4 ms·

What about situations where a simple solution would be the most effective and appropriate? Would you be averse to it just because it is simple?

• reacweb 11y ago
  The solution may be simple, but the reasoning to justify that it is the most effective is probably not.
• widforss 11y ago
  I would say that it would depend. I'm primarily thinking of big picture political questions, and in that general area I feel that simple answers are mostly flawed answers. However, in engineering, I apply the *nix philosophy of less is more. But this post isn't very technical.
• pjc50 11y ago
  Potentially, yes? Especially if it's a long-standing complex problem. History is full of oversold simple solutions. Hearing "just do .." should immediately alert you to the possibility that the speaker hasn't understood your situation.
  • epalmer 11y ago
    Also the policy / solutions promoters need to be asked and need to answer the questions: 1) what are the trade-offs 2) what are the potential unintended consequences 3) what happens if the boundary conditions are approached like 60 years later, very few people do X, many people do X
  • eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    >History is full of oversold simple solutions. Of course, history is also full of people insisting, "No, hold on, it's far more complicated than that!" and then being totally wrong. For instance, people spent a very long time believing that a difficult-to-model combination of many different factors produced stomach ulcers. Then an experiment was done, and voila, the real cause was Helicobacter pylori. Simplicity (or, in fact, regularization) is helpful far more often than it's harmful.
    • mrob 11y ago
      In the case of stomach ulcers it actually is more complicated. Helicobacter pylori is the most common cause, but not the only cause: http://www.uptodate.com/contents/association-between-helicobacter-pylori-infection-and-duodenal-ulcer http://www.uptodate.com/contents/association-between-helicob...