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>> if a thing is made straight it will be because humanity has been stripped out of it This is a great heuristic for life. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Ma
by A_Duck 3y ago
>> if a thing is made straight it will be because humanity has been stripped out of it
This is a great heuristic for life. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics does not apply to human behaviour and simple answers to social problems are almost always oversimplified.
If people use your system then get comfortable with many levels of adjustments and tweaks. y=mx+c isn't gonna cut it.
This cognitive bias often manifests as a desire to do a greenfield refactor of an old system, ignoring the value of all the tweaks and shims added over the years to accomodate the real world.
- HPsquared 3y agoReductionism is a hazard, but overcomplication can also be an unhealthy sign. Epicycles come to mind.
- A_Duck 3y agoPerfect example. For minds trained on physics and chemistry where mathematics is unreasonably effective, epicycles are a 'code smell' to be eliminated — there must be a simpler expression of the system. This instinct has to be discarded when working with messy complex human beings.
- HPsquared 3y agoThere are a lot of faulty heuristics indeed, reductionism is only one. Sometimes human behaviour can be explained better, that is more reliably and with less "over-fitting", by a simple model with the right perspective and vocabulary, than a really complicated explanation that is missing a key insight.