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Oh thank you for sharing! I had tried describing this earlier in my career and had call it "The complexity shell game" as in attempts to hide complexity only se
by salomon812 2mo ago
Oh thank you for sharing! I had tried describing this earlier in my career and had call it "The complexity shell game" as in attempts to hide complexity only serve to move it around and to trick yourself it's gone. I would much rather use an existing standardized term, so I'm switching to Waterbed Theory, thank you!
- sigmoid10 2mo agoI call it the conservation of effort. If you are able to save mental energy in one place, it necessarily has been spent in another.
- andrewflnr 2mo agoThat's not entirely true though. There are sometimes true wins in things like finding better perspectives, e.g. models that are both simpler and more accurate, good abstractions that separate concerns cleanly, stuff like that.
- sigmoid10 2mo agoYou still have to find these things though. Even if you didn't do it, someone, somewhere did spend all that mental energy. There are no shortcuts to saving effort in a closed environment. Same way you can't reduce total energy in a closed system. In fact these two are closely related.
- andrewflnr 2mo agoThis seems like it requires such narrow definitions of things like "closed environment" that it loses applicability to the real world. It's a heuristic worth considering, but not a universal principle.
- sigmoid10 2mo agoIt's not that hard though. Until we integrate extraterrestrial code into our package managers, you can call earth our closed environment. And if your company has strict offline and library requirements, you could even define it for your place of work.
- sscaryterry 2mo agoIts amazing how humans come up with the same things independently.