I tend to believe in the KISS principle, but as you note, some things just are not simple to fix. Especially when the “simple” fixes have exacerbated the problems over the past 40 years.

…you just know you’re now going to be accused of comparing Tea BagPartiers to “challenged” rats, don’t you?

I can’t find the study at hand, but some years ago a study published in Science done on planeria. A little flat worm that is pretty low on the scale of neurons on board. It was a challenge study similar to your rat maze. They got bored within hours and simply refused to perform until very very hungry. Don’t you love it? All we need to know is right here. We just need to learn how to see it.

The rest of us will suffer the fate of the American Bison.

Yup, but now it’s the Rich, driving by in their Cadillacs & SUVs, shooting us [figuratively, at least] for sport.

Complexity is important. So is simplicity. One needs to be able to handle both ways of thinking about things. Complexity is often used as a form of camouflage.

Maybe it’s time to stop whipping the tea party and look at our own (mis)leaders. Blaming the Right Wing is nothing more than a cheap trick at this point, a distraction from the real issue, which is the Left’s lack of credibility.

So, keeping us hungry makes us prefer the simple. Well, I always wondered how it was that the teabaggers couldn’t see how they were being manipulated by the super-wealthy. Now I’m beginning to get it.

So there’s hunger, and then there’s mind-hunger or better put, a need for exercising the mind. Diversion, play, entertainment. What an interesting experiment. I wonder if the rats think of the complicated maze as the playground, and the simple route as ‘the way to the school cafeteria.’

I think you are right. Curiosity and pleasure in the novel seems to exist in other phyla. I didn’t describe it well but that was the interpretation of the planeria study. Once mastered, they just got bored with the set up.

I remember one planeria study.
A worm was placed on a wire and then electricity was run through the wire.
After awhile, the worm made an arch with its body to avoid the shock.
The worm that learned to make the arch was then killed, ground up and fed to worms that hadn’t been experimented on.
The worms who ate the experimented-on worms were then placed on the wire. As soon as current was started in the wire, they formed the arch, seemingly learning the maneuver from eating the ground up worms.
How does this relate to our topic?
I have no idea.

Boyohboyohboyohboy… That KISS principle proves its worth over time.

Imka’s point @5 that “Complexity is often used as a form of camouflage.
” sure strikes a deep chord with me.

Can you say ‘Magnetar’? Or ‘CDO’s'?

Excellent post, the rat maze example particularly.

Santa Fe Institute is offering early-bird discounts on a program led by Portland State’s Melanie Mitchell discussing and exploring Complexity (her book on the subject is an outstanding read!).

There’s clearly something in the air. As evidence I offer Krugman’s invocation of Wolfgang Pauli’s acid wit as captured in Pauli’s response a simplistic paper’s author saying, “It’s not only not right, it’s not even wrong”. Pauli’s quip brilliantly weds his own gift for rendering complexity in terms both clear and concise.

Hey thanks for that!
I couldn’t recall the details of the planeria study that I’d been intrigued by in the late 90s, but that was it!

I can’t recall the details of the experimental design, but when I encountered it, it was used as kind of a ‘test’ or ‘thought framework’ to assess the validity of all the elements of that experimental design (i.e., were the subjects roughly equivilent, were the conditions the same… etc).

I don’t like to think of myself as such a rat in a maze, but fundamentally there are some parallels, I suppose ;-))

However, I am more and more convinced that if ‘the uber rich’ think that they can secure wealth and security in their own little neofeudalist safe holdings, they’re completely bonkers. That may have worked in the 1400s, but the world had more resources, less pollution, and more space then. Today, thinking like that leads to Erik Prince fueled fantasties that produce looting and dictators. That’s a short-term strategy, based on a Mafia-like psychology.

Yep. They manufacture complexity for things that should be simple and easily understood while at the same time they manufacture simplicity on topics that are inherently complex.

It really is Bizarro World

Henri Poincaré discovered that the very simple reductionist equations of classical mechanics led to extreme complexity in around 1895. Together with the discoveries of Gregor Cantor and Lobachevskii, and later Birkoff, Klein, Brouwer, and Julia and others, people were well aware that complexity existed before it emerged in mathematics in the 1950s and 1960 and 1970s as Chaos Theory and Catastrophe Theory and then as Complexity Theory.

Even in the sciences, especially in engineering, and in the social sciences and economics, there has been a great reluctance to invent fast enough to keep pace with the growing complexity of the world. And in foreign policy, the number of countries has doubled since the late 1930s, and the population has tripled since World War II. But the notion that things are well served by theories constructed in the 18th, or 19th century, or economics created in the 1930s is still prevalent, and not just among the GOP.

In chaotic systems, the generic case for more than two degrees of freedom is that there is no versal deformation: There is no path of change along which every change takes a predictable form.

I am aware of that study. It is not the one I was referring to. I think it and the rat study are both explorations into the complexity of motivation.

I apologize for bringing it up without more good documentation. As it is it is mostly just rainy Sunday afternoon musing.

I think of it as a kind of curiosity. Even rats know that the better they understand their environments, the better chance they have of survival.

Look at it this way. Suppose the experimenter shuts off the easy passage after a while. The rat that learned the complex maze will eat. The others won’t.

Even in the sciences, especially in engineering, and in the social sciences and economics, there has been a great reluctance to invent fast enough to keep pace with the growing complexity of the world.

One reason for that is that thinking is hard, and teaching yourself to think away from the formal structures you learned in school is especially hard, because following the trail of learning to the point of departure for further thought was a lot of work, creating a real psychic investment.

The first step is admitting that those structures aren’t working.

One reason for that is that thinking is hard, and teaching yourself to think away from the formal structures you learned in school is especially hard, because following the trail of learning to the point of departure for further thought was a lot of work, creating a real psychic investment.

Agree.

Rote learning does have a metabolic expense, but creative learning — particularly any time that you have to make decisions (which requires activating multiple neural networks, then selecting between them) is metabolically taxing.

So people who are overly tired, ill, incrediby stressed out, are going to have a tougher time mastering complexity — UNLESS they find it playful, I suspect. And even then… any kind of learning does require at least minimal metabolic expense, if only because that’s required for the energy to make neurochemical changes in the brain’s synapses.

It’s harder for a couch potato culture to master complexity, and then innovate; they don’t have the metabolic resources.

Oftentimes, it’s precisely the fact that the world is so complex that is the best reason for keeping solutions simple. HCR is an example.

IMHO, where many centrist — and some left-leaning — wonks go wrong is in thinking that the complexity of the solution must match the complexity of the problem. Not so. In many cases, the more complex the problem, the simpler the solution has to be to prove politically viable. The Rs get this — big time.

The reason that the Rs can today put forward overly simple simple solutions that have failed in the past is that our current leadership is loathe to point out the fallacies, bad intentions, and consequences of R policies. Rather, the perpetrators are seen as folks with “good” ideas.

Many problems have very simple solutions. Swap transactions suck money out the real economy and cause a number of systemic problems. We could solve that problem by declaring them to be gambling contracts and unenforceable in US courts. That would be the end of them.

Most of the simple solutions are some variant of that: the whole thing was a bad idea, so how can we end it. I don’t see anything like that coming to pass.

There are several ideas that would help fix health care, some of them quite simple to state, like single-payer. Other parts are infinitely complicated, like the availability of very expensive treatments.

Agree.

Book Salon up with Anya Schiffrin’s Bad News: How America’s Business Press Missed the Story of the Century hosted by Cynthia Kouril

LOL, I said the same thing the other day to a friend of mine. The rich drive around in their silver Mercedes as if they’re driving thru Lion Country safari and the rest of us are the wild animals.

Reply to TalkingStick @ 15

My reply was mostly for Sunday afternoon humor

I think at least some of it was that the expedient creativity for industry was problem solving, and problem solving was also the easier to define a curriculum and a sure teaching method for, even though no one should make the mistake of thinking that it isn’t true creativity or novel thinking.

But modeling, as John Casti once said, is always the ‘dark art’, the thing that nobody really knows how to teach, the thing that you can’t be certain to get out of school on time on. You can’t fit it into a comfortable business model in industry, you can’t make plans with it, you’d end up tearing up your company and revamping it all the time.

But dealing with real complexity requires you to re-model all the time and to re-dream the future all the time. And to continue having upheaval periods when you’re inventing quantum mechanics and the transistor, instead of just running out the applications and building Facebook or iPad.

So we give up and use really simpleminded approximations and forget that if you reduce all your forecasting to predicting the weather, you’re at the mercy of the wind.