The Better Letter: But No Simpler

All in all, we should make things as simple as possible. But no simpler.

The recipe for being a decent grandparent is simple: Love them, pay attention, be there for them, and do fun stuff. I am in Columbus, Ohio as I write this, for the U.S. Men’s National Team’s World Cup qualifying match with El Salvador. The result was terrific.

Bob Seawright @RPSeawright

U-S-A!

The game was great, too.

USMNT Only @usmntonly

ANTONEE ROBINSON MAKES IT 1-0 FOR THE USMNT! (via @ESPNFC)

The night was simply fantastic, and simplicity is the theme of this week’s TBL.

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But No Simpler

The Golden State Warriors beat the Houston Rockets last Friday evening because, with the game tied at 103, their offense became as simple as what you might run on your driveway.

Steph Curry received the inbound pass on the right wing. The Warriors didn’t bother running him off screens. They didn’t even bother setting a pick to hunt for a defensive mismatch, as is their wont. The Dubs became much like a stereotypical NBA offense with a superstar. They put the ball in the hands of their best player and let him work.

Steph didn’t use any of his fancy dribble moves. He didn’t go for a deep bomb of the sort that fans crowd the arena to see pre-game. He took three dribbles left, gave a hard jab toward the hoop, and stepped back into a midrange pull-up jumper.

Golden State Warriors @warriors

Good morning, #DubNation

Curry’s buzzer-beating 20-footer was the first walk-off jumper of his career. Coach Steve Kerr called the basic isolation, and Steph delivered. “That was the play,” Kerr said. “Get the ball to Steph and get out the way.”

The Warrior offense is generally predicated on misdirection, coaxing the defense into mistakes and tough choices, with the terror of Curry – the best shooter the game has ever seen – as its focal point. They will use four passes and two screens to get a shot because the concoction of motion and required defensive decisions can leave a defense confused and vulnerable. But in Kerr’s eighth season, opponents are acutely aware of and drilled on the Dubs’ offensive approach, increasing the demand for execution.

The Warriors had failed in just this way in the final seconds the previous night. Juan Toscano-Anderson ended up with the ball in his hands at the end of regulation. He got a good shot but missed it. The offense worked but they didn’t execute. And the best offensive weapon in the league didn’t have the ball in his hands when it mattered most.

So sometimes the best misdirection is not to use any (“invert, always invert”). As Oliver Wendall Holmes said: “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

“It was a play that we drew up to try and keep it a little more simple than we did last night where we had a lot of action, and a lot of screens, and a lot of traffic,” Curry said.

Simplicity is powerful indeed. Occam’s Razor makes the point: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. More than seven centuries on, it remains a core principle of science and philosophy.

Isaac Newton esteemed simplicity in mathematics and theology: “truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.” We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that he unified trillions of motions, both on Earth and in the heavens, into just three laws of motion and one of gravity.

Albert Einstein is famous for making a similar claim: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Ironically, the famous quote is a simplification of what he really said.

“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”

Einstein achieved perhaps the most radical scientific simplification of all by unifying space and time within a single entity, spacetime (although Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace brought the entire natural world under a single law of natural selection).

Mathematicians and programmers often believe that the more elegant solution to a problem should be preferred to the uglier solution. It is a form of Occam’s Razor based on aesthetics. It often turns out to be true in mathematics that the most elegant solution to a mathematical problem is not only beautiful, but also best. Elegance, truth, and beauty seem bound up together in mathematics somehow.

The uniformity of the cosmic microwave background shows that, when the Big Bang occurred, the universe “turned out to be stunningly simple,” as Neil Turok, director emeritus of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada, put it at a public lecture in 2015. “[W]e don’t understand how nature got away with it,” he added.

The theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner’s paper, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” argued that the extraordinary ability of mathematics to make sense of the world is a puzzle. An analogous case can be made for the success of simplicity in science. Why does elegant simplicity work so well?

That question haunts the universe’s “fine tuning.” It seems impossibly well-suited to the development of life as we know it. The physicist Lee Smolin has estimated that, considering all the fine-tuning iterations, the chance of life existing in the universe is one in 10 to the 229th power. The two primary explanations are God or the multi-verse (I prefer the simpler hypothesis, although it doesn’t rule out the more complex also being true).

“For God is not a God of confusion, but of peace” (I Corinthians 14:33).

The power of simplicity can be expressed in a variety of ways.

“The things you own end up owning you” (Tyler Durden, Fight Club).

Simplicity is a virtue. It is a gift.

The values of simplicity include clarity and slack. Simplicity makes it easier for us to focus and prioritize. Integrity is easier to achieve and monitor. It omits excess.

Things that are simple are easier to convey, understand, use, and remember. The simple is more durable, more accessible, and more elegant. Simple is harder to achieve but easier to deal with.

However. Simplification can sacrifice individuality, innovation, and expertise.

Crucially, Occam, Newton, and Einstein provide only provisional guidance. They offer a maxim, not an axiom. Consider any true explanation of something. It’s often easy to come up with another that is simpler but wrong. For example, the law of gravity explains the motion of the moon, yet it would be simpler (but wrong) to think that heavenly bodies always move in perfect circles at a constant rate.

Mario Bunge threw down the gauntlet.

“All oversimplification should be avoided in science and in philosophy, except as a temporary methodological device enabling us to start work or to apply its results. Simplicity, a practical and aesthetic desideratum, becomes dangerous if promoted to the rank of universal norm, particularly in matters of knowledge. For here it can consecrate ignorance and, what is worse, the refusal to learn – i.e., dogmatism.”

The answer to the greatest unknowns of the universe isn’t something like “42.”

Mathematicians and physicists seek simple elegance. Playwrights use silence to increase dramatic tension. Bach composed a magnificent piece to be played on a single string.

Steve Jobs and Apple revolutionized the cellphone by making it simple, intuitive, and beautiful. Instagram succeeded only when it was stripped of features and reworked to focus on just one thing: photographs.

Simple investment choices beat the complexities of modern portfolio theory surprisingly often.

Marie Kondo implores: “Keep only those things that speak to your heart. Then take the plunge and discard all the rest.” Costco’s value proposition involves a simpler shopping experience with far fewer choices. Clare Boothe Luce recognized that “the height of sophistication is simplicity.”

When seeking improvement, our natural inclination is to add stuff (more tasks, more content, more objects), making things more complex. We routinely overlook solutions that involve subtraction – doing or having less – that make things simpler.

Still, there is no reason to think that making things simpler is inherently better than making things more complex, even though it is generally cheaper and more efficient. When considering a problem, both types of responses and solutions should be considered, with the simpler tried first.

All in all, we should make things as simple as possible. But no simpler.

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Totally Worth It

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Benediction

This week’s benediction is a terrific (and simple) acapella arrangement of a classic gospel song.

To those of us prone to wander, to those who are broken, to those who flee and fight in fear – which is every last lost one of us – there is a faith that offers hope. And may love have the last word. Now and forever. Amen.

Thanks for reading.

Issue 99 (January 28, 2022)