7 ms·

We've lost our respect for complexity

105 points by Wilsoniumite 2y ago

rob74 2y ago
I largely agree with this post except for the reference to "juvenoia". Case in point: the new US administration doesn't contain a lot of terribly young people, but they have also thoroughly lost the respect for complexity. All those "deep state" bureaucrats who at best don't seem to do anything useful and at worst dare to contradict you? Fire them all!
- gunian 2y ago
  tangential but doesn't deep state mean a secret group of leadership? does it apply if one is a known public servant
  - zmgsabst 2y ago
    No — “deep state” can refer to the permanent bureaucracy operating according to their own agenda, in coordination with NGOs, etc. That’s the “unauthorized networks of power” which run independently of democratic control, eg by coordinating non-prosecution of crime despite citizen demands for more criminal prosecutions. > A deep state is a type of government made up of […] unauthorized networks of power operating independently of a state's political leadership in pursuit of their own agenda and goals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state
    - gunian 2y ago
      does this assume democracy is real? as in the people have a say in the policies so anything to the contrary is a deep state? i've never had a say over my life let alone politics so it's a very foreign concept like having agency
      - zmgsabst 2y ago
        > state's political leadership The political leadership of the US is elected; by definition, any network of power which isn’t beholden to that is “deep state”.
        gunian 2y ago
        so lobby groups would be considered deep state? or rich people? but how can something be deep state if it has existed since the inception of the aforementioned state. rich people have run the world since humans came into existence is it like a on paper not in reality thing?
      - Dalewyn 2y ago
        A democratic form of governance isn't required for a Deep State. Let's rename Deep State as "Under State" for the purposes of this conversation to make it easier to understand. Whatever is the government (the "State", like in "Head of State") you can see is the "Above State". Presidents, Prime Ministers, Kings, Governors, Legislatures, Courts, the government that supposedly runs the country, this is the Above State. The Deep State, the Under State, operates under the Above State for their own goals and benefits accountable to noone, the only time they come up to the sunlight is to correct an Above State that dares to harm or defy the Under State. You can almost never see the Under State as a common citizen, but you can probably feel their influence if you pay attention. "Deep" in Deep State hence refers to where they are figuratively located in a given country's political mechanism.
        gunian 2y ago
        the hard oart for me to grasp is since the day of the theocratic state influence groups have been a thing how can it be a separate thing if it has been a part of the state since its inception?
        Dalewyn 2y ago
        It's separate in the sense that the individuals involved are mostly employed clerks, scribes, middle management, and other such "common" public servants who serve for practically life careers without input from anyone, as far as the Above State side of things go. In the Under State, those same people actually run the government because they are the people who do all the heavy lifting. The Above State with its Presidents and Secretaries and Legislators are all replacable and expendable, they're just an abstraction and obfuscation layer for the Under State to put their desires into action. Occasionally you might catch glimpses of them when they play their hand too strongly, like the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction(tm) narrative pushed by the Intelligence Community (the Under State) with State Secretary Colin Powell (the Above State) acting as their mouthpiece. On rare occasions a Deep State agent might turn coat and blow the secrets as was the case with Snowden.
  - boticello 2y ago
    'Deep state' could also be called 'permanent state' and means those unelected entities which hold power through changes of government. Victoria Nuland is an example. She worked for six presidents and ten secretaries of state over 30+ years, always promoting the same war agenda. She has worked in concert with her husband Robert Kagan, who has worked as an adviser to several governments and think tanks. These people and organisations are all part of the deep state, aka security state, aka military industrial complex, as forewarned by President Eisenhower on his departure from office.
    - gunian 2y ago
      that sounds so cool better that than be starved out and slowly die like me while watching someone else use your SSN so it's like lobbyists? or does rit have to be a specific industry
    - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
      If we take this definition, which is a lot less conspiratorial than the association I've had with the term, it refers to influential longstanding politicians that kept a low profile and out of the media for the most part.
- zmgsabst 2y ago
  You’re making a straw man of their argument. They understand what the bureaucrats purported to do, but don’t believe that government bureaucrats can manage a complex system and that better outcomes are obtained by allowing individuals to optimize in a complex system than attempt to centrally manage complexity. I’d go so far as to say you have it exactly backwards: It’s people who advocate for government bureaucratic management that don’t respect complexity by hanging onto the belief a complex system (eg, an economy) can be managed by a handful of credentialed experts.
  - cjfd 2y ago
    This is a very extreme stance. It also is a false dichtomy. A government bureaucracy (a needlessly pejorative term, btw....) can do things and individuals also can do things. One does not exclude the other. It gets interesting when asking what things are best done by government and what things by individuals. The non-respecting of complexity is happening when one thinks that it is one or the other. And the government is involved in any contract anyway because if one side does not do what it obligates, the judicial system can be used to enforce it.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      > This is a very extreme stance It doesn't seem extreme at all. If you've ever worked on a technical project and been given a deadline by someone not in the project who also isn't technical, you'll know the problem with central planning. > The non-respecting of complexity is happening when one thinks that it is one or the other This isn't to do with complexity, except that generally the government (or any centrally managed thing) is worse at managing complexity than the government. The government managing something isn't because it's too complex for the private sector. It's because the private sector would have adverse incentives with society-level bad outcomes if it attempted it. E.g. private prisons without sufficient enforced regulation.
- dmpk2k 2y ago
  There is a balance though, because large organisations tend to ossify, yet the environment continues to change.
1GZ0 2y ago
I feel like "Complexity" is the wrong word here. Although I agree with the notion that deep knowledge of complex systems has decreased over the years, I'd argue that the problem isn't the lack of interest in gaining deeper knowledge that's the problem, nor a perceived lack of respect for expertise. I'd argue its more to do with the nature of how large codebases morph over time as they're retrofitted to do more usercases. Its a lot easy in the short term to just hack in the functionality you need into an existing codebase, instead of rewriting the entire thing from scratch every time. This comes at the cost of maintainability and leads to a lot of headaches in the long term, as systems that where never designed to work together clash in unexpected ways. I don't begrudge anyone for not wanted to dive into codebases like that.
- diggan 2y ago
  > I feel like "Complexity" is the wrong word here. [...] I'd argue its more to do with the nature of how large codebases morph over time as they're retrofitted to do more usercases. Its a lot easy in the short term to just hack in the functionality you need into an existing codebase, instead of rewriting the entire thing from scratch every time. This comes at the cost of maintainability and leads to a lot of headaches in the long term, as systems that where never designed to work together clash in unexpected ways. Rich Hickey separates complexity into two parts[0], accidental and intentional (IIRC). Intentional complexity is complexity that stems from the domain of your problem, there isn't much you can do to manage it, DNA splicing will be complex no matter what you do, for example. The other part is accidental complexity, which is complexity you could deal with, but for whatever reason choose not to right now, as you touch on in your comment. This eventually snowballs into a huge spaghetti monster as you pile hacks on top of hacks. There is a (famous at this point) talk from Hickey where he dives much deeper into how he sees complexity, which happens to be a really good pitch for Clojure, but I first saw it before I knew Clojure, and the perspective applies to software in general, so no Clojure knowledge needed. [0] - "Simple Made Easy" - Rich Hickey (2011) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4
FrankWilhoit 2y ago
It is not "complexity good" versus "complexity bad". It is all about legibility, and legibility emerges from how complexity is managed.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
BwackNinja 2y ago
Complexity has always been less respected the more it is separated from the experiences of the average person; or more personally, your own experiences. Unfortunately, that's the very nature of complexity itself. Dependencies increase instead of decrease in the hopes of scaling, saving time and money, or even providing a slightly better product. As positive as those efforts sound, they also make the failure cases worse. The only people to respect with regards to complexity are those dealing with inherent complexity -- especially when they're building more digestible abstractions, and those working to reduce complexity due to having a substantial understand of it. It can be rather difficult to distinguish between inherent complexity and incidental complexity though.
Dalewyn 2y ago
>We are constantly asking our brains to grasp at complex topics and distill down at least our own perception of them to something manageable. Considering "DON'T TREAD ON ME"[1] is a meme that goes back all the way to 1776, the human desire to simplify what is needlessly complicated is nothing new and certainly nothing unexpected even today. This is especially so for Joe Average who more than likely is simply way too busy already with more pressing affairs to daily life. >Now, when many may challenge that notion of consistent progress of the world toward a brighter future, letting somebody else do it just doesn’t seem so right. This too is "older than history"[2]. A common (misattributed?) quote from Mark Twain goes that "If you don't read the newspapers, you are uninformed. If you do read them, you are misinformed."[3] It has always been preferable to have a healthy appetite for critical thought and to be skeptical of everything. Critical thought is how you form your own opinions, your own beliefs, your own ideals and goals in life, your own identity. And indeed, the discipline of science is predicated on putting forth hypotheses and testing them; that is questioning how the world works and whether our current understanding stands up to questioning. What was ridiculous was the deference to higher authority without regard. Noone has the time nor capacity to question and understand everything, especially Joe Average, but to then fundamentally give up your own freedom of thought and defer it to "some group of people who would make it their life careers and ... trust them" is what was and is ridiculous. The widely derided NPC meme starts becoming less of a meme if you trust someone to tell you how to think. Around these parts we call that programming: Telling computers how to think and what to do. >we now live in a time ... that understanding the full complexity of every topic that might cross your path is not only possible, but somehow, expected. Personally as a millenial (age mid-30s), I grew up on a healthy course of being taught to think for myself. Essentially, that is a natural conclusion to being taught that we should strive to truly understand the world around us. >Still, clear answers don’t seem ahead of us The answer is actually simple: Use experts (not "experts" like some pundit on television or a political office holder, actual real experts out in the field who know their stuff and speak objectively) as a potential guide (not an authority!) towards striving to better understand the world around you. We quite literally have a limited capacity to care[4], we must pick and choose what we concern ourselves with even as we strive to understand. Logically then, we should first strive to understand the world around us because that's what is immediately relevant to our daily lives. Progressivism today cares so much about things that are faraway and irrelevant to your daily life, and because you have a limited capacity to care that leaves you unable to care for the people and things in your life. That is simply stupid. Understand the people around you, not some faceless entity on the other side of your continent/island or even the planet you hear on social media. Understand the society around you, not some construct you will probably never even travel to. Understand the world around you, your life, and you might realize that life and the world are actually pretty nice. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Tread_on_Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Tread_on_Me [2]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OlderThanTheyThink https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OlderThanTheyThi... [3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/QuotesPorn/comments/exkeku/if_you_dont_read_the_newspapers_you_are/ https://old.reddit.com/r/QuotesPorn/comments/exkeku/if_you_d... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
openrisk 2y ago
The thing is, historically we never really had much respect for complexity. > We talk about complex subjects all the time. Medicine, politics, economics, sociology, morality and more For our entire history we have being talking about complex subjects we barely understood and, like proud primates, we were always very vocal and cocksure about our view points. We experienced two cultural revolutions, first in the world of ancient Greece, subsequently in the modern era of scientific enlightenment. One can think of the emergent scientific method as effectively learning to respect complexity. Being humble about assertions that cannot be validated again and again, in different conditions, by different parties etc. The tangible result of this new trait (respecting complexity) was pretty amazing. But only for a precious few domains. Our default mode, being 100% sure about things we have little clue about (who needs hallucinating AI when you've got humans), continues to be the prevalent one. Whats worse, we now have what has been called "the pretence of knowledge" [1]. We know that real knowledge is powerful, so why not pretend we have it when we actually don't? This leads to a random mix of (typically self-serving) opinions coupled to the superficial use of scientific tools. A pathology most visible precisely in the above list of really complex topics. The risk is that as the challenges of our own complex societies mount, we will undo also what we have achieved, and effectively go back to become stochastic parrots, unhinged from complex reality. [1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hayek/lecture/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hay...
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  In other words, this suggests nearly all the population are posers/pretenders some of the time…?
  - roenxi 2y ago
    Not really, that would imply they are pretending. There aren't enough people with a genuine respect for truth for that to be a factor. It is more that any signal of knowledge will be copied mercilessly if it affords any respect. If people with bookshelves get more respect, then everyone will have a bookshelf and nonetheless be confused if they meet someone who reads a lot of books. The default assumption is that a person has no idea what they are talking about because the base rate success of that stance is rather high.
nonrandomstring 2y ago
A trillion dollar marketing industry condemns enquiry and threatens mild inconvenience as the terrible fate awaiting anyone who errs from the path of simplicity. The word "just" has a lot to answer for. "Just do it". "It just works". Complexity is an acquired taste. It is somewhat rebellious to celebrate and indulge in it.
somethingsome 2y ago
Complexity is important when a subject at is core is complex, I'm mostly against complexity for the sake of complexity. Too many subjects are getting complex for the sake of it, or due to organic development. There is an even greater beauty than complexity when very complex subjects can be reduced to simpler ones without losing their power, it requires a greater understanding of complexity than what is usually seen. As an illustrative example : QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Feynman
EncomLab 2y ago
Folding Ideas is one of the best channels on YouTube- glad to see it brought up here!
amelius 2y ago
In academia, people had respect for complexity. In industry, nobody seems to use big-O notation.
- bob1029 2y ago
  N is usually small in practice. Analyzing how expensive it is to do something often costs more than just doing the thing.
  - Matthyze 2y ago
    I'm sure there's a sampling bias here. Many intractable methods are never adopted by the developer community exactly because they're intractable, which means such methods won't be encountered often. Like an ant line avoiding obstacles. Only pioneers/people developing new methods encounter them.
- alecco 2y ago
  > In industry, nobody seems to use big-O notation. Ironically, it's because big-O notation is too theoretical and doesn't respect real-world complexity. Big-O is used to see when the operations are of sizes out of normal use and big-O doesn't represent hardware complexity (like latency differences, size limitations, or caching).
- donatj 2y ago
  A gentleman knows is someone who how to use big-O notation and doesn't. The only times I have used big-O in my career has been job interviews. It is my belief that it's mostly used to weed out people who didn't take computer science classes, and make them feel bad regardless of their real world skills. It's the same thing with database normalization. It has come up twice in my twenty year career. Once in an interview, and once during an acquisition when someone from the purchasing company was I believe trying to "Gotcha!" me. 3NF just doesn't come up in normal day to day work.
vbezhenar 2y ago
I do not respect complexity. 99% of complexity is not necessary. I respect simplicity. Complexity appears naturally, there's nothing respectable about it, it's just the way world evolves. Simplicity takes lots of effort to achieve and even more effort to maintain. Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- passwordoops 2y ago
  So you don't respect semicon, airplanes, electricity transmission and distribution, running water... What do you respect then?
- Matthyze 2y ago
  Did you read the article? The author's and your points are entirely tangential.
- GuB-42 2y ago
  Complexity may be your enemy, but you should respect your enemy, or it will defeat you. Disrespecting complexity usually goes "that complex thing is a mess, let's make something simple instead", which usually results in the "simple" thing being useless, and often not that simple. Respect complexity, especially if your goal is to remove it.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  Rather than accuse you, I'll just refute you thusly: In order to achieve perfection, you must understand what should be removed. To understand what should be removed, you must respect the complexity. Respect is not acceptance, even though it's very easy to confuse the two.
metalman 2y ago
There is a part in the Life of Brian, where Brian "helps"/intervenes in a complex assembly/manufacturing operation, which results,instantly, in chaos and destruction. The scripting and effort to film that short piece must have required a true understanding of complexity, and what happens when it isn't recognised and respected. Unfortunately, complexity, and the respect for profesionalism, is weaponised, to produce, mountains(litteral) of junk, that then has to be payed for once, and then again when it proves to be junk, and then a third time to get rid of, and fourth and fifth, pehaps to get strait.
ned99 2y ago
An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity - Terry Davis
revskill 2y ago
It is about the number of connections in a graph.
DaveMcMartin 2y ago
In academia, respect for complexity still exists, but industries prioritize simplicity to enable mass production, reduce costs, and make things easier for people to understand, remember, and use. That’s why logos are becoming flat, with simple shapes and colors, buildings are often bland rectangular boxes, and apps have fewer texts and buttons on each screen. As with almost everything, we need to find a balance between simplicity and complexity.
- Gigachad 2y ago
  I feel like the reason for the change in design trends was that for most of human history, ornate details and complexity required immense labour and signified wealth. Then with modern technology, we could print or weave any pattern you want on fabric effortlessly. Instead of a stone mason chiseling away all day, you can pour plaster in a mould and have all that same detail. Now that detail is cheap, simplicity is on trend.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    You're right, although once something isn't impressive to do it converts to a fashion-related trend. Fashion doesn't often have a practical benefit, so a lot of it is just "I want my stuff to look different to my parents' stuff, and that makes fashion cycles, where people's fashionable floral wallpaper now isn't too different from what their grandparents had.
Painsawman123 2y ago
>That’s not been entirely without good reason, many things were promised then that have failed to materialize. From flying cars to world peace i mean, Flying cars has been a reality for quite some time now, they just go by another name, "helicopters".
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  I don't think we were promised those things.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
xnx 2y ago
Seems like this might be the same as the current popular disdain for experts and being educated.
perrygeo 2y ago
The rise of complexity, and its collapse, defines every civilization for which we have historical records. Given that our society seem hell-bent on repeating the pattern, I question whether we ever had respect for it. It seems that we have nothing but arrogance to proclaim "this time we'll get it right" as we layer on the next layer of complexity. [1] Joseph Tainter "The Collapse of Complex Societies"
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
vdjskshi 2y ago
We're recreating a demon haunted world that will foster cargo cults. The algorithms we interact with are inscrutible, so we make up rules of thumb and assign agency where there is none. E.g. In 5 years there won't be a way to truly know how to minimize your personally-customized prices at the grocery store, but there will be tons of cargo cult opinions (put your phone in airplane mode, walk through iles 3 times before you pick up an item, pick up a generic version before the name brand, ...). Algorithms and AI are the new divine agents to appease with ritual.

105 points by Wilsoniumite 2y ago

I largely agree with this post except for the reference to "juvenoia". Case in point: the new US administration doesn't contain a lot of terribly young people, but they have also thoroughly lost the respect for complexity. All those "deep state" bureaucrats who at best don't seem to do anything useful and at worst dare to contradict you? Fire them all!

gunian 2y ago
tangential but doesn't deep state mean a secret group of leadership? does it apply if one is a known public servant
- zmgsabst 2y ago
  No — “deep state” can refer to the permanent bureaucracy operating according to their own agenda, in coordination with NGOs, etc. That’s the “unauthorized networks of power” which run independently of democratic control, eg by coordinating non-prosecution of crime despite citizen demands for more criminal prosecutions. > A deep state is a type of government made up of […] unauthorized networks of power operating independently of a state's political leadership in pursuit of their own agenda and goals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state
  - gunian 2y ago
    does this assume democracy is real? as in the people have a say in the policies so anything to the contrary is a deep state? i've never had a say over my life let alone politics so it's a very foreign concept like having agency
    - zmgsabst 2y ago
      > state's political leadership The political leadership of the US is elected; by definition, any network of power which isn’t beholden to that is “deep state”.
      - gunian 2y ago
        so lobby groups would be considered deep state? or rich people? but how can something be deep state if it has existed since the inception of the aforementioned state. rich people have run the world since humans came into existence is it like a on paper not in reality thing?
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      A democratic form of governance isn't required for a Deep State. Let's rename Deep State as "Under State" for the purposes of this conversation to make it easier to understand. Whatever is the government (the "State", like in "Head of State") you can see is the "Above State". Presidents, Prime Ministers, Kings, Governors, Legislatures, Courts, the government that supposedly runs the country, this is the Above State. The Deep State, the Under State, operates under the Above State for their own goals and benefits accountable to noone, the only time they come up to the sunlight is to correct an Above State that dares to harm or defy the Under State. You can almost never see the Under State as a common citizen, but you can probably feel their influence if you pay attention. "Deep" in Deep State hence refers to where they are figuratively located in a given country's political mechanism.
      - gunian 2y ago
        the hard oart for me to grasp is since the day of the theocratic state influence groups have been a thing how can it be a separate thing if it has been a part of the state since its inception?
        Dalewyn 2y ago
        It's separate in the sense that the individuals involved are mostly employed clerks, scribes, middle management, and other such "common" public servants who serve for practically life careers without input from anyone, as far as the Above State side of things go. In the Under State, those same people actually run the government because they are the people who do all the heavy lifting. The Above State with its Presidents and Secretaries and Legislators are all replacable and expendable, they're just an abstraction and obfuscation layer for the Under State to put their desires into action. Occasionally you might catch glimpses of them when they play their hand too strongly, like the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction(tm) narrative pushed by the Intelligence Community (the Under State) with State Secretary Colin Powell (the Above State) acting as their mouthpiece. On rare occasions a Deep State agent might turn coat and blow the secrets as was the case with Snowden.
- boticello 2y ago
  'Deep state' could also be called 'permanent state' and means those unelected entities which hold power through changes of government. Victoria Nuland is an example. She worked for six presidents and ten secretaries of state over 30+ years, always promoting the same war agenda. She has worked in concert with her husband Robert Kagan, who has worked as an adviser to several governments and think tanks. These people and organisations are all part of the deep state, aka security state, aka military industrial complex, as forewarned by President Eisenhower on his departure from office.
  - gunian 2y ago
    that sounds so cool better that than be starved out and slowly die like me while watching someone else use your SSN so it's like lobbyists? or does rit have to be a specific industry
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    If we take this definition, which is a lot less conspiratorial than the association I've had with the term, it refers to influential longstanding politicians that kept a low profile and out of the media for the most part.
zmgsabst 2y ago
You’re making a straw man of their argument. They understand what the bureaucrats purported to do, but don’t believe that government bureaucrats can manage a complex system and that better outcomes are obtained by allowing individuals to optimize in a complex system than attempt to centrally manage complexity. I’d go so far as to say you have it exactly backwards: It’s people who advocate for government bureaucratic management that don’t respect complexity by hanging onto the belief a complex system (eg, an economy) can be managed by a handful of credentialed experts.
- cjfd 2y ago
  This is a very extreme stance. It also is a false dichtomy. A government bureaucracy (a needlessly pejorative term, btw....) can do things and individuals also can do things. One does not exclude the other. It gets interesting when asking what things are best done by government and what things by individuals. The non-respecting of complexity is happening when one thinks that it is one or the other. And the government is involved in any contract anyway because if one side does not do what it obligates, the judicial system can be used to enforce it.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    > This is a very extreme stance It doesn't seem extreme at all. If you've ever worked on a technical project and been given a deadline by someone not in the project who also isn't technical, you'll know the problem with central planning. > The non-respecting of complexity is happening when one thinks that it is one or the other This isn't to do with complexity, except that generally the government (or any centrally managed thing) is worse at managing complexity than the government. The government managing something isn't because it's too complex for the private sector. It's because the private sector would have adverse incentives with society-level bad outcomes if it attempted it. E.g. private prisons without sufficient enforced regulation.
dmpk2k 2y ago
There is a balance though, because large organisations tend to ossify, yet the environment continues to change.

1GZ0 2y ago

I feel like "Complexity" is the wrong word here. Although I agree with the notion that deep knowledge of complex systems has decreased over the years, I'd argue that the problem isn't the lack of interest in gaining deeper knowledge that's the problem, nor a perceived lack of respect for expertise. I'd argue its more to do with the nature of how large codebases morph over time as they're retrofitted to do more usercases. Its a lot easy in the short term to just hack in the functionality you need into an existing codebase, instead of rewriting the entire thing from scratch every time. This comes at the cost of maintainability and leads to a lot of headaches in the long term, as systems that where never designed to work together clash in unexpected ways. I don't begrudge anyone for not wanted to dive into codebases like that.

diggan 2y ago
> I feel like "Complexity" is the wrong word here. [...] I'd argue its more to do with the nature of how large codebases morph over time as they're retrofitted to do more usercases. Its a lot easy in the short term to just hack in the functionality you need into an existing codebase, instead of rewriting the entire thing from scratch every time. This comes at the cost of maintainability and leads to a lot of headaches in the long term, as systems that where never designed to work together clash in unexpected ways. Rich Hickey separates complexity into two parts[0], accidental and intentional (IIRC). Intentional complexity is complexity that stems from the domain of your problem, there isn't much you can do to manage it, DNA splicing will be complex no matter what you do, for example. The other part is accidental complexity, which is complexity you could deal with, but for whatever reason choose not to right now, as you touch on in your comment. This eventually snowballs into a huge spaghetti monster as you pile hacks on top of hacks. There is a (famous at this point) talk from Hickey where he dives much deeper into how he sees complexity, which happens to be a really good pitch for Clojure, but I first saw it before I knew Clojure, and the perspective applies to software in general, so no Clojure knowledge needed. [0] - "Simple Made Easy" - Rich Hickey (2011) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4

FrankWilhoit 2y ago

It is not "complexity good" versus "complexity bad". It is all about legibility, and legibility emerges from how complexity is managed.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

BwackNinja 2y ago

Complexity has always been less respected the more it is separated from the experiences of the average person; or more personally, your own experiences. Unfortunately, that's the very nature of complexity itself. Dependencies increase instead of decrease in the hopes of scaling, saving time and money, or even providing a slightly better product. As positive as those efforts sound, they also make the failure cases worse. The only people to respect with regards to complexity are those dealing with inherent complexity -- especially when they're building more digestible abstractions, and those working to reduce complexity due to having a substantial understand of it. It can be rather difficult to distinguish between inherent complexity and incidental complexity though.

Dalewyn 2y ago

>We are constantly asking our brains to grasp at complex topics and distill down at least our own perception of them to something manageable. Considering "DON'T TREAD ON ME"[1] is a meme that goes back all the way to 1776, the human desire to simplify what is needlessly complicated is nothing new and certainly nothing unexpected even today. This is especially so for Joe Average who more than likely is simply way too busy already with more pressing affairs to daily life. >Now, when many may challenge that notion of consistent progress of the world toward a brighter future, letting somebody else do it just doesn’t seem so right. This too is "older than history"[2]. A common (misattributed?) quote from Mark Twain goes that "If you don't read the newspapers, you are uninformed. If you do read them, you are misinformed."[3] It has always been preferable to have a healthy appetite for critical thought and to be skeptical of everything. Critical thought is how you form your own opinions, your own beliefs, your own ideals and goals in life, your own identity. And indeed, the discipline of science is predicated on putting forth hypotheses and testing them; that is questioning how the world works and whether our current understanding stands up to questioning. What was ridiculous was the deference to higher authority without regard. Noone has the time nor capacity to question and understand everything, especially Joe Average, but to then fundamentally give up your own freedom of thought and defer it to "some group of people who would make it their life careers and ... trust them" is what was and is ridiculous. The widely derided NPC meme starts becoming less of a meme if you trust someone to tell you how to think. Around these parts we call that programming: Telling computers how to think and what to do. >we now live in a time ... that understanding the full complexity of every topic that might cross your path is not only possible, but somehow, expected. Personally as a millenial (age mid-30s), I grew up on a healthy course of being taught to think for myself. Essentially, that is a natural conclusion to being taught that we should strive to truly understand the world around us. >Still, clear answers don’t seem ahead of us The answer is actually simple: Use experts (not "experts" like some pundit on television or a political office holder, actual real experts out in the field who know their stuff and speak objectively) as a potential guide (not an authority!) towards striving to better understand the world around you. We quite literally have a limited capacity to care[4], we must pick and choose what we concern ourselves with even as we strive to understand. Logically then, we should first strive to understand the world around us because that's what is immediately relevant to our daily lives. Progressivism today cares so much about things that are faraway and irrelevant to your daily life, and because you have a limited capacity to care that leaves you unable to care for the people and things in your life. That is simply stupid. Understand the people around you, not some faceless entity on the other side of your continent/island or even the planet you hear on social media. Understand the society around you, not some construct you will probably never even travel to. Understand the world around you, your life, and you might realize that life and the world are actually pretty nice. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Tread_on_Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Tread_on_Me [2]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OlderThanTheyThink https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OlderThanTheyThi... [3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/QuotesPorn/comments/exkeku/if_you_dont_read_the_newspapers_you_are/ https://old.reddit.com/r/QuotesPorn/comments/exkeku/if_you_d... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

openrisk 2y ago

The thing is, historically we never really had much respect for complexity. > We talk about complex subjects all the time. Medicine, politics, economics, sociology, morality and more For our entire history we have being talking about complex subjects we barely understood and, like proud primates, we were always very vocal and cocksure about our view points. We experienced two cultural revolutions, first in the world of ancient Greece, subsequently in the modern era of scientific enlightenment. One can think of the emergent scientific method as effectively learning to respect complexity. Being humble about assertions that cannot be validated again and again, in different conditions, by different parties etc. The tangible result of this new trait (respecting complexity) was pretty amazing. But only for a precious few domains. Our default mode, being 100% sure about things we have little clue about (who needs hallucinating AI when you've got humans), continues to be the prevalent one. Whats worse, we now have what has been called "the pretence of knowledge" [1]. We know that real knowledge is powerful, so why not pretend we have it when we actually don't? This leads to a random mix of (typically self-serving) opinions coupled to the superficial use of scientific tools. A pathology most visible precisely in the above list of really complex topics. The risk is that as the challenges of our own complex societies mount, we will undo also what we have achieved, and effectively go back to become stochastic parrots, unhinged from complex reality. [1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hayek/lecture/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hay...

MichaelZuo 2y ago
In other words, this suggests nearly all the population are posers/pretenders some of the time…?
- roenxi 2y ago
  Not really, that would imply they are pretending. There aren't enough people with a genuine respect for truth for that to be a factor. It is more that any signal of knowledge will be copied mercilessly if it affords any respect. If people with bookshelves get more respect, then everyone will have a bookshelf and nonetheless be confused if they meet someone who reads a lot of books. The default assumption is that a person has no idea what they are talking about because the base rate success of that stance is rather high.

nonrandomstring 2y ago

A trillion dollar marketing industry condemns enquiry and threatens mild inconvenience as the terrible fate awaiting anyone who errs from the path of simplicity. The word "just" has a lot to answer for. "Just do it". "It just works". Complexity is an acquired taste. It is somewhat rebellious to celebrate and indulge in it.

somethingsome 2y ago

Complexity is important when a subject at is core is complex, I'm mostly against complexity for the sake of complexity. Too many subjects are getting complex for the sake of it, or due to organic development. There is an even greater beauty than complexity when very complex subjects can be reduced to simpler ones without losing their power, it requires a greater understanding of complexity than what is usually seen. As an illustrative example : QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Feynman

EncomLab 2y ago

Folding Ideas is one of the best channels on YouTube- glad to see it brought up here!

amelius 2y ago

In academia, people had respect for complexity. In industry, nobody seems to use big-O notation.

bob1029 2y ago
N is usually small in practice. Analyzing how expensive it is to do something often costs more than just doing the thing.
- Matthyze 2y ago
  I'm sure there's a sampling bias here. Many intractable methods are never adopted by the developer community exactly because they're intractable, which means such methods won't be encountered often. Like an ant line avoiding obstacles. Only pioneers/people developing new methods encounter them.
alecco 2y ago
> In industry, nobody seems to use big-O notation. Ironically, it's because big-O notation is too theoretical and doesn't respect real-world complexity. Big-O is used to see when the operations are of sizes out of normal use and big-O doesn't represent hardware complexity (like latency differences, size limitations, or caching).
donatj 2y ago
A gentleman knows is someone who how to use big-O notation and doesn't. The only times I have used big-O in my career has been job interviews. It is my belief that it's mostly used to weed out people who didn't take computer science classes, and make them feel bad regardless of their real world skills. It's the same thing with database normalization. It has come up twice in my twenty year career. Once in an interview, and once during an acquisition when someone from the purchasing company was I believe trying to "Gotcha!" me. 3NF just doesn't come up in normal day to day work.

vbezhenar 2y ago

I do not respect complexity. 99% of complexity is not necessary. I respect simplicity. Complexity appears naturally, there's nothing respectable about it, it's just the way world evolves. Simplicity takes lots of effort to achieve and even more effort to maintain. Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

passwordoops 2y ago
So you don't respect semicon, airplanes, electricity transmission and distribution, running water... What do you respect then?
Matthyze 2y ago
Did you read the article? The author's and your points are entirely tangential.
GuB-42 2y ago
Complexity may be your enemy, but you should respect your enemy, or it will defeat you. Disrespecting complexity usually goes "that complex thing is a mess, let's make something simple instead", which usually results in the "simple" thing being useless, and often not that simple. Respect complexity, especially if your goal is to remove it.
Dalewyn 2y ago
Rather than accuse you, I'll just refute you thusly: In order to achieve perfection, you must understand what should be removed. To understand what should be removed, you must respect the complexity. Respect is not acceptance, even though it's very easy to confuse the two.

metalman 2y ago

There is a part in the Life of Brian, where Brian "helps"/intervenes in a complex assembly/manufacturing operation, which results,instantly, in chaos and destruction. The scripting and effort to film that short piece must have required a true understanding of complexity, and what happens when it isn't recognised and respected. Unfortunately, complexity, and the respect for profesionalism, is weaponised, to produce, mountains(litteral) of junk, that then has to be payed for once, and then again when it proves to be junk, and then a third time to get rid of, and fourth and fifth, pehaps to get strait.

ned99 2y ago

An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity - Terry Davis

revskill 2y ago

It is about the number of connections in a graph.

DaveMcMartin 2y ago

In academia, respect for complexity still exists, but industries prioritize simplicity to enable mass production, reduce costs, and make things easier for people to understand, remember, and use. That’s why logos are becoming flat, with simple shapes and colors, buildings are often bland rectangular boxes, and apps have fewer texts and buttons on each screen. As with almost everything, we need to find a balance between simplicity and complexity.

Gigachad 2y ago
I feel like the reason for the change in design trends was that for most of human history, ornate details and complexity required immense labour and signified wealth. Then with modern technology, we could print or weave any pattern you want on fabric effortlessly. Instead of a stone mason chiseling away all day, you can pour plaster in a mould and have all that same detail. Now that detail is cheap, simplicity is on trend.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  You're right, although once something isn't impressive to do it converts to a fashion-related trend. Fashion doesn't often have a practical benefit, so a lot of it is just "I want my stuff to look different to my parents' stuff, and that makes fashion cycles, where people's fashionable floral wallpaper now isn't too different from what their grandparents had.

Painsawman123 2y ago

>That’s not been entirely without good reason, many things were promised then that have failed to materialize. From flying cars to world peace i mean, Flying cars has been a reality for quite some time now, they just go by another name, "helicopters".

robertlagrant 2y ago
I don't think we were promised those things.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

xnx 2y ago

Seems like this might be the same as the current popular disdain for experts and being educated.

perrygeo 2y ago

The rise of complexity, and its collapse, defines every civilization for which we have historical records. Given that our society seem hell-bent on repeating the pattern, I question whether we ever had respect for it. It seems that we have nothing but arrogance to proclaim "this time we'll get it right" as we layer on the next layer of complexity. [1] Joseph Tainter "The Collapse of Complex Societies"

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

vdjskshi 2y ago

We're recreating a demon haunted world that will foster cargo cults. The algorithms we interact with are inscrutible, so we make up rules of thumb and assign agency where there is none. E.g. In 5 years there won't be a way to truly know how to minimize your personally-customized prices at the grocery store, but there will be tons of cargo cult opinions (put your phone in airplane mode, walk through iles 3 times before you pick up an item, pick up a generic version before the name brand, ...). Algorithms and AI are the new divine agents to appease with ritual.