The aristocracy of ideas

For those of us who pride ourselves on being innovative and intelligent, there’s a risk in over-engineering and over-complicating our work. Manufacturing complexity is the tool we use to reinforce the story we tell ourselves that we are insightful and sophisticated. But the cost of that unnecessary complexity is noise. Consider this passage from the book The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb: 

“Show two groups of people a blurry image of a fire hydrant, blurry enough for them not to recognize what it is. For one group, increase the resolution slowly, in ten steps. For the second, do it faster, in five steps. Stop at a point where both groups have been presented an identical image and ask each of them to identify what they see. The members of the group that saw fewer intermediate steps are likely to recognize the hydrant much faster. Moral? The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they will be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information.”

To someone caught up in the aristocracy of their ideas, there is something distasteful about what is simple or obvious. Our ego is hidden in the layers of nuance, not in the piercing, dressed-down truth. Sometimes, on the other side of complexity, there is not more complexity, but rather elegant simplicity.