5 ms·

The Complexity of 'Simplicity'

31 points by KrisJordan 16y ago

rick_2047 16y ago
A good example of the authors specific notion of simplicity, can be our own Hacker News. On one end of the HN machine you submit a post or a comment or a question and around 2000 people see it in a day. After that you receive a nice little discussion (if your original input was good enough), as the output. A little noisy sometimes but has a form of natural filtering.
- simonsquiff 16y ago
  And a simple little number next to the topic or comment donating its worth. Karma is a wonderfully simple concept with remarkable outcomes - its a teacher, a rewarder, a punisher, an encourager...it helps make the community work (a very complex problem) but is wonderfully simple.
  - thaumaturgy 16y ago
    Downvoted. ;-) That point number that everyone seems to want to attach to everything these days has absolutely nothing to do with measuring worth. It is merely a measure of popularity, and popularity doesn't even correlate well to value.
    - JoelSutherland 16y ago
      This just isn't true. Generally the most popular comments here are the most valuable. Not always, but it certainly correlates well. I certainly wouldn't want comments ordered randomly.
    - mannicken 16y ago
      Ah, but popularity has everything to do with measuring value. As an analogy, gold would be a worthless piece of metal, if it wasn't for its popularity. Worth is an illusory, human-defined concept and just like anything "the worthiness of something" is ecided by majority. Perhaps because those who don't subscribe to majority's value system are weeded out in the process of evolution, unless their value system offers some incredible evolutionary advantage. And by incredible I mean "everyone is dead and unable to reproduce except for those who think that karma points are bullshit". In reality, reality is merely a construct of our minds, and all value systems are created by consensus on which hallucinations are advantageous and which are disadvantageous. Thus, if we decide by unspoken consensus that karma points are worthy of construction of smart comments then karma points are valuable.
      - thaumaturgy 16y ago
        You're clearly a subjectivist, a philosophical position which I as a pragmatist find useless. I would love to sit here and debate this with you, but I have a Saturday lunch meeting in a few minutes with my old high school's football captain and prom queen. I hear that they've accomplished some amazingly valuable things. We're probably going to eat at McDonald's. We will probably spend some time discussing the latest Dean Koontz or Danielle Steele novels. After that, I will come home and watch Fox News for a few hours, followed by some sitcoms. Gosh, it's a good thing all these are so popular! Otherwise, I would have no idea what was valuable and what wasn't. Oh, and by the way: gold would not be worthless. It has certain intrinsic properties -- like its resistance to corrosion, its malleability, its conductivity, and its low melting point -- which have made it valuable for many uses.
        Ardit20 16y ago
        You watch Fox News? Wow, the first person I have read admit that! I thought no one watches Fox News but the dumb.
        mannicken 16y ago
        So, would you disagree with the statement 'value is subjective'? What about different value systems? How do we decide which one is more valuable than another, considering we ourselves certainly have a very odd and rare value system, which considers philosophical discussions to be of a high value. Reality check: most people don't spend their time on HN discussing pragmatism and subjectivism. As an extreme example, consider value system of a heroin addict, for instance. He or she values heroin above all. You might say his value system is inferior to yours, but how would you defend that statement? Speaking from utilitarian point of view, it's not necessarily that a heroin addict decreases society's happiness or pleasure, if he uses it as a constructive stimuli. Speaking from a physiological point of view, we are not much different from heroin addicts. My opinion is that value systems are psychological routes by which we can get an endogenous high. Our brains have built a series of quests for us to accomplish, after which they reward us with various pleasurable chemicals. Some people get high watching Fox News, some people get high debating philosophy, some people get high from heroin. The value of each activity is (non-verbally) agreed upon, by spending time on that activity and hanging around people who spend their time on the activity.
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  And yet: If you mistakenly click the wrong one of the two very miniscule arrows for a vote, there is no way to fix this mistake; New users can make unpopular comments which will auto-ban all of their future comments -- even when they say things worth discussing -- and there is no way for them to crawl out of that hole (and worse, they often don't even realize that it's happening); Reply pages tend to expire while writing long, well-researched, carefully-considered comments, requiring those rare commenters to copy-paste the contents of their reply (and worse, inadvertently discouraging deep discussions); Users are never notified of replies to their comments or submissions, which in effect motivates people to spend more time on the site polling it (as opposed to a useful push-type notification), and also effectively limits discussions to a du jour shallowness because an active user is unlikely to notice any reply made to them a few days later. I'm not so certain that the author of that article would find this little forum to be a suitable example of his kind of "complex simplicity". I think it's actually a bit the opposite: the internals are simple, which requires more complex behavior on the part of the users.
todayiamme 16y ago
Sometimes I wonder if we would be better off with some mandatory complexity. Most people simply don't appreciate the miracles they see around them every second of every day. Miracles that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. Miracles that happen everyday on a consistent basis. Miracles that they curse and abuse. If people could just see and understand how complex one Google query actually is then maybe the world would be a better place.
- snprbob86 16y ago
  Google has two courses for Nooglers (I believe they were called "Life of a Query" and "Life of a dollar") which cover the search process from the perspective of both a user and advertiser down all the common branches, all the way to the metal, and back to the user. Despite being a strong engineer, I recall thinking "computers are magic".
  - Psyonic 16y ago
    Those sound interesting. Can't wait til September :)
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  Absolutely. It is for this reason that I vociferously advocate that all cars return to using carburetors in place of fuel injectors. If you had to spend a few hours once a month adjusting your idle screw and WOT switch, you would appreciate all of the miracles in your car's engine. All sarcasm aside, let's not forget that technology is not an end unto itself, it is a means to an end. It needs to help people accomplish things, not hinder them.
  - todayiamme 16y ago
    That's true and my concept is terribly wrong, but there is a problem at work over here. To quote Carl Sagan; >>>We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.<<<
jiganti 16y ago
What were the results of Google's experiment?
jacobolus 16y ago
The classic line from St. Exupéry’s Wind, Sand, and Stars (in French, Terre des hommes) is “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove.” For any who have not read that book, I highly highly recommend the whole thing, and for hackers especially the chapter containing that quotation (it’s somewhere near the beginning). St. Ex. provides one of the most insightful/“true ringing” defenses of technology I’ve ever read.

31 points by KrisJordan 16y ago

rick_2047 16y ago

A good example of the authors specific notion of simplicity, can be our own Hacker News. On one end of the HN machine you submit a post or a comment or a question and around 2000 people see it in a day. After that you receive a nice little discussion (if your original input was good enough), as the output. A little noisy sometimes but has a form of natural filtering.

simonsquiff 16y ago
And a simple little number next to the topic or comment donating its worth. Karma is a wonderfully simple concept with remarkable outcomes - its a teacher, a rewarder, a punisher, an encourager...it helps make the community work (a very complex problem) but is wonderfully simple.
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  Downvoted. ;-) That point number that everyone seems to want to attach to everything these days has absolutely nothing to do with measuring worth. It is merely a measure of popularity, and popularity doesn't even correlate well to value.
  - JoelSutherland 16y ago
    This just isn't true. Generally the most popular comments here are the most valuable. Not always, but it certainly correlates well. I certainly wouldn't want comments ordered randomly.
  - mannicken 16y ago
    Ah, but popularity has everything to do with measuring value. As an analogy, gold would be a worthless piece of metal, if it wasn't for its popularity. Worth is an illusory, human-defined concept and just like anything "the worthiness of something" is ecided by majority. Perhaps because those who don't subscribe to majority's value system are weeded out in the process of evolution, unless their value system offers some incredible evolutionary advantage. And by incredible I mean "everyone is dead and unable to reproduce except for those who think that karma points are bullshit". In reality, reality is merely a construct of our minds, and all value systems are created by consensus on which hallucinations are advantageous and which are disadvantageous. Thus, if we decide by unspoken consensus that karma points are worthy of construction of smart comments then karma points are valuable.
    - thaumaturgy 16y ago
      You're clearly a subjectivist, a philosophical position which I as a pragmatist find useless. I would love to sit here and debate this with you, but I have a Saturday lunch meeting in a few minutes with my old high school's football captain and prom queen. I hear that they've accomplished some amazingly valuable things. We're probably going to eat at McDonald's. We will probably spend some time discussing the latest Dean Koontz or Danielle Steele novels. After that, I will come home and watch Fox News for a few hours, followed by some sitcoms. Gosh, it's a good thing all these are so popular! Otherwise, I would have no idea what was valuable and what wasn't. Oh, and by the way: gold would not be worthless. It has certain intrinsic properties -- like its resistance to corrosion, its malleability, its conductivity, and its low melting point -- which have made it valuable for many uses.
      - Ardit20 16y ago
        You watch Fox News? Wow, the first person I have read admit that! I thought no one watches Fox News but the dumb.
      - mannicken 16y ago
        So, would you disagree with the statement 'value is subjective'? What about different value systems? How do we decide which one is more valuable than another, considering we ourselves certainly have a very odd and rare value system, which considers philosophical discussions to be of a high value. Reality check: most people don't spend their time on HN discussing pragmatism and subjectivism. As an extreme example, consider value system of a heroin addict, for instance. He or she values heroin above all. You might say his value system is inferior to yours, but how would you defend that statement? Speaking from utilitarian point of view, it's not necessarily that a heroin addict decreases society's happiness or pleasure, if he uses it as a constructive stimuli. Speaking from a physiological point of view, we are not much different from heroin addicts. My opinion is that value systems are psychological routes by which we can get an endogenous high. Our brains have built a series of quests for us to accomplish, after which they reward us with various pleasurable chemicals. Some people get high watching Fox News, some people get high debating philosophy, some people get high from heroin. The value of each activity is (non-verbally) agreed upon, by spending time on that activity and hanging around people who spend their time on the activity.
thaumaturgy 16y ago
And yet: If you mistakenly click the wrong one of the two very miniscule arrows for a vote, there is no way to fix this mistake; New users can make unpopular comments which will auto-ban all of their future comments -- even when they say things worth discussing -- and there is no way for them to crawl out of that hole (and worse, they often don't even realize that it's happening); Reply pages tend to expire while writing long, well-researched, carefully-considered comments, requiring those rare commenters to copy-paste the contents of their reply (and worse, inadvertently discouraging deep discussions); Users are never notified of replies to their comments or submissions, which in effect motivates people to spend more time on the site polling it (as opposed to a useful push-type notification), and also effectively limits discussions to a du jour shallowness because an active user is unlikely to notice any reply made to them a few days later. I'm not so certain that the author of that article would find this little forum to be a suitable example of his kind of "complex simplicity". I think it's actually a bit the opposite: the internals are simple, which requires more complex behavior on the part of the users.

todayiamme 16y ago

Sometimes I wonder if we would be better off with some mandatory complexity. Most people simply don't appreciate the miracles they see around them every second of every day. Miracles that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. Miracles that happen everyday on a consistent basis. Miracles that they curse and abuse. If people could just see and understand how complex one Google query actually is then maybe the world would be a better place.

snprbob86 16y ago
Google has two courses for Nooglers (I believe they were called "Life of a Query" and "Life of a dollar") which cover the search process from the perspective of both a user and advertiser down all the common branches, all the way to the metal, and back to the user. Despite being a strong engineer, I recall thinking "computers are magic".
- Psyonic 16y ago
  Those sound interesting. Can't wait til September :)
thaumaturgy 16y ago
Absolutely. It is for this reason that I vociferously advocate that all cars return to using carburetors in place of fuel injectors. If you had to spend a few hours once a month adjusting your idle screw and WOT switch, you would appreciate all of the miracles in your car's engine. All sarcasm aside, let's not forget that technology is not an end unto itself, it is a means to an end. It needs to help people accomplish things, not hinder them.
- todayiamme 16y ago
  That's true and my concept is terribly wrong, but there is a problem at work over here. To quote Carl Sagan; >>>We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.<<<

jiganti 16y ago

What were the results of Google's experiment?

jacobolus 16y ago

The classic line from St. Exupéry’s Wind, Sand, and Stars (in French, Terre des hommes) is “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove.” For any who have not read that book, I highly highly recommend the whole thing, and for hackers especially the chapter containing that quotation (it’s somewhere near the beginning). St. Ex. provides one of the most insightful/“true ringing” defenses of technology I’ve ever read.