I see this all around me. People are fixated on careers, hobbies (FOMO), spread thin by family obligations and errands. The truth is, happiness does not derive from these things. This "busyness" is an invention. Life is simple, and happiness actually derives from having cats.
* YMMV. You might need to live in a developed world that assures you won't be left to die, that is not at war, that you can find a way to sustain yourself, and that you're not involved in any accidents that drastically change your otherwise simple life.
I have been in countries at war, like Congo, and life there was the simplest thing you could have.
In fact, all the complexity appears when there is peace. People do not save or study or anything secondary when there is war.
Are you going to study when you don't know where your family is? When your mother or sister or daughter has been raped and you have to protect her for being raped or killed? When they go after you because you abandoned guerrilla (or the army)?
You make a simple mistake(like looking weak, with no friends or too smart) and you die, it was as simple as that. A kid without beard with an automatic gun does not like or respect you? You are dead.
People at war, they need something, they take it(with automatic weapons). Super simple.
In China things were also super simple. When I was there a biker was hit by a car and died. Nobody gave a dam. Cars were circulating as usual around the dead person. It was the most brutal thing I ever saw in my life, including Congo, in Congo people cared more about each other.
It is the developed world that is complex and sophisticated. People work for abstract things like "career", "pensions", "tenure" or even paper money that are promises that don't really exist as real things but really are symbols of trust in the society.
BTW you feel alive living at the moment and I personally miss some part of that, even when I was risking my life.
The whole point of Maslow's triangle is that first, people meet their basic needs before moving higher up in the triangle. So how are you escaping the triangle when you stipulate "once you have your basic needs met"
> People at war, they need something, they take it(with automatic weapons). Super simple.
That is not actually true. Most people in war zone are civilians without weapons. The survival depends a lot on navigating power structures and negotiating. And luck. But it is not simple and everyone speculates.
> When your mother or sister or daughter has been raped and you have to protect her for being raped or killed?
How exactly would you protect them? You don't. Cause I had relatives survive war and read memoirs from civilians and it was more that everyone was looking for source of income. If males had to join army or guerilla (or died), then it is women trying to survive and trying to care for those who stayed (children, old, themselves). And that is not simple.
> Are you going to study when you don't know where your family is?
Hardly. But school systems in war countries and occupied countries do somehow move on, as malfunctioning as they are. People leave them to search for income and food. People clinge on activites too.
Mental health issues get worst under those conditions. The conflicts between people escalate while everyone being even more dependent on each other. People live in cramped conditions. And none of that is simple. Living in one household with mentally ill or abusive relative you would normally cut off is opposite of simple.
> When they go after you because you abandoned guerrilla (or the army)?
You know what drives me crazy? All these people talking about how great technology is and how it saves all this time. But what good is saved time if nobody uses it? It just turns into more busy work, right? You never hear somebody say, "Well, with the time I’ve saved by using my Word Processor, I’m gonna go to a Zen monastery and hang out.” (Jesse)
The problem with everything that 'saves time' is that it doesn't save time in way a that actually frees up blocks of time, because most things in your day are running to someone else's schedule. Saving 10 minutes here and 20 minutes there only adds up to give you hours to do what you want if you're not waiting for some event to let you begin the next task. If you are waiting for something then saving 10 minutes just gives you 10 minutes more dead space in your day to spend waiting. If I have two meetings and I can manage to get the first one done early the only impact that will have is that I'll have to wait longer until the second one. I guess that's a little more time to spend writing nonsense on HN, but it doesn't feel useful to have saved that time.
Saving time on tasks to give yourself more time to do other things only works if you have complete autonomy over your schedule.
Also applies to the very tired ”work smarter, not harder” saying: it never means working less with the time you gain but actually means ”work smarter so you can work even more”
At some point, you stop working though right? And all that smart work probably earned you enough money to retire early compared to someone working a dead end job.
It's not an intrinsic property of technology, either. It's just businesses that want to take advantage of you in new and more abusive ways. Don't let them.
I agree on the short timescale, but look at the longer one. like coal mining was horrible during Orwells times, and now it is difficult but much much better due to technology. Or take saturdays. I do not know about your country, but here not having to work (and not having to go to school) on saturday happened in the last 50 years; or in Singapore in the last 15 years.
The funny thing is, that horrible coal mining that technology liberated us from was part and parcel of the Industrial Revolution. Thank you technology, for saving us from the fallout of technology! Good thing this time there's no fallout.
I prefer it this way, with renevables in (far) sight and maybe some fusion, much better than not heating the apartment in winter (which of course you can choose to do up to a certain limit)
Life is busy work. I mean, we give sense to our life beyond filling the atmosphere with CO2, and yet, on a planetary scale, there is not much more to humanity than that.
Technology allows us to experience things that wouldn't be possible otherwise. And your word processor can indeed save you enough time to do other things you want to do with your life. And if word processors and overstimulation are not your things, you can go to a Zen monastery, technology have your back: food, medicine, construction, transportation,... so you can meditate in peace.
I have known several people who live a simple life. Small house in the middle of nowhere, no phone signal, grow their own crops, etc... But they still have a car, go out to town to buy stuff that come out of large factories, they have a few electric devices powered by solar panels, etc... They take advantage of technology and people love of word processors to live their simple life, and that's fine! That's what technology is for, to allow those who want to disconnect to do so without putting their life at risk, and to give a dopamine rush to those who can't stay still.
As long as workers who trade their labor time for money do not participate in the productivity gains at a rate that sufficiently outpaces wage adjustments to the new productivity, this will continue.
It's why I think more and more as the days go on that the Internet, while being humanity's greatest invention, is turning out to be a net negative. Despite most human-development-related statistics pointing to the fact that humanity/civilization is at its most productive/safest in all of history, the Internet is slowly eroding away what it means to be human.
I remember talking to a coworker friend of mine who was a cat owner. She said that she didn't understand dogs. They just loved you unconditionally all the time no matter what. So I guess she liked the life with the cat where it was just randomly mean or not interested in her sometimes. Kind of illustrated things to me.
Dogs are for people that need the reassurance of the unconditional love
Cats are for people who have the kind of levels of self-confidence that makes the unconditional love of a dog both suffocatingly annoying and suspicious.
> Get a terrier. Best of both worlds. You have to earn their love, and they're as prickly as cats sometimes.
Yes, might be really the case. I'm pretty much a cat person and when I'm thinking about getting a dog, then terriers are pretty much on top of the list.
Seriously, one species has undergone intensive inbreeding with the express purposes of cultivating physical and mental dependency, the other is still a feral predator that can continue flourishing without you. That robustness necessarily implies intelligence, the ability to discriminate perceptions (Chimpanzees can perceive magic tricks; they can discriminate that something has taken place that should not have followed from what was known). People mistake socially pliable for intelligence.
this is a very weird take, probably only possible by a cat owner.
Would you feel suffocated and suspicious from the unconditional love of your child? Its not about reassurance, its just that it is a beautiful experience in this life, and i give just as much love back to my dog.
if you view disinterested cats as the ideal relationship, I hope you can separate that from your human relationships
> So I guess she liked the life with the cat where it was just randomly mean or not interested in her sometimes.
If you think your cat is randomly mean to you, then you really don't understand your cat, you don't correctly read the clues it signalizes to you.
If I'm e.g. petting my cat and don't stop if she starts wagging her tail, which pretty much means she's overexcited, then she will scratch me to make it more clear to me.
To expect that your cat is all the time interested in you also seems honestly quite a bit narcissistic.
Not true from my experience. All cat owners I know are relaxed go with the flow type of people. Few dog owners I know are as you describe but the rest don’t make the pattern significat to notice. Maybe the anxious people you know attempt to rid their anxiety by soothing themselves with cats and it is not working properly for them. I personally love cats and their presence gives me a relaxed attitude but would never have one in my apparent, the smell is too much to bear. And hair everywhere...
And there's a hypothesis that says toxoplasmosis can manipulate the behavior of their hosts to encourage risk-taking activities, including entrepreneurship, and cat owners are more likely to have an interest on startup companies [0][1]...
Which brings us to Hacker News.
Full Disclosure: I was a cat owner, but I'm on HN for its news and the forum, I'm not particularly interested in startup companies...
[0] Toxoplasmosis has been linked to a higher likelihood of entrepreneurial behavior in people who get infected
We do up to about 6 or 7 days. I often joke I'm not responsible enough to own a dog, and if I was going to get a dog, I might as well just have kids. The idea of having to find a way to take care of the dog when you want to go out of town is definitely a little anxiety-producing.
I guess the other side of that is you can often take a dog or kids with you in the car or train but with a cat it’s a bit trickier. That being said my mum used to throw (kinda literally) the cat in the back of the car when I was a kid and we’d drive 2 hours to my grandmas place. The cat didn’t seem to care much and went to sleep.
Pretty normal in Europe, at least where I live for dogs to be on public transport and regional trains.
Edit: just double checked the rules for the ICE (regional fast train), if it fits in a carrier it's free of charge, a bigger dog you have to buy a child ticket for.
> This bit is easy. You can take dogs, cats and other small animals with you free of charge on all British trains, up to a maximum of two per passenger, as long as they do not endanger or inconvenience passengers or staff. Dogs must be kept on a lead at all times unless contained in a basket. Dogs without leads, cats, birds and small animals must be carried in an enclosed basket, cage or pet carrier which must be rigid and not open (to prevent escape) and the animal able to stand and lie down in comfort. Animals and containers must not occupy seats, otherwise a charge may be made. If you want to use a Caledonian Sleeper to or from Scotland, you'll need to pay a fee, see here. For full details of dog & pet regulations on British trains see www.nationalrail.co.uk/passenger services/luggage animals.html.
Clean before the trip, clean after trip? It probably depends on the cat, but in case of ours, the litterbox can stay untouched for a week before it starts pooping outside of it.
(However, we always arrange for someone to take an active care of the cat, including cleaning its litterbox, if we have to leave for more than 3 days.)
so- we have a large "concrete mixing tub" we use as a litterbox for the 2 cats. it's roughly 36" x 24". It's in a 2-level wooden enclosure my father-in-law built just outside our house, with a cat door connecting it to the interior of our house.
No reason it couldn't be used inside, of course, but it would eventually smell more inside, versus a smaller box you scoop more frequently. (of course, you can scoop a large box frequently too, it just takes longer).
I tell myself I scoop it twice a week, but to be honest, it often ends up being more like "weekly", on garbage day.
Once during college, I lived with roommates (and girlfriend) who loved cats. Think we had 3-4 indoor cats at one point and some other strays outside they liked to feed.
We had 3 litter boxes and they had to be scooped daily or they quickly became disgusting.
My point was that cats still need upkeep and it's really not fair to leave them living in filth for a week at a time just because someone can set up an auto-feeder.
Any pet is going to be an inconvenience if properly cared for. Doesn't mean a person can't travel, but as mentioned they will likely need to ask or pay someone to come and check on the pets.
Giant litter box is helpful but still needs to be regularly scooped.
If someone can invent a feasible self cleaning litter box (or a good way to toilet train a cat) I would love to have a cat pet, but right now the idea of them using dirty litter boxes and walking on every surface in the house is just too unappealing.
It doesn't work if you normally don't let your cat choose their meal times. But cats do develop food intelligence unlike dogs and will only eat what they need - the key is they have to have a reliable expectation that food is always available.
An automatic feeder helps - since getting one there's always good in my cats bowl but she only eats a little at a time.
Ahem, my dog will not eat and save his food for later when he's had too much food lately - I think that's what you're referring to as food intelligence.
He often does this by burying the chicken drumstick under dirt and leaves, which I think is not uncommon for dogs.
We have 3 cats and just got a puppy. The dog is already much more beloved and worth the higher effort than the cats have ever been. Cats are basically dry goldfish that you can play with and pet a bit. Dogs are part of the family.
Travel becomes almost impossible when you have a cat. Can't leave decent amount of time to anywhere, sometimes just possibilities of what may happen is enough.
Not if you're part of the massive destruction of wildlife wrought by these biodiversity annihilators masquerading as cute pets.
'As an invasive species[1] and superpredator,[2] they do considerable ecological damage.[2] In Australia, hunting by cats helped to drive at least 20 native mammals to extinction,[3] and continues to threaten at least 124 more.[3] Their introduction has caused the extinction of at least 33 endemic species on islands throughout the world.[2] Feral and domestic cats kill billions of birds in the United States every year, where songbird populations continue to decline.[4]'
There was a psychology research on how people even billionaire form a baseline similar to a homeless dude. All the stress, pressure you have is the same as everybody else and it will never change.
So the goal should be do whatever you enjoy while doing the minimum effort..
Of course this type of thinking would immediately hamper progress everywhere.
Yes, I don't understand how people don't see that all this "progress" is mainly towards building surveillance states that commit war crimes around the world, deny people basic human rights at home and abroad, destroy our environmental support systems, etc. etc.
But hey, they made a 15th iphone too and a 30th avengers film, so I guess it's all good...
Would it? People perform better when not stressed. Lazyness is a big driver for invention. Actual research is already done driven by pure interest, not driven by ambition.
What? I can’t see it being a good invention driver for anything other than the category of “tools for lazy people”. How was the invention of the OLED driven by laziness? How about the high bypass turbofan?
> What? I can’t see it being a good invention driver for anything other than the category of “tools for lazy people”. How was the invention of the OLED driven by laziness? How about the high bypass turbofan?
It's proven that "doing nothing" helps with creative thinking. The inventions you are talking about are a product of both hard work and laziness.
You can't solve a problem by staring at your screen and thinking really, really hard for 10 hours. The solution will come to you a few hours later during a shower or a walk.
> "tools for lazy people"
1) From the biological standpoint all tools are for lazy people. Lazy animals spend less resources, which in turn could be used for creating more lazy animals.
2) Our brain is wired to be lazy. This impacts both how we approach problems (form stronger neural pathways or move between system I and system II to use D. Kahneman's example) and how we avoid them (e.g. cognitive biases)
3) The distinguishing feature of humans as animals is that we create tools and become dependent on them.
On a less serious note, I'd say that 90% of my programming work is driven by laziness.
For instance, I test things in advance or design them in a certain way so I don't need to worry about them in the future.
This allows me for focus on more challenging problems. These at some point become boring chores. So "I test things in advance or design them in a certain way so I don't need to worry about them in the future." Rinse and repeat.
> It's proven that "doing nothing" helps with creative thinking. The inventions you are talking about are a product of both hard work and laziness.
The kind of "doing nothing" that helps with creative thinking is very different from the kind of "doing nothing" that results from laziness.
> On a less serious note, I'd say that 90% of my programming work is driven by laziness. For instance, I test things in advance or design them in a certain way so I don't need to worry about them in the future.
That's not being lazy, that's long-term thinking and defering gratification – which is the opposite of what people typically mean by the term "laziness". In your post, you're conflating two concepts:
1) Defering productive work until a later time to free time for near-term non-productive activities ("being lazy").
2) Spending more resources (time, energy) near-term to be more efficient overall ("being inventive").
Yeah, that was supposed to sound tongue-in-cheek, but actually distorts the meaning of the rest of the post. I wish I didn't add that example and kept only the first part of the post. Thanks for pointing that out. (Now, I wish I kept only the bullet points)
> The kind of "doing nothing" that helps with creative thinking is very different from the kind of "doing nothing" that results from laziness.
I agree, but that's not how I read the parent post. I'm curious to see how you'd describe this distinction though.
> I'm curious to see how you'd describe this distinction though.
One kind of "doing nothing" frees your mind to discover solutions and interesting ideas in a background process. Examples include talking a walk, talking a shower, or just sitting around and letting your mind wander.
The other kind of "doing nothing" occupies your mind with low-effort thought processes. Examples include watching TV or reading a book. This isn't necessarily a negative thing, but your mind won't be solving problems (unless you're not really focusing on the movie or the book).
You read the parent post (my post) wrong. I’m refuting that laziness is “the driver” for innovation.
You then went on a tangent about downtime being responsible for thinking. That has zero relationship with laziness.
You only need to look to students to see how spending intellectual effort exploring ideas requires energy. Huge chunks complain about anything that requires open ended problem solving. You become blind to this as a knowledge worker who has honed that skill in the same way a plumber becomes blind to the difficulty of sweating pipes together.
Again, the high bypass turbofan and OLED were not created out of laziness. Many critical ideas were likely matured during downtime, but that’s not laziness.
All math proofs pushing the boundaries of the field of math have approximately no practical application leading to inventions to help mathematicians be lazy. Nobody is taking a crack at the Riemann hypothesis because they’re too lazy to do the dishes.
Zoom is not for lazy people. The main use case is to allow people to have meeting who could not otherwise. The percentage of zoom users who could meet otherwise is vanishingly small.
Making a tool that helps people do work more efficiently is not targeting lazy people. A person is not lazy if they want to do a job more efficiently and eliminate wasted effort. A person is lazy if they don’t want to do work at all.
A smart writer uses spellcheck because people make mistakes and spellcheck is a lot cheaper than a proofreader. A lazy writer doesn’t bother writing in the first place.
OLED: Performing in theater live is laborious. Also, getting there and waiting for actors.
Turbofan is way out of my area of expertise. Still, I guess planes are less hard than breeding, riding a thousand horses, sailing ships, and so. And waiting, waiting is not for lazy.
I have this weird idea that wild life forced people into this kind of dynamics.
You make just enough efforts to go where you need / want. The rest is superfluous.
And modern society, lifting you into a form of comfort, also ties you to an large body of strings that forbid you to work on your gong fu (whatever task/effort you deeply need to do to feel happy).
Worrying about and preparing for ever more elusive contingencies can be poison in itself. Kafka's short story "The bunker" pictures this state of mind very well.
There's a ceiling to happiness, though, that's predicated on your tolerance of death and suffering around you. You can't punch through it without advanced technology. But I guess people could instead live their lives stoned on their local mushrooms to achieve the same feelings of happiness.
I'd say that meditation is the best version of wireheading currently known to humanity. I admit that due to obvious problems with measuring happiness, this hypothesis is hard to test.
Maybe you meant something slightly different, but I will agree with other comments that this wouldn't hamper progress. Most people don't enjoy doing nothing for protracted periods of time. We like to create things and make stuff happen. I think we'd make more progress, if anything.
There are many things in life that cannot be simpler without losing some level of choice that we value, I'll grant that.
Nobody who has ever dealt with the United States Government, or any US State government, can tell me with a straight face that the principle is absolute.
Or, put another way, I'll gladly give up all the choices that lead to misery every time I deal with the IRS or DMV in exchange for things to be as simple as they are in other countries I've visited.
"Hello. Welcome to the Automated DMV, Mr. Smith. Your car registration needs to be renewed. Since you're here, and we recognize you, and your car is in the parking lot, and we recognize that, too, renewal will be $122. You have three parking tickets outstanding, so we will add $150 to that. You have one red light violation, and we're sending video of that to your phone if you want to contest it. But since the face and license plate match, we assume you won't, so we're adding $1025. Your total today is $1297."
"Right now, you have $475 in your bank account. We can set up an easy payment plan at $150 per month plus 3% interest per month if you like, with automatic deduction. If that's OK with you, just say "Yes"."
This would be pretty cool actually, if we make some key changes: "we will add" -> "do you want to add them now?" and "you have $$$ in your bank account" -> "how do you want to pay", for example.
Basically, automatically giving options to the users based on access to data they should already have. Detecting the car is not even needed, just scan the driver license at a terminal and get going.
DMV does not need to have direct access to your bank account, but can simply hand off the total to your banking app (say), which in turn can then offer the easy payment plan. Some credit cards already offer this option today.
In general, life can be made quite simple with technology without also having to give up choices or privacy. The hard part is convincing the tech companies/govt IT bureaucracy to go this way :)
IDK. Here in the Czech Republic, public health insurance company (VZP) tends to wait almost to the end of the debt expiration period before hitting you with debt collection including hefty interest.
This is done to maximize the interest...
So I can definitely imagine another autority waiting for years before squeezing you dry.
except where the people responsible for enforcing traffic laws (traffic police) are different from the people responsible for vehicle registration (state government road traffic authority).
I think a realistic example of what you mean would be looking at getting support from Uber. If you want to something from their checklist, it's simple, but if you have something that doesn't fit nicely into their FAQ, it is maddeningly impossible to have a real interaction to get your issue resolved. That is what a simple, automated solution looks like.
You've immediately jumped to the absolute extreme opposite in terms of automation, excluding all of the middle options that would be better than they are today, and the result is... honestly, I'd still prefer your fantasy example to what we have today.
Last time I renewed my drivers license, I had to visit the DPS (Texas separates licensing people and cars, so DPS is for people) three times. In person. During a pandemic. Because of failings on the part of the DPS. This is typical.
We haven't gone that far but a lot of those sort of interactions have moved online in the UK. The obvious one for me is filling a tax return at the end of the year. It's automated for all but the most cmplex of cases.
It's the same here in Denmark. We've also had a lot of failed tax related IT projects through the years though. But when i hear how tax collection is handled in the US, i can tell that we are really lucky with our system.
You do this transparently when you “choose” from a list of preset internet providers or wireless plans.
In any event, Governments are bad examples because they serve more interests than just “customers.” They are not businesses and it is destructive to compare them as such
This article seems to be using abstract academic hand waving to say "it's impossible to simplify anything".
But it seems so obviously false. A "hello world" program could fetch every character from a separate database; same output but enormously more complex process.
A small car could have 16 wheels, 2 engines, and be controlled by typing commands on a keypad ("steer left 3 degrees").
Don't tell me these examples are just exposing some complexity that was already there, or that complexity is a conserved constant, etc.
It's amazing what can be made to sound plausible with an erudite wiring style.
Agree that treating complexity as a constant is a bit extreme. The author lost me at the bit about Tesler's law.
That said, it feels like there is likely some sort of Pareto efficient frontier with regards to complexity vs. usefulness. You can certainly have a poorly-designed system which is arbitrarily more complex without being anymore useful. But if you make things "as simple as possible" for any given amount of complexity, there will always be some underlying trade-off.
“Whether something is complicated is in the mind of the beholder.” Don Norman
In the same way that a probability represents your state of information about an event or action your assessment of the complexity of a task or problem is a function of your state of information and relevant expertise.
I think this has implications for models like cynefin where the assignment to a domain (simple, complicated, complex, chaotic) is presented as objective but I believe this assessment if a function of your information and understanding.
One implication for designing software is to use familiar UI metaphors--which are viewed as simpler and easier to use.
One implication for competitive analysis is that you cannot assume that your competitors bring the same information and level of understanding to a problem that you do. In best case you have more information and expertise. In the case you need to anticipate, you have less information and expertise, and what looks complex or chaotic to you may be complicated to a competitor.
A fascinating little facette of this is that e.g. while command line applications are certainly harder to use for typical users, they are in a different sense also simpler, because a certain class of problems/worries is totally stripped away. Namely: where was that button again? Oh god they changed it again.
Life can't be simpler yet because systems do not yet understand the consequences of their actions.
The first step to advanced simplicity is making it easy to do again what you did already. This is the "reorder last shopping cart" level.
The next step is to have a good understanding of what people are likely to re-order, and how often. Some marketing systems are starting to get this. If, last time, you ordered a hammer and some nails, next time you should be offered more nails, but not more hammers.
One obstacle to advanced simplicity is cross-vendor integration. This is why more than one remote is often necessary. There are entertainment systems that self-configure when plugged in, but only from one vendor.
Interesting that this article talks entirely to the complexity of technological systems and business processes. Largely, those aren't the things that make my life complex, it's other people.
Being the middleman between two people who you love but hate each other is complex. Telling someone who is smart enough to do a job but hasn't been performing that they aren't getting their contact renewed is complex. Figuring out why your two year old is crying is sometimes flat out impossible. Setting up kubernetes or reading processes for what forms to bring the DMV? Annoying, but manageable. If those were the only complexities in my life, it would be simple indeed. Less rich, but simple.
This reminds me of scene in Mr Robot, where a non-hacker has been tasked with hacking into FBI network. All she needs to do is plug in a pre-prepared access point and type a few commands.
It’s human factors i.e. being caught by FBI and associated anxiety that add complexity to the situation.
Darlene has to remind her of the simplicity of the task.
This had a big impact on me, as someone who has struggled with anxiety in the past.
While the article is quite nice, the title is certainly misleading. The article is about complexity of products and services and its management, but not about complexity of life. The latter, I believe, mostly comes from a myriad of interactions between numerous underlying psychological, social and economic networks/graphs (it's the same thing in this context: https://bence.ferdinandy.com/2018/05/27/whats-the-difference...) of forces, types of actors, incentives and other factors.
To paraphrase a blog writer- "a lot of people complain about feeling disconnected, but when I ask them to describe what it would feel like to be connected, they are unable to describe anything."
Many people are aware of life feeling too complicated, but very few actually have thought about what life would feel like if it were simple, and once they think about what they would need to get rid of in order to make life feel simple, most are unwilling to give up the privileges and freedom afforded to them by their "complex" lives.
Fred Brooks said [1] that there are two types of complexity, accidental and essential. While accidental complexity can be reduced the theory is that the essential complexity cannot.
"Accidental complexity relates to problems which engineers create and can fix; for example, the details of writing and optimizing assembly code or the delays caused by batch processing. Essential complexity is caused by the problem to be solved, and nothing can remove it; if users want a program to do 30 different things, then those 30 things are essential and the program must do those 30 different things."
I guess the whole point of design or engineering for that matter is to get as close as possible to the bare minimum of essential complexity. Elegance comes to mind, if you are able to jump over several complexity traps.
The past is gone, and we can barely predict even tomorrow. Packing all of these "days" into "life" is not simple at all. It's an error.
There is no "life". It's an ideology, and letting the idea rule you too strictly will turn you into an ideologue. It's our mind that sorts our infinitely complex realities out, but also inevidably finds itself tangled in its own abstractions.
Emotionally, happiness can only be felt in moments. Days where happy moments outnumber the sadder moments could be considered a happy day. But to then extend this to a lifespan is just too ambitious to be practical. It's surreal.
Once you have happiness in your days, living a day at a time should suffice. And once you have happiness at arms reach, knowing that should suffice. That is a good place. That is one better model of a good "life".
> Removing functionality doesn’t make something simpler, because it removes options. Simple tools have a limited ability to simplify processes. Trying to do something complex with a simple tool is more complex than doing the same thing with a more complex tool.
I agree with the quote but I am not able to reconcile it with the following observations...
1. The Unix philosophy insists on making simple tools which focus on doing just one thing and only one thing. Edit: Come to think of it, simple tools can simplify a complex process if you can compose them into a complex tool to do the job.
2. I think this also runs counter to Apple's understanding of simple too (one button mouse anyone?).
The quotes referenced in this article “Whether something is complicated is in the mind of the beholder" and "The total complexity of a system is a constant" appear to me to be contradicting. How can the complexity be both relative and constant simultaneously? Personally, I favor the former. An operating system, for example, seems to me to dramatically lower total complexity since a few hundred (thousand?) people can maintain it. Meanwhile, without operating systems how many hundreds of thousands of people would it take to maintain our modern tech if we all had to work on bare metal?
Maybe there is no link between something being complicated and it's complexity.
One is entirely subjective and the other isn't.
Example: a typical CLI application might be incredibly complicated to my mother, while it is in fact much less complex than e.g. a GUI software she uses to make and order picture books, which to her is much less complicated.
Something being complicated to someone doesn't mean it is complex. Very simple things can be complicated, very complex things can be simple.
Wow! I was his student many, many years ago. I had to take his class because he was the head of our department. I thought I was going to do something very different with my life and I wasn't very interested, except that he was a great lecturer. In retrospect he was easily the most influential professor I ever had.
If his work in something like "Design of Everyday Things" seems underwhelming I would guess that is because it has become so influential that you already have absorbed a lot of the ideas in the book. You certainly live in a world that is slightly shaped by them. As a teacher, Norman constantly taught through anecdotes about the way things work.
ATMs used to give you money and then after they gave you money they would return your card. The model for the bank was take card, do transaction, return card. The problem was people kept leaving their cards in the machine. Donald Norman pointed out that the "mental model" for people was go to atm-> get money. Once the last step is accomplished the customer doesn't thinks they are done. They don't want to keep thinking about the ATM. "Mental Model" of an interface is a term you may have heard and he coined.
Now every time I go to an ATM and it gives me my card back before the money, I think of him.
I think part of the trouble is I read the "revised and expanded edition." From some of the reviews I remember reading at the time, the revisions did the book no favors.
I think the biggest additional thing from that book is the concept of "affordances". Practically every UI related person I talk to talks about the concept intentionally or not and he put a name to it.
I would agree the book has little in terms of practical advice nowadays. It was brief and straightforward at the time, and age has only lessened the impact.
Same, my thoughts are its one of those things that it was revolutionary at the time but the ideas have become so distributed now so it seems obvious. Originally published in 1988, windows 3.0 was released in 1990, it was published when MS-DOS was king.
I am not a designer/UX person but still thought I would give it a go. I couldn't get through more than 30% of it because of how boring and repetitive it was.
For me it seemed like it fleshed out a lot of ideas about what makes good UX. I didn't think it was earth shattering but I think back to it often when I interact with the various items in my life. It's nice for someone to explicitly explain something you intuitively grasp but can't clearly explain.
Here's a little trivia: It was originally titled the Psychology of Everyday things. It was so popular with designers, particularly software designers, that they re-titled it.
A victim of complexity:
I remember my kid trying to open a child-proofed bottle of pills: "It's child-proof" I told her.
"How does the bottle knows I am a child?"
She asked.
From my perspective a huge amount of features/modes/choices in things are rarely used things that a minority might want but most people never use, so things could be much simpler. I’ve never used an Android device because I would probably go down an unproductive rabbit hole of customizing and debugging etc. iOS cuts down on my freedom but frees up mental energy for more meaningful uses.
While there is often a trade-off between internal and external complexity, the article goes too far.
For instance, having a zillion inter-related modes creates internal and external complexity without improving functionality at all. Using orthogonal controls helps a lot.
Guys who made things that have a zillion inter-related modes actually spent few effort to convert the "model" to a truly conceptual model which should be much simpler or as you said, orthogonal. And I believe that this is where the complexity lied in.
Would it make sense to have more fields visible at once? Maybe making users not have to dig though 10 pages to find the “Covid” checkbox would be better.
Would it make sense to have a single schema monolith with simple HTML forms vs microservices, 100 schemas, persistent connections, streaming, and burn-rate-heavy cloud infrastructure?
Do you need all of those JS libraries that look simple but are actually more complex than vanilla JS to setup and maintain?
Object storage seemed simple, but how will you translate all of that JSON later when the model must change over and over again?
Is that code that uses lambdas and annotation-based cloud logging that is so much more readable and maintainable generating frequent delays for customers due to GC and latency than the loop and shared variable equivalent that writes to file?
Counter-examples: code that could be simplified without cost, storing customer data whose structure is out of your control, use of well-maintained libraries that save time and add value, and relatively low cost use of the cloud services due to good planning and design.
