Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
There is no one recent event that inspires this observation, it’s just something I’ve noticed for awhile.
When you have people agreeing about the problem that has to be solved but disagreeing about what to do about it…I have seen many, many incidents in which the disagreement meanders almost perfectly along the separation between a simple solution and a complicated one. And so we have two intellectually inimical forces, berating each other not quite so much about which solution is likely to work and which solution is likely to fail, as about the nature of the problem they are trying to solve. That’s my first observation.
Examples abound. Violent crime, just for starters; there are those who say where it happens to excess, it is a natural consequence of failing a basic governmental function, which is to separate those who refuse to live by the social contract, from those who could be hurt by them. Lock up the bad guys where they can’t do their bad stuff, and they’ll stop doing it. Others say the root causes are far more complex, having to do with economic issues like widespread poverty, an ever-expanding gap between the rich and the poor, vanishing middle class, historical segregation and discrimination, et al. Simple versus complicated. Not sure there’s much value in fleshing out such a list, but other examples would include: How do you revive an economy, what do we do about global warming, what do we do about the skyrocketing Autism diagnoses in children right now, should we drill-baby-drill…in all these issues we seem to be arguing around the simple-versus-complicated template.
Second observation: It is pretty much a constant that the two sides will slip into a comfortable mode in which each one presumes to carry the mantle of being reasonable, rational, in many cases scientific, and accuses the other of being anti-logical. This one is unsurprising, it is to be expected when people start to argue about things that matter to them.
Third observation, and this is something not often explored, perhaps worth pointing out: The people who argue toward the complicated solution, wherever the disagreement endures for any length of time, even as they pretend to be conducting themselves according to the scientific method, sustain a hostile relationship against the concept of experimentation. This is almost by definition — if you were trying to resolve a disagreement about the proper solution being simple, versus complicated, and set about finding the answer by means of experimentation, the rational way to do it would be to try the simple solution first, right? It seems unavoidable. Well, if you happen to be on the side that insists the solution is a complicated one, think about where this puts you: The other side’s solution is going to be tried out, and horror of horrors it might work! Then what? Well…your options would be narrowed down considerably. You could hope nobody saw what just happened. If the experiment was conducted successfully on just a sample of something larger, which represents the real problem, you could conjure up a danger involved in expanding the scope and pronounce that the experimentation must stop here because it’s just not worth the risk. Other than those, there isn’t much. You can admit defeat, of course, but that’s it.
Notice that the advocates of the simple solution do not have to worry about the experiment reaching an unfriendly conclusion. They get to say, legitimately, that if things don’t work out then there needs to be some minor refinement to what was tried, and then try it again. Like, for example, extinguishing a grease fire with a Class A extinguisher; it’ll fail, but the experiment’s more-or-less on the right track, there’s a detail that needs to be modified. My point is, to the advocates of the more complicated solution, there is no good outcome — even if the experiment “proves” the simple solution doesn’t work, they don’t get to say “Alright we tried it your way, so the answer must be what we have in mind.” Because that’s too complicated, and the layman can see it’s unwarranted. The layman can see it’s only logical to try out the simple solutions first, and if they repeatedly fail, complicate them by increments until you find something that works. It just makes sense. It’s evolution in action.
So the advocates of the more complex solution, have to end up being anti-experimentation. Ultimately, they all end up in the same mode, sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling “I can’t hear you la la la.”
We see this a lot when people, acting as individuals, are free to use their personal discretion and personal resources to try out whatever solution they wish, without being accountable to some larger group. Parenting comes to mind as the best example of this. Many parents find themselves experiencing common problems with parenting, but then you look around and you see there are other parents that do not have these problems. Is that because the parents who do not have the problems, implemented very complex solutions and/or prevention countermeasures? Generally, no; the most effective methods are the simplest ones. This kid’s got a potty-mouth, that one doesn’t, the one that doesn’t lives in a household that doesn’t have cable. Like that.
How do the advocates of the more complicated solution — who, by & large have enjoyed far less success dealing with the problem — respond to this. You might expect they’d say “Huh, I guess I have something to learn here, I shall go home and try out the other guy’s solution.” That would make a lot of sense…but, of course, that won’t happen. And here are my fourth and fifth observations: More theory, this time dealing with separation of the two situations that would make the defined simple solution (conveniently) unsuitable for the environment still laboring under the problem; and, some insults directed toward the practitioner of the simpler solution, along with anyone else who might think it would work. My kid’s as good as your kid but he’s got ADD, and if your kid had the same disability you’d find your overly-simple solution doesn’t work — and, for daring to think it would, you are a slope-foreheaded troglodyte. I am clearly smarter than you are even though my kid’s growing up to be a profane jackass and yours is not…because I see things in a more sophisticated, nuanced way, and you limit yourself to two-dimensional, comic-book answers.
Somehow, it’s eliminated as a possibility that the other fellow might have left his methods simple, because he complicated them only to such an extent that he was able to make things work, and then sensibly stopped complicating them.
That’s your disciplined, scientific thinking at work, supposedly. Obviously it isn’t. But whenever this occurs, and I see it occuring quite often, unfortunately it has become an exceptionally rare happenstance that it gets called out.
As I see each year come and go, I am gradually being swayed toward the notion that advocates of overly complex solutions, that exist in theory, can be seen safely as advocates against any solution being effectively applied. Either they want the problem to continue, or the repercussions of the problem’s continuance are not as much of a concern to them as the preservation of their ego. They want to be viewed as having the “right” solution even though nothing is being solved. They don’t really own the problem, only the solution to it. Which has not been seen to be effective quite yet because…well…at that point, to continue the thought, you have to evaluate each situation on a case-by-case basis.
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Somehow, it’s eliminated as a possibility that the other fellow might have left his methods simple, because he complicated them only to such an extent that he was able to make things work, and then sensibly stopped complicating them.
If I successfully instill the K.I.S.S. principle into the heads of my children, I will consider myself a good parent. You might not be surprised to see how many adults not only fail to understand that principle, but actively deny that it might be true.
- Physics Geek | 02/15/2012 @ 10:55The advocates of the complex solution always think of themselves as what Tom Sowell calls “intellectuals” — people whose work begins — and ends — with ideas.
Verbal dexterity often correlates with intelligence. Somewhere down the line, though, verbally dextrous liberals convinced the educational establishment, at least, that verbal dexterity IS intelligence. We can see the results in every blog comments section, where dudes dumber than a box of hammers throw around words like “disambiguation” in an effort to sound smart.
As I said, the whole trend started in the ed biz, and the pathology is most advanced there. I’m quite serious when I say you can get 80% of a humanities PhD just by reading the Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. There are entire fields — pretty much anything that ends in “Studies”– that consist of nothing but cutesy little word games; tenure boils down to being More Radical than Thou.
I honestly sometimes think that dismantling the Department of Education would get us more than halfway to solving all of America’s problems.
- Severian | 02/15/2012 @ 11:41Yeah…I read somewhere there’s this fascination with the breadth of an idea, as opposed to its depth, which results in some people being inordinately fascinated with the number of different ways an idea can be expressed, never mind whether or not it’s ever validated. This results in, among other things, an exaggerated importance placed on languages. Leftists think it’s a great bragging point if a school district has seventy languages in active use in the local high school. Noam Chomsky, it’s often forgotten, is a professor of linquistics.
Sonic Charmer was trying to figure out why women like Twilight; I joined him in helping to try to figure this out…and the peanut gallery came flying at us to chastise us for “overthinking”. Like there was some urgency in getting us to stop. As if we were smoking cigarettes around a gas pump. Overthinking…you know, maybe we were (it was a chick-porn movie, after all), but what of it? A couple of blokes on the Internet overthinking something, where’s the crisis? So we have all these people running around who fancy themselves to be over-thinking-constables, deputized to stop anyone from thinking too deeply about something…back in High School I remember these students bragging openly about how they were learning Spanish and would have guaranteed employment forever, in addition to being part of a knowledgeable elite…I have the suspicion these are the same people. They place importance on reaching a conclusion in a variety of ways, and not much importance on making sure it’s the right one.
- mkfreeberg | 02/15/2012 @ 11:51That’s hilarious about the Twilight thing, seeing as how there’s an entire academic discipline (“American Studies”) that’s nothing but over-thinking pop culture. For instance, the first dissertation that comes up on the American Studies Association’s own website is titled:
“You’ve Got to Have Tangibles to Sell Intangibles”: Ideologies of the Modern American Stadium, 1948-1982.
Some kid got a P-h-freakin’-D with that. In the year of our Lord 2011.
That being the case, though, is it any surprise that the wannabe-intelligentsia think just mouthing polysyllables is enough to not only sound smart, but actually be smart? What possible contribution could this make to our stock of knowledge? How could you ever possibly test it? And the questions just keep on coming. Why stop in 1982? Is there some other hirsute, unwashed grad student out there beavering away on the ideologies of American stadiums, 1983-present? Hell, what does “the ideology of the stadium” even mean?!
It’s all nonsense on stilts. But since professors are all so very, very, very intelligent (just ask one!), spewing jargon-laden nonsense about the ideology of stadiums or the heteronormative dimensions of foosball tables must be what intelligent people do….. right?
And of course it’s all politicized, because nothing lends itself better to portentous pronouncements than radical politics. We both know what “the ideology of stadiums” means, actually — capitalism sucks, new stadiums always demolish desperately needed housing for poor minorities, pro sports is the new slavery, yadda yadda yadda. And so pretty soon your wannabe intellectual identifies exclusively with the Democratic party. Meanwhile, a body can go through four years of college, umpteen years of grad school, and retire gracefully as a professor emeritus without ever having had an idea tested out in the real world.
- Severian | 02/15/2012 @ 14:36Purely for purposes of balance, I’ll put one vote in for the occasional appropriateness of complex over simple solutions — treating the disease is often more complicated (in terms of time taken, actions performed, and factors evaluated and addressed) than merely treating particular symptoms, but it does tend to have an overall better effect.
Simple solutions also have a tendency to become stopgap ones, for that matter, or to miss forests for trees. In the initial example, the simple solution to crime (“Lock ’em up”) vs. the complex solution to crime (“Identify relevant social conditions and adjust as needed to minimize incentive to criminal behaviour”) aren’t actually solutions to the same problem; the first is what to do about criminals and the second is how to keep people from becoming criminals.
And there’s also the issue of different definitions of “success”. Very often the difference between a simple and a complex solution is not in how it addresses the original problem, but in how many consequences it tries to take into account other than the primary goal, usually based on which consequences are deemed acceptable and which aren’t (which in turn has a remarkable tendency to be based on how likely one thinks it that you personally might be affected by said consequences). Locking up anyone accused of a crime is a far simpler solution than a trial, and would get far more criminals off the streets than our current complex system, but it would do so at an unacceptable price.
And this, I think, is the root of the paralysis of modern complexity advocates: the more unintended consequences you try to take into account the more you realize anything you try may come back to bite you in the ass. Which is why it’s so difficult to do anything without trusting in Providence.
- Stephen J. | 02/15/2012 @ 14:50I don’t think anyone is arguing for the categorical superiority of simple solutions — the objective is to fix the problem, and the solution will necessarily be as complex as it takes to accomplish that.
The problem is that a great many of the complex “solutions” on offer aren’t really solutions at all — they’re Rube Goldberg machines designed to, if anything, prevent problems from being solved. Any yokel with a high school degree can come up with simple solutions; it takes a PhD in Protest Studies from Princeton to analyze all the variables, tease out all the nuances, etc. So if Danny Dumbass from Decatur comes up with something that works, what’s left for Professor Ponytail from Princeton to crow about?
The clearest proof I can think of is liberals’ tendency to automatically retreat to higher and fluffier levels of abstraction when confronted with plain horse sense. Take that New York Times article about “Crime Rates Fall, but Prisons Remain Full.” We should’ve been able to hear the smack from the left’s collective facepalm in Antarctica after that one…. but no — every liberal in existence started pounding their keyboards about nuance and complicating factors and more studies are needed &c. For liberals, it’s far, far more important to be smart than to be right, and so simple-but-possibly-effective solutions can’t even be allowed off the drawing board.
- Severian | 02/16/2012 @ 08:58Very well put, Sev.
“What are some good things about being bound & gagged?”
- mkfreeberg | 02/16/2012 @ 09:41