

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simplicity - john_horton
http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/02/unreasonable-effectiveness-of.html

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petervandijck
His examples are awesome. HN might be a good example too. Up/downvotes seems
easy to improve upon, but perhaps most "improvements" would hardly make a
dent.

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chalst
Hoisted from that page's comments:

    
    
        However, due to the nature of the publications today, nobody is going to be honest and say: "You know what, we really thought that this advanced technique was going to be better. We tried our best, as you can see, but the improvement is really tiny." 
        There should be some credible way of reporting negative findings, which are surprising.
    

There are journals, such as the Journal of Negative Results (<http://www.jnr-
eeb.org/index.php/jnr>) for ecology, that do try to fill this gap. But they
don't have the same impact value.

This is fair enough, up to a point: you should be aiming for results that will
change the field.

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drbaskin
The title of this post seems to be a reference to the famous paper of Wigner
titled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical
Sciences." It is a very readable paper and I cannot recommend it highly
enough.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences)

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chalst
"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of X" has become a snowclone
([http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000350.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000350.html)).

Check Google Scholar
([http://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=%22the+unreasonable+effec...](http://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=%22the+unreasonable+effectiveness+of%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart))

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john_horton
I wonder if some of the benefits of simplicity come from the reduced
probability of making errors. I know that in my own research, I always try to
use simple methods or at least augment more complex methods with graphics and
simple methods.

That being said, I think it is useful to know the complex methods, even if you
don't use them.

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JoeAltmaier
US accidentally dropped a hydrogen bomb in the ocean (11 atomic bombs have
been lost by the US total). Taking the opinion of fishermen, pilots, Navy
officers, weather men etc, and simply averaging their estimations on a map the
bomb was found in a day.

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ehsanul
Counterexample: I doubt the current implementation of pagerank+additions at
Google is all that simple.

