
Overthinking - aen
http://aentan.com/design/overthinking/
======
oskarth
The space pen affair is a well known urban myth, see for example
<http://io9.com/5838635/the-million-dollar-space-pen-hoax>

The second example is funny but it is a classic example of misdirection. It is
made out to be about mathematics but has got nothing to with it. How exactly
is that about overthinking something?

The third example is a ingenious solution by the author himself, a solution
that is the product of thinking hard about coming up with a simple solution -
hardly a case of whatever the opposite of overthinking is. If anything it is
the opposite - just slice it up into 12 bites and take a small piece each of
the last bit. If it's a mathematical question a mathematical approach seems
more than reasonable.

All these examples seem to me to be weak examples of overthinking.

Here is a much better example of overthinking in my opinion, The Centipede's
Dilemma:

 _A centipede was happy – quite!

Until a toad in fun

Said, "Pray, which leg moves after which?"

This raised her doubts to such a pitch,

She fell exhausted in the ditch

Not knowing how to run._

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipedes_dilemma>

~~~
thaumaturgy
The part about the string made me smile a bit, because I guess there aren't
too many climbers on Quora. As any salty old trad climber knows, it only takes
a couple of wraps around an object before the rope (or string in this case)
becomes fixed to the object.

So unless you're lucky, the process would actually look like: take string,
make space between thumb and index finger, wrap some number of ... oh, darn,
it didn't come out even at all ... rats, can't move my fingers ... OK, start
over, let's make the fingers a little farther apart ... wait, rats, didn't get
11 even wraps that time either ...

(I experimented with this before posting my comment, just in case.)

Or you could, y'know, take the string, measure the circumference, divide by
11. Or, you could throw away the string, take the diameter of pizza -- which
is written in black marker on a tin or cardboard round and displayed on the
wall at every pizza joint I've ever been to, I think -- and multiply by 3 and
divide by 11 and space your cuts about that far apart.

There's a lot of good stuff out there on the benefits of "thinking like a
child" -- learning to clear your mind of the preconceptions and opinions and
expectations that we tend to develop as we get older. I don't think this post
was a step in that direction, though.

~~~
anthonyb
or just loop the string over 1 finger 11 times?

~~~
aqme28
Since the string is of a fixed length, that only works if you finger's
diameter is 1/11 of the pizza's diameter.

~~~
sopooneo
He means hanging from the finger, not tightly wrapped.

------
muyuu
It's not overthinking, it's called context.

If you give an engineering problem to an engineer in a corporate environment,
he will try to do what he's been told to be a good job: good precision and low
cost, complexity not being a problem as far as the solution is achieved. If
he's given 1 hour, then using 59 minutes is just as valid as using 5. And
rightly so.

As for the numeric problem, same thing. You are not giving a measure of
"goodness" and you are not providing rules. I'd go ahead and fill in 2581 =
fuck_you , where fuck_you is a constant defined as 3.15. That's a point-wise
defined polynomial there. Voila, solved in 3 seconds. Just as valid as making
up something as arbitrary as counting loops in a given numeric representation.
Also, I'd bet the house I don't own that if I give that in a paper to a kid
with no instructions he wouldn't come up with that "solution" - ever.

In the (urban legend) problem about the pen and pencil in zero-gravity, there
is context. The objective is to take notes. It's a real world problem with a
fixed solution, so yeah, just using a pencil would be a much better solution
than engineering a special ballpen. An engineer can and should be expected to
solve that. Engineers are expected to solve real world problems and consider
real world situations and realistic expectations.

~~~
rduchnik
I think it's totally relevant, I have worked with guys that have fancy PHD's
from MIT that always over complicated the crap out of simple things. It's like
when you buy something expensive or make an investment, you feel the need to
defend and justify it to others.

It's the same thing here, you get a fancy degree and everything you do has to
be complex to justify getting that degree otherwise what separates you from a
guy with an average degree. It's probably more an ego thing, but I see this
all the time.

~~~
aGHz
I don't understand why you presume it's a need to defend and justify it to
others. Getting a PhD from MIT isn't exactly a walk in the park, I imagine the
person got it BECAUSE of a pleasure to tackle complicated problems in the
first place.

If I really enjoy dealing with complexity and you give me something really
simple to do, well I'm gonna go ahead and have some fun with it. It's not a
matter of justifying, it's just that simple stuff is boring to somebody who
enjoys complexity.

~~~
aGHz
To clarify, I'm not saying over-engineering is a good thing. I'm saying
there's a mismatch between the complexity of the problem and the
desires/personality of the person having to solve it. Give the simple problem
to people who valor elegance, minimalism, simplicity, and keep the MIT PhD for
rocket surgery and stuff.

~~~
afthonos
Rocket surgery is a field I dearly want to see created. :-D

------
thelastnode
Even in the movie 3 Idiots, at the end of the movie, the man with the pen
points out that there's a reason for the complexity: bits of graphite flying
around in zero gravity near instrument panels and people's eyes, etc.

Simplicity is great, but sometimes complexity is warranted. More importantly,
assuming other smart people ( _many_ other smart people) are wrong without
deep thought is not a good idea.

~~~
bandy
Not only graphite, but assuming a proper non-mechanical pencil, you'd end up
with wood shavings in addition to the graphite bits flying about — which you
could solve by adding a vacuum to the pencil sharpener, to capture the debris.

------
rmk2
>> Con­jur­ing com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tions may make you look smart
but to become truly cre­ative you need to be able to lib­er­ate your mind from
the the shell of knowl­edge, edu­ca­tion and adul­ti­fi­ca­tion you have
accu­mu­lated. Only then can you think like a child again.

This claims that creativity and education are diametral opposites. This
essentially replicates the myth of the natural artist who can only achieve
true creativity within nature and by forgetting culture. The basis for both
assumptions is a fundamental divide between culture and nature, whereas
culture is seen as hindering the creativity and freedom of the _homo
naturalis_.

While I'm sure you can always find _some_ cases where this distinction might
hold true, there are plenty of others that reveal the false dichotomy at work
here.

There is a difference between a solution perceived as complicated or simple,
but there is no objective measurement for a difference in _creativity_. The
combination and application of maths (in the example with the pizza cutter) is
as much a creative use of ideas as is the "manual" method with the string.

------
dxbydt
I hate to say this, but the article is complete bullcrap. Have you even seen
the movie he references ? The protagonist is supposed to be this "naturally
talented genius" who detests the bookish Indian academic education system, so
throughout the film he takes potshots at the stuff he's taught in school,
ultimately choosing to drop out without a degree until the Dean formally
requests him to take the finals, upon which he gets the highest grade in the
university. Its a completely one-sided portrayal, and while it is valid in the
sense that Indian education system is wholly bunk, it is unfair to draw any
deep profound lessons out of a shallow screenplay played for laughts. The
pencil thing as has been pointed out by the commentators below is an urban
legend.

The most talkedabout scene in the whole film involves a vaginal delivery using
a vacuum blower as a suction device, and a AA battery as an inverter as the OB
barks out instructions on a webcam. As a former electrical engineer I refuse
to even entertain the possibility of such a stunt. Yet everybody in the media
- the newspapers/TV/talkshows went gaga over this scene, suposedly a parable
for "necessity is the mother(pun intended) of invention".

There's 2 scenes where the conductivity of brine is demonstrated when a person
urinating on a live wire gets electrocuted, again played for laughs.

There's a scene where a student in his final year is unable to graduate
because his thesis involves getting a toy helicopter to fly. He's unable to
figure out the propulsion mechanics, so in disgust he throws the helicopter
into the trash. The hero, our natural genius sophomore, picks up this
helicopter, spends the time rigging up wires in the EE lab & finally gets it
to fly. He puts a camera on the copter & as it coasts high in the air, it
captures the video of the senior who has committed suicide by hanging in his
dorm! Now is that crass or what ? Commiting suicide for failing to figure out
some stupid propulsion mechanics! I remember thinking at the time that if this
same film had been made in English, the critics & audience in the US would
have torn it to shreds for such pandering & crass footage. But India being
what it is, this very scene was lauded for its authenticity!

Even setting aside all that, the wrapping a string around your palm 11 times
is simply trading off precision for some trial & error , not sme clever
solution. For the preschool numbers thing, he's making up the rules as he goes
along.

Frankly, the article should be titled "Not thinking".

~~~
revolutions
The movie is filled with impossibilities, true. But have you seen Bollywood
movies? Have you known the Indian audience they cater to? The impossibilities
are the reason the movie did well; no half educated person is going to
seriously attempt delivering a child with a vacuum over a webcam. At the same
time, these stupid feats brought people to the movie, and forced them to
realize how pathetically screwed up our education system is. Sure, we didn't
do anything to fix it from that one movie--but for at least a few months,
every time the movie was brought up, people started caring about changing the
way our kids were taught.

I'm not suggesting this movie was something that raised awareness about an
unknown issue, but it did succeed in bringing it to the forefront for quite a
while, as Aamir's movies have been known to do. If you've seen other Bollywood
movies, you know that 3 Idiots is a godsend when compared to the literally
thousands of song filled intellectually vacuous love stories that we've been
inundated with.

Furthermore, that suicide wasn't for the helicopter. It was after the dean
called his (sick?) father, and told him that his son was not graduating that
year. I do not remember the specific circumstances (I have terrible memory and
watched this movie a few months ago), but claiming that the suicide was due to
an engineering failure is ignoring many aspects of the student's life.

\---

As for the string solution--I don't really see why you need precision in
cutting a pizza in 11 slices for a random customer. It's an interesting
solution, one I hadn't thought of, and I'd say one that many others hadn't
thought of. The point was to deal with what a cook would have in his hands,
not a mathematically sound approach. While the latter might be clean, it would
be physically impossible to implement with a pizza cutter that might not be
sharp enough, or a pizza where the cheese and sauce still oozed over the
crust* (in which case you never could get equal slices).

* You can tell I haven't had lunch yet.

~~~
dxbydt
> But have you seen Bollywood movies? Have you known the Indian audience they
> cater to?

0\. By a twisted quirk of fate( ie. being an Indian by birth), I happen to be
addicted to Bollywood movies. I average 4 per month & have been doing so for
atleast 2 decades now.

1\. The guy is supposed to make a quadcopter fly in order to graduate. He is
unable to. The Dean says he'll flunk if he doesn't make it fly. The guy looks
at the wall in his dorm which says "loser" ( or was it "rebel" )in giant
letters. The hero makes the copter fly. There's a tiny camera on the copter.
The camera transmits aerial footage to a wintel laptop. As the copter soars,
the laptop shows the guy hanging from a ceiling fan in his dorm
.....impressively manipulative, yeah ? I think we call that camp out here. It
was so in-your-face, manufactured outrage...

2\. In reality, that quadcopter was built by Ashish Bhatt, a smart EE engineer
out of IIT Bombay. He sells those at his startup IdeaForge
(<http://www.ideaforge.co.in/web/products> )

3\. Suicides on Indian campuses is a legitimate issue. Back when I was a
student, there were 2 suicides in my campus, both because the student in
question flunked some engineering/math course. The number of student suicides
is disproportionately large ( <http://www.google.com/search?q=suicide+IIT> ).
There were quite a few seminars on suicide prevention after that film.

4\. Strictly speaking, it was a movie by-the-numbers...lets insert a suicide
here, lets talk about pencils in outer space there, kind of thing. otoh the
audience/critics were completely awed by it & made it the biggest film ever
out of Bollywood.

~~~
revolutions
> Strictly speaking, it was a movie by-the-numbers

I wasn't trying to say this movie has amazing merit; just that it served its
purpose in an industry and to an audience where it isn't very easy to do so.

------
xarien
I solved the second one in a couple minutes in my head with value
substitutions. Unless you were to do with with a pen and paper, it'd be pretty
difficult to pick up on the closed loops.

Generating the following list took less than 30 secs when I looked it over, so
obviously the example of it taking a long time to solve is a bit contrived.
What threw me off a bit at first was that the number 4 was not used at all. I
spent a little time trying to figure out why that was excluded before moving
on.

0 = 1 1 = 0 2 = 0 3 = 0 5 = 0 6 = 1 7 = 0 8 = 2 9 = 1

~~~
rpsw
That is how I did it. I actually don't understand what is meant by looking for
shapes or closed loops.

~~~
WiseWeasel
Notice how an 8 has two loops (circles), and a 0, 6 and 9 have one each? The
other numbers don't have closed loops, except sometimes 4.

------
eldude
I'm surprised by how defensive the comments are here. They seem out of place,
especially on "Hacker" News, an entity whose name by definition emphasizes
thinking outside of the box. Frankly the post seems spot on regarding
providing multiple examples (1 hypothetical and humorous, 1 general, and 1
specific) of how "engineering" minds' over thinking causes them to be
outperformed by "simpler" minds and more obvious solutions. Even his string
example could be kept obvious and simple by saying, "Measure the
circumference, divide by 11, mark on string at regular intervals, cut to
lines," and I'm fairly confident it would still be the best answer.

Any post-sophomoric software engineer will lament an over-designed system they
helped create, lauded for its superior design, only to have it become unwieldy
and unmanageable under its own monstrous complexity, and then refactored to a
far simpler and more intuitive solution. It's no coincidence KISS is taught in
every Engineering 101 class across the country.

I found the article to be light and refreshing, reminding me that as an
engineer, often I am my own worst enemy...

Or the very least, the enemy of that tragic racquetball launcher I built in
Freshman engineering that _literally_ crumpled under its own weight on demo
day. Lol.

------
ankurdhama
The numbers based question was hilarious!!, specially to know that pre-school
children can solve it in 5 mins. Try to show this question to a pre-school
child and let us know what happens.

Our brain is just a amazing pattern matching machine. As soon as it is
presented with a problem it starts to find patterns/relations in the problem
along with going through the knowledge base it has acquired till now and
trying different permutations and combinations to find the solution. In the
number question, as soon as you read it, the brain will try to find patterns
"using" the mathematical knowledge it has and it will keep on doing so until
it gets frustrated an says WTF there is no relation here but it may happen
that few days later you subconscious do find a pattern here based on "shapes"
and not "numbers" but that is very very unlikely because as soon as we see
numbers we think in numbers and not their shapes. If this problem was
presented using shapes, anybody could have solved it in seconds.

------
CrLf
Ball-point pens actually work in space. The ink does now flow because of
gravity, it flows because of ink viscosity.

~~~
nosse
You mean capillary action? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capillary_action> I
think this is somehow linked to viscosity, but I don't seem to find how.

------
myspy
Well, my pizza solution would have been to find a measuring tape and divide
the circumference by eleven with your phone calculator ;)

But is it our problem to over think everything. School, university,
bureaucracy, everything we encounter in life pushes us into that direction.

Probably to stop us from getting killed. Something evolutionary...

~~~
Tichy
I totally want to work on an augmented reality cake divider now. Point phone
at cake to get a divider overlay.

~~~
mbq
Such app is already shown in the Quora thread: [http://www.quora.com/What-is-
the-easiest-way-to-cut-a-pizza-...](http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-easiest-
way-to-cut-a-pizza-into-11-equal-slices)

------
bazzargh
The numbers puzzle was easy to spot if you've ever played Petals around the
Rose.

Here's a classic article about that game, dating back to 1977, describing Bill
Gates trying to figure it out: <http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-
bg.htm>

------
EvilTerran
I'm in the "higher education" category, yet that puzzle only took me about
2-3min of looking at it... I got briefly red-herringed by digit sums / digital
roots looking promising, so spent most of the time thinking about those, but,
once I'd found counter-examples, it didn't take long to crack.

That said, the "pre-school children" bit was a big hint as to how to approach
it.

The use of '=' instead of, say, '→' made the math pedant in me twitch, though
;)

------
dkarl
Nobody really needs to divide a pizza into eleven pieces with such precision.
It's presented as a "real" situation, but it's a classic type of mathematical
problem, the constraints of which are entirely made up _for fun_. When he
dismisses the geometrical solution as "overthinking" and a sign of a lack of
creativity, he not only misses the point, he's mocking what other people do
for fun. Nice.

Also, as someone else already pointed out, he didn't specify how to find the
middle point of the pizza, so his answer isn't a complete practical solution
anyway.

~~~
irishcoffee
Stretch a string over the middle of the pizza. Stretch another string over the
middle of the pizza perpendicular to the first.

------
buddydvd
The solution is very clever. However, it is incomplete. In addition to the
equally divided markings around the circumference, you also need to know the
midpoint of the circle. Without the midpoint, the cuts may still yield unequal
slices. Fortunately, using the author's same technique, you can easily produce
the midpoint by making marks at the opposite ends of a single loop. Those two
additional markings provide a guide for you to make cuts into the midpoint of
the pizza.

------
mastef
>php abc.php

    
    
      Looking for 8+8+0+9 being 6 : found 2+2+1+1 : 6
      Looking for 7+1+1+1 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
      Looking for 2+1+7+2 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
      Looking for 6+6+6+6 being 4 : found 1+1+1+1 : 4
      Looking for 1+1+1+1 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
      Looking for 3+2+1+3 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
      Looking for 7+6+6+2 being 2 : found 0+1+1+0 : 2
      Looking for 9+3+1+3 being 1 : found 1+0+0+0 : 1
      Looking for 0+0+0+0 being 4 : found 1+1+1+1 : 4
      Looking for 2+2+2+2 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
      Looking for 3+3+3+3 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
      Looking for 5+5+5+5 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
      Looking for 8+1+9+3 being 3 : found 2+0+1+0 : 3
      Looking for 8+0+9+6 being 5 : found 2+1+1+1 : 5
      Looking for 1+0+1+2 being 1 : found 0+1+0+0 : 1
      Looking for 7+7+7+7 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
      Looking for 9+9+9+9 being 4 : found 1+1+1+1 : 4
      Looking for 7+7+5+6 being 1 : found 0+0+0+1 : 1
      Looking for 6+8+5+5 being 3 : found 1+2+0+0 : 3
      Looking for 9+8+8+1 being 5 : found 1+2+2+0 : 5
      Looking for 5+5+3+1 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
      Looking for 2+5+8+1 being 2 : found 0+0+2+0 : 2
    

:D

~~~
revolutions
Excuse my ignorance, but how does this work?

------
instakill
I hate that story. The reason pencils weren't used was because broken bits of
graphite can cause havoc if it floats into electronic crevices.

------
roel_v
I'm probably an idiot, but how do you divide the string in 11 equal pieces
without measuring the length and dividing by 11?

~~~
lusr
Based on my extensive pizza eating experience, the average pizza slice is no
wider than the distance between my thumb and forefinger, so start by wrapping
the string around thumb & forefinger 11 times, leaving a bit dangling at the
end. Then gradually expand the distance between the two fingers until the
loose bit is eliminated.

I suspect you don't even have to mark the string with a pen (meaning the
author possibly overthought the solution). You can just use the gap between
your fingers. The chances are that the additional length added by the
circumference of your fingers probably compensates for the curvature of the
pizza circumference, depending on the size of the pizza and the size of your
fingers. If you're doing this regularly you'll quickly learn the appropriate
degree of compensation.

~~~
roel_v
Oh but then it's just trial and error, unless like you say there is low enough
friction to open your fingers and loosen all loops at the same time.

Quite unimpressive solution, imo. It's not about 'over thinking' any more,
it's about giving up precision to find a low-tech solution.

------
akrymski
Who cares about pens and pencils, use an ipad :)

Overthinking leads to over-enginnering, because humans aren't great at knowing
what to do with all the free time we'd have if we did our job in 10% of the
time :) Perhaps overthinking is required to keep us busy. Even though we all
claim our time is money, in reality most get paid by the hour and not by the
amount of work that has been accomplished. Plus complexity gives more weight
to what we do, allowing us to claim that there's no shortcut to where we're
going. That degree, that level of experience, are all job requirements that
protect us.

Experienced entrepreneurs often fall for this trap. Too much prior knowledge
of a particular industry leads them to quickly find faults in most ideas, and
the just-do-it attitude that leads to simple approaches that stun everyone
slowly fades.

~~~
aen
Prior knowledge. Yes. Exactly what I was telling. I gave the numbers question
to some of my friends and they all seem to be crippled by their prior
knowledge.

I was thinking about the iPad too. I wonder what astronauts are using now.
Surely not the space pen.

~~~
vertex-four
Did you give it to any kids yourself, rather than relying on the article's
claim that kids are usually able to solve it? If you're going to try to repeat
the experiment, you must repeat all of it before claiming it repeatable.

------
lani
they stopped using the pencil in space because the graphite got everywhere !!

------
lifeformed
I figured out the number one in about 30 seconds. The biggest clue is that it
claims preschoolers get it easily. That means all mathematical operations,
except addition and less likely subtraction, is out of the question. A quick
glance showed that adding or subtracting in any simple way would not yield a
result - a more complicated way would not be done by a preschooler. So that
meant it probably was some sort of spacial or visual problem. Seeing 6666=4
and 0000=4 got me thinking about the shapes of the numbers, and from there I
quickly determined the answer was the number of closed loops.

~~~
Melyan
I bet it was more like 2 minutes. It only took me 64 minutes.

------
toddnessa
I believe that one reason why things can get overcomplicated is because often
this has proven to be profitable. Why did it cost millions of dollars to
create a pen in space when a pencil would do? Obviously, someone benefited
greatly financially from the government contracts that were given to them for
the purpose of creating a pen that would work in space- even when it wasn't
truly necessary. Many believe the old saying that "money makes the world go
round." Could this be the reason why else we have legally allowed for
financial instruments such as derivatives which are so complex that the
majority of the public does not even understand them? Is it profitable for
someone to have something such as this be so complicated that the general
public will fail to see their inherent danger? While overthink is dangerous
for productivity, someone has also figured out that it is profitable- at least
for them.

------
hiromichan
Uhm I guess it's about common sense and not being an engineer all the time!!

If someone would call a pizza place in reality saying they wanted 11 equal
pieces, they would have answered that at most they could have the pizza cut in
some slices! :D HA!

------
aen
The film scene is one of the things that motivated me to write this. So I used
it for some humor. Whether it is true is besides the point. Though an urban
myth, it made me think about the subject.

------
lhorie
Am I the only who would cut the pizza in 12 pieces, then eat one?

~~~
georgemcbay
I'm an American, I'd just eat the whole damn pizza.

------
sdenheyer
I have two children, a pre-schooler and a kindergardener, and I very much
doubt either of them could solve that puzzle.

------
mastef
If you think kids are good at simplifying, just go on Draw Anything and try to
figure out some of their drawings.

------
swah
<http://www.therussiansusedapencil.com>

------
nitid_name
[Sigh] Pencils aren't used because some graphite would rub off into the air
and muck up the filter.

------
petchang
What a well written article! Must have taken a lot of thought to write this
well :)

