

The Complexity of 'Simplicity' - KrisJordan
http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/simple-design-is-complex

======
todayiamme
Sometimes I wonder if we would be better off with some mandatory complexity.
Most people simply don't appreciate the miracles they see around them every
second of every day. Miracles that were unimaginable just a few decades ago.
Miracles that happen everyday on a consistent basis. Miracles that they curse
and abuse.

If people could just see and understand how complex one Google query actually
is then maybe the world would be a better place.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Absolutely. It is for this reason that I vociferously advocate that all cars
return to using carburetors in place of fuel injectors. If you had to spend a
few hours once a month adjusting your idle screw and WOT switch, you would
appreciate all of the miracles in your car's engine.

All sarcasm aside, let's not forget that technology is not an end unto itself,
it is a means to an end. It needs to _help_ people accomplish things, not
hinder them.

~~~
todayiamme
That's true and my concept is terribly wrong, but there is a problem at work
over here. To quote Carl Sagan;

>>>We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at
the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at
all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for
disaster.<<<

~~~
thaumaturgy
That I can agree with, but I think the fix is in education.

~~~
jacobolus
The problem is that education must be at such a massive scale that it's hard
for one person to make an impact beyond locally. Just designing a curriculum
doesn't work, because if teachers don't understand the pedagogy it won't ever
get taught. With the current trend away from critical thinking and towards
high-stakes testing, with the scary "anti-elitist" (anti-science, anti-
empiricism) tendencies of broad swaths of the Republican party fundamentalist
christian base which exert tremendous pressure on primary candidates & the
textbook choosers in large influential states &c., and with the increasing
involvement & influence of very large businesses in education whose bottom
line is not necessarily closely related to the quality of instruction, it’s
hard to see where proper science education is going to slot itself in.

One of the big reasons I spent a year working as an intern for One Laptop Per
Child is that I strongly believe that getting as many kids as possible even a
bit of exposure and experience with programmable computing environments (and
ideally then also with some simple hardware hacking such as plugging various
sensors into the audio in jack) is a sure way to plant the kind of approach to
problems that is required to understand modern technology or work in science.

* * *

It's somewhat off the subject, but I've been reading Darwin’s _Voyage of the
Beagle_ , and it’s truly wonderful to see his mind at work. Not only is he
constantly carefully observing the culture, geology, weather, flora/fauna,
fossil record, etc. that he comes across on the trip, but also for nearly
every observation he provides at least a speculative hypothesis and references
various other people’s theories which are supported or contradicted by the
observation in question, and also usually suggests further experiments or
observations which would test or corroborate the hypothesis. (Occasionally
there’s even a footnote explaining that his hypothesis at the time was later
shown to be false.)

It’s the scientific method as clearly and purely as I’ve ever seen it working,
and the result is that nearly every page has some kind of insight. I’m left
with tons of my own questions in response, even in subject areas I’m not
especially experienced in and don’t usually think much about, and the reading
is quite exciting, even apart from the amusing situations he finds himself in.

I don’t know what the best way is to provide that kind of spark to children,
but I’m completely sold on the notion that it’s desperately needed, and the
most important thing a school could teach.

~~~
thaumaturgy
What if you could launch a school, instead?

This is probably my favorite problem. I think about it every day. It started a
few years ago when it really began to dawn on me that almost every single
sociological problem that a society develops can be traced back to errors in
its educational system. I began to imagine -- as realistically as possible --
just what kind of societies might develop based on different kinds of
educational systems.

There's a neat sub-problem though that you allude to: since we assume that
education feeds into sociological tendencies which feed back into education,
how can you dramatically alter the direction of an education system once it
has been moving in a particular way for several decades?

I think the answer is best exemplified in games of strategy, like Go. In
general, any time you're faced with an overwhelmingly powerful opponent, you
try to find a niche they don't care about, you establish a small, self-
supporting base in that niche, and then you grow it as quietly as possible for
as long as possible. So, for example, if you tried to attack the current
education system head-on, in the form of essays or books or school boards or
legislation, you will probably fail. But, what if:

1\. You start with one or two after-school, extracurricular activities;

2\. You develop some rigorous, detailed, well-thought-out goals and methods
for teaching them;

3\. You slowly add on more programs;

4\. You centralize them into a single facility;

5\. You begin to offer a not-worthless certificate at the successful end of
each program thanks to (2).

Well, now you've just gone and launched something which can push against the
current educational system a little bit. If you make this successful, you can
begin to -- a little tiny bit at a time -- publicly ask questions like, "Why
don't public schools have programs like this?"

It may be slow, but after spending a lot of brain time considering a large
number of various ways of changing an educational system, this is the approach
that I think has the best chances of success.

I've been putting a lot of energy recently into growing my business, so that I
can finance a small store in the next 9 months or so, so that I can have an
appropriate space to offer a fun, basic mechatronics program next Summer,
which is my step #1.

~~~
todayiamme
Awesome.

I've been thinking about doing something like this too. Albeit not in the
concrete way you've put forward, but something analogous to it.

If my startup takes off and I am at a stable plateau then I think that I can
run a program like this on the premises. I could ask the people who are
working with me to tutor/mentor kids by building stuff with them. Further, by
having a hiring bias I can choose people with a personality that makes them
more suited for such a thing.

In the longer run wouldn't it be awesome to fund a Xerox PARC that doubles up
as a school? It's an amazing way to create long lasting partnerships with a
community. You are giving back and receiving precious talent in return.

P.S. - Is there anyway I can help you out with your project?

~~~
thaumaturgy
> _P.S. - Is there anyway I can help you out with your project?_

I had to think about this for a day. The short, immediate answer was "Yes!
absolutely!", but I wasn't really sure in what ways.

I think I need three things right now:

1\. Links to people with experience in mechatronics and/or teaching such
things to small groups of kids age 12 to 16 (or thereabouts). I'm pretty handy
with a soldering iron, reasonably proficient at programming, and have taught
rock climbing to groups of kids that age. So, I think I've got all the pieces,
but any hints would be appreciated. I intend to use Arduino and the course
syllabus will involve making a small, automated, maze-navigating robot over
the course of a couple of months in the Summer. They will get to keep their
robot. I will build one of my own starting early next year to make sure I have
a good idea of what to expect in assembling it.

2\. I really need "help finding help". I've got that affliction where I'm used
to being self-sufficient and providing help to other people. As a result, I'm
not very good at finding or getting help with things. F'r instance, I have no
idea how to motivate someone else to be interested in what I'm up to, and I
don't know how to ask for help, or how to respond to offers of help.

3\. Finally, the same old yarn about needing resources. I didn't have any
savings when I started my business a few years ago. I've grown it literally
out of nothing, and it's pretty healthy, but its growth potential is limited
mostly by my lack of capital resources at the moment. So, if you know of
anyone that might have a passing interest in helping me sort that out, that
would be nifty.

Thanks for your interest! I'll post an update to HN once this thing gets
rolling, hopefully in a few months. The main focus right now is to get my
hands on a small building, which is requiring me to step up my revenue a bit.

------
jacobolus
The classic line from St. Exupéry’s _Wind, Sand, and Stars_ (in French, _Terre
des hommes_ ) is “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to
add, but when there is nothing left to remove.”

For any who have not read that book, I highly highly recommend the whole
thing, and for hackers especially the chapter containing that quotation (it’s
somewhere near the beginning). St. Ex. provides one of the most
insightful/“true ringing” defenses of technology I’ve ever read.

------
jiganti
What were the results of Google's experiment?

------
rick_2047
A good example of the authors specific notion of simplicity, can be our own
Hacker News. On one end of the HN machine you submit a post or a comment or a
question and around 2000 people see it in a day. After that you receive a nice
little discussion (if your original input was good enough), as the output. A
little noisy sometimes but has a form of natural filtering.

~~~
simonsquiff
And a simple little number next to the topic or comment donating its worth.
Karma is a wonderfully simple concept with remarkable outcomes - its a
teacher, a rewarder, a punisher, an encourager...it helps make the community
work (a very complex problem) but is wonderfully simple.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Downvoted. ;-)

That point number that everyone seems to want to attach to everything these
days has absolutely nothing to do with measuring worth.

It is merely a measure of popularity, and popularity doesn't even correlate
well to value.

~~~
mannicken
Ah, but popularity has everything to do with measuring value.

As an analogy, gold would be a worthless piece of metal, if it wasn't for its
popularity. Worth is an illusory, human-defined concept and just like anything
"the worthiness of something" is ecided by majority. Perhaps because those who
don't subscribe to majority's value system are weeded out in the process of
evolution, unless their value system offers some incredible evolutionary
advantage. And by incredible I mean "everyone is dead and unable to reproduce
except for those who think that karma points are bullshit".

In reality, reality is merely a construct of our minds, and all value systems
are created by consensus on which hallucinations are advantageous and which
are disadvantageous. Thus, if we decide by unspoken consensus that karma
points are worthy of construction of smart comments then karma points are
valuable.

~~~
thaumaturgy
You're clearly a subjectivist, a philosophical position which I as a
pragmatist find useless.

I would love to sit here and debate this with you, but I have a Saturday lunch
meeting in a few minutes with my old high school's football captain and prom
queen. I hear that they've accomplished some amazingly valuable things. We're
probably going to eat at McDonald's. We will probably spend some time
discussing the latest Dean Koontz or Danielle Steele novels. After that, I
will come home and watch Fox News for a few hours, followed by some sitcoms.

Gosh, it's a good thing all these are so popular! Otherwise, I would have no
idea what was valuable and what wasn't.

Oh, and by the way: gold would not be worthless. It has certain intrinsic
properties -- like its resistance to corrosion, its malleability, its
conductivity, and its low melting point -- which have made it valuable for
many uses.

~~~
mannicken
So, would you disagree with the statement 'value is subjective'? What about
different value systems? How do we decide which one is more valuable than
another, considering we ourselves certainly have a very odd and rare value
system, which considers philosophical discussions to be of a high value.
Reality check: most people don't spend their time on HN discussing pragmatism
and subjectivism.

As an extreme example, consider value system of a heroin addict, for instance.
He or she values heroin above all. You might say his value system is inferior
to yours, but how would you defend that statement? Speaking from utilitarian
point of view, it's not necessarily that a heroin addict decreases society's
happiness or pleasure, if he uses it as a constructive stimuli.

Speaking from a physiological point of view, we are not much different from
heroin addicts. My opinion is that value systems are psychological routes by
which we can get an endogenous high. Our brains have built a series of quests
for us to accomplish, after which they reward us with various pleasurable
chemicals.

Some people get high watching Fox News, some people get high debating
philosophy, some people get high from heroin. The value of each activity is
(non-verbally) agreed upon, by spending time on that activity and hanging
around people who spend their time on the activity.

