Comment by tc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tc | Hacker News Reader

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complex problems more often require complex solutions

When you apply that sort of thinking to code, the result is an explosion of special cases, and you get buggy, slow, and unmaintainable software.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the best societal innovations have been as simple and neat as the best code hacks. "All men are created equal," rather than, "Some men are created with more rights than others -- there's a complex hierarchy to be followed. We have rules for this!"

Edit: Yes, the analogy to code was not to be taken too seriously, though I don't think it should be completely dismissed either. Do the complex problems that a large organization faces require a ton of complex rules? Netflix doesn't think so. As for my implied argument that "simpler rules make for a better society," if you don't like the Jefferson example, there are plenty of other historical examples you can find. The Constitution is an extremely short document considering the magnitude of what it set out to accomplish. It structured an entire federal government in only a tiny fraction of the words found in the currently proposed healthcare bill.

> When you apply that sort of thinking to code

Politics and sociology is not code. Appreciating this very simple assertion, the rest of your claim falls apart.

> "All men are created equal,"

I cannot think of a more contrived, irrelevant example. Trying to model policy and social behaviour on, say, OOP, is a really bad idea.

I know this is HN and all, but not everything has an analogue to programming. The "hacker mentality" is not a panacea to the world's ills.

You seem pretty touchy about the analogy. I understand that the 'hacking' meme has been overplayed here.

Above though, I'm just pointing out that simpler is often better in a number of different fields, even for complex problems. The Supreme Court spends a great deal of time trying to lay down the simplest tests and precedents they can. The Bill of Rights was a simple document which addressed centuries of complex abuses. Smart companies try to find the simplest policies and procedures that could possibly work. And yes, in technology we often find that a simpler process scheduler works better than a more complex one.

The 'hacking' meme is well beyond overplayed - and doubly worse is that it's less of a "har har we're witty internet people" meme and more of a cult.

> I'm just pointing out that simpler is often better in a number of different fields, even for complex problems.

Yes, but that in no way suggests that simpler solutions are better in this field - that neither of us are really qualified professionals in (I'm assuming you're not a policymaker or politician :P)

> lay down the simplest tests and precedents they can

For good reason, but again, this in no way suggests that simple, one-liner policies would be better than, say, a 100-page tome of laws that address specific cases.

> And yes, in technology we often find that a simpler process scheduler works better than a more complex one.

And yet this still has no bearing on whether or not this holds true in politics. The whole concept strikes me as "simple solutions work better in technology, clearly they also work better in politics", which to me is an absurd statement to make.

Think about the tax system. What's the simplest system? Flat tax for all? Is this the optimal solution? Most people would say no - but yet it's the simplest, easiest to calculate, and least burdensome in terms of processing cost (both for the filer and the taxman). We have highly complex tax systems that work considerably better than the lowest-common-denominator easy solution.

Which isn't to say there isn't a simpler solution that would work better, but it certainly breaks the notion that simpler = better.

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