Decomplication: How to Find Simple Solutions to “Hard” Problems (2016)

Re:Decomplication: How to Find Simple Solutions to “Hard” Pr... by msla on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @11:14AM (#28774144)

How do you cure cancer? Well, cancer is a complex disease, made of cells which are nominally "yours" but which are actively trying to proliferate as much as possible, causing knock-on effects...

Or, in the words of this article, "BULLSHIT! Just kill the cancer cells while leaving the healthy cells alive! Simple! Anything beyond that is artificial complexity! DA-EPOCH-R? DAE overcomplicated BuLLshiT! I know best!"

The kind of over-simplification this article promotes leads directly to outcomes like Steve Jobs fruit-curing himself into an early grave because he thought he'd outsmarted a kind of cancer that would have been pretty damn treatable had he had an ounce of humility.

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Re:Decomplication: How to Find Simple Solutions to “Hard” Pr... by gpderetta on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @11:19AM (#28774194)

every problem has a solution that is simple, elegant and wrong.

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Re:Decomplication: How to Find Simple Solutions to “Hard” Pr... by mdp2021 on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @02:34PM (#28776567)

Some people call them "silver bullets": appealing illusions that problems may be more manageable than they are. Unfortunately, many silver bullets per problem can be formulated. They are considered one of the nourishing of populism.

You want a metal-to-be-defined bullet against them? Education. So one gets used to meet problems that look simple but reveal their difficulty once you tackle them.

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Re:Decomplication: How to Find Simple Solutions to “Hard” Pr... by drooby on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @11:27AM (#28774291)

Huh? The author specifically says organic chemistry is actually complex.

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