Very well put, although we shouldn’t be too surprised by now. In programming, it’s so easy to add accidental complexity that we are constantly searching for new tools to curb that complexity, and we’re failing. Distilling that further, you only need game of life to find emergent phenomena which we really can’t predict much about, but which we can trivially simulate.

I do think the quote is very powerful, as it highlights a specific assumption we have completely backwards: almost everything is easier than understanding. There are so many fields where trial and error is still the main MO, yet we don’t seem to grok the difference intuitively. We can really only understand a narrow set of simplified systems.