Simplicity and simplism
António Costa Amaral
Investment Executive & Advisor | Capital Projects ? Transformation ? Innovation ? Policy ? Engagement | MBA PgMP PMP PMI-ACP
#Einstein famously said "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler". This is a famous quote which encapsulates a lot of #wisdom.
Except that Einstein never said it.
That quote, so prevalent in pop culture, seems to be an abbreviated version of “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”
Einstein was a victim of an quote #oversimplifying his thoughts on oversimplifying. Oversimplifying is, for short, #simplism.
Why do we simplify, and end up oversimplifying?
We need to make sense of life, and we need manageable mental frameworks to find our bearings among the complexity of reality. And thus we resort to models of reality, which should be compact - "simple".
People used to think that the Sun and planets revolved around the Earth, because, you know, that's what you observe up in the sky, it was a simple explanation. However it was simplistic. The mathematics that followed were crazy.
Just advancing the idea that the sun was the "real" center of our observable universe made everything so much simpler. Just a change in perspective did not alter reality, however it allowed us to have #clarity, a better grasp on reality, and thats the real power of #insight.
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A good mental model has descritive power ("what"), explanatory power ("why"), and predictive power ("thus then"). This sort of #knowledge can make life substantially easier.
In science, everything being equal, ceteris paribus, models may have a long shelf-life. Reality does not change, science evolves at its pace. Until #experience proves otherwise, you can safely act on that theory.
In life and in business, new information is constantly produced. Reality changes. You change, other people change, circumstances change. Simple insightful systems become superficial, stale, simplistic.
And, to put it simply, acting on outmoded mental models will not yield good results. Thus you have to put in the work to challenge your ideias - yourself.
There is comfort in simplicity, there is failure in simplism.
Einstein also never said "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"
Consider that in life, and in business, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting the same results.
As I understand it, science is based on natural laws (as opposed to divine intervention, aka miracles), so given identical boundary conditions (which are of course an idealization in physics and basically impossible in social science), identical actions ought to yield identical results. Or what do you mean, António Costa Amaral? Ps. Of course, in a theory of practice and of learning, one is expected to advance every time a little, even if the curve flattens at some moment (aka "marginal utility"). Pps. As concerns the Einstein quote, it reminds me of Occam's razor. Ppps. As concerns the comparison between the geocentric (Ptolemy) and the heliocentric (Copernicus) model, what is also interesting, apart from the crazy maths (called deferent & epicycle), is the fact that actually, the planets and the sun revolve around each other's point of balance, only that that point happens to be much closer to the sun than to any planet. When I explained this to Fabrizio Ferraro it was interesting to see his reaction [not talking about s'''(t)=v''(t)=a'(t) here though]