.

• One huge effect of the above is that making changes become that much harder because successfully and confidently making a change requires analysis and understanding.

• For similar reasons, debugging becomes harder.

• We also lose flexibility as we can’t consider a component on its own.

On some levels, we already know this. Still, we end up with systems that are more complex than necessary. Why?

Ans: Because we prefer what is easy over what is simple. This is not a conscious, active trade-off. It’s just that easier things are inherently…. well, easier to do. So it’s natural to lean more towards them.

So the key is to then turn simple into easy. In other words, make it easy to do things in a simple manner.

How can we do that? It’s not easy (no pun intended). But two possible ways to try would be:

• Making simplicity “close by”. What is close is what is easy. E.g. Multiple standards on code formatting in the same code-base is complex. It’s simpler to have on consistent way to format code. But that is not easy to do. We can make it easy by say installing formatters and then running them through pre-commit hooks.

• Making them familiar. What we know is what is easy. We can thus learn what would make our work simple.

</Programming>

I think this talk can be generalized fairly well. In everything we do, we should strive to turn simple into easy.

For instance, not eating/reducing processed food is a simple way to be decently healthy. One way to make doing that easy would be to not buy any when going grocery shopping, to make sure you only have access to whole foods. In a way, Design for Default such that simple becomes easy.

So to bring things full circle:

• Decomplicate your life by turning artificially complex things back into being simple.

• Then, make it easy to do the simple thing.

C'est simple.

// Listening

Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality

Lex Fridman Podcast | 3 hours

Three hours long but in my opinion, totally worth it. I was mind-blown every 10 minutes or so. Of course, most of it I didn’t fully grasp. But it was still a lot of thought-provoking stuff. Like:

• “The Turing test is basically a test of the conjecture whether people are intelligent enough to understand themselves”.

• “sentience is possessing certain classes of models and intelligence is the way to get to these models if you don't already have them”.

• “a brain cannot feel anything. Neurons cannot feel anything. They're physical things. Physical systems are unable to experience anything. But it would be very useful for the brain or for the organism to know what it would be like to be a person and to feel something. So the brain creates a simulacrum of such a person that it uses to model the interactions of the person. It's the best model of what that brain, this organism thinks it is in relationship to its environment. So it creates that model. It's a story, a multimedia novel that the brain is continuously writing and updating”

• “In some sense, life exists because of the market opportunity of controlled chemical reactions”

• “An organism is not a collection of cells, it is a function that tells cells how to behave”

• “We basically made this bet with the Industrial Revolution that you can control everything. And the modern societies with basically unfettered growth led to a situation in which we depend on the ability to control the entire planet”.

• “it's likely that we should ascribe a certain degree of intelligence to plants. The problem is that plants don't have a nervous system, so they don't have a way to telegraph messages over large distances almost instantly in the plant.
  …
  Something like plants is actually a set of living organisms, an ecosystem of living organisms that are just operating a different timescale and are far superior and intelligent as human beings”.

• “a government, game theoretically, is an agent that imposes an offset on your payout metrics to make your equilibrium compatible with the common good”.

• “I suspect that for most people, the fear of death is the fear of dying before they are done with the things that they feel they have to do, even though they cannot quite put their finger on it”.

• “We don't have continuous existence. It's not a continuous process. The only thing that binds you together with the Lex Fridman from yesterday is the illusion that you have memories about him. So if you want to upload, it's very easy. You make a machine that thinks it's you because it's the same thing that you are.
  You are a machine that thinks it's you”.

• “The body gives you a second order agency. What you consider what constitutes the body is the things that you can indirectly control. Third order (are) tools. And the second order is the things that are basically always present. But you operate on them first order things which are mental operators. And the zero order is in some sense the direct sense of what you're deciding”.

• “democracy is the rule of oligarchs that are the people that currently own the means of production that is administered not by the oligarchs themselves because there’s too much disruption. … So it's administered by institutions and these institutions themselves are not elected, but they provide continuity and they are led by electable politicians. And this makes it possible that you can adapt to change without having to kill people”.

• “Happiness is a cookie the brain bakes for itself”.

I know I basically dumped a whole of quotes but my brain still needs time to actually process it all. So, for now, just leaving it at that :).

// Other Videos

Piper

Pixar | 4 mins

I have been watching a lot of short movies this weekend. Including Pixar classics. The details on this one is just amazing.

Success Kid: Meme Story

Buzzfeedvideo | 5 mins

Interesting to see the story behind the meme. And never knew he was holding sand in his hand. :o

// Stories and Poems

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

Ursula K. Le Guin | 15 mins

A thought-provoking story of philosophical fiction. Tugs equally at both the heart and the mind.

In the Desert

Stephen Crane

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”

// Music

• Perfect for a end-of-weekend Sunday evening, alone.

• Jerusha <3

// Wholesome

Rex Chapman🏇🏼 @RexChapman

How? Incredible...

That’s it for the week.

Thank you for your time :)

Have a great week ahead!

With Love,
Bijay

(P.S: Would love to say I’m testing out the read-rate with different send-times for these letters but of course the truth is I am leaving it till the last minute too much… 😅 Needs to change).

[1] Though: (Just) Exercise is not enough