Simple. I have found that most people dread the thought of being perceived as being simple. If we had our choice, most of us would like to be thought of as being sophisticated. And why wouldn't we? Being sophisticated makes us feel special. We feel like we are in an exclusive club, set aside only for the very few who have mastered the fine details and nuances of a particular subject. We might feel superior when we think we know just a little more, or even a lot more, than the average Joe. Your friend who swirls the wine in his glass, holds the neck of the wine glass with his pinky deliberately sticking out, then tilts back his head ever so slightly, tipping the glass and touching his lips to glass to take a light sip, pausing for a calculated moment, and then nodding an approval to the waiter that this is indeed a fine wine. "I will have it."
You are mesmerized by his sophistication.
But don't be. He's just bullshitting you and himself, but ironically he doesn't even realize it.
You see, there's too much sophistication in this world. The worst of it is in my own field. Science. One of the interesting phenomena, or rather disease, that I've seen in students, post-docts, and even full grown scientists (including me at times) is this irrational desire to make everything look sophisticated. Geodynamic modelers who get so enamored with their numerical codes and then start to consider a dozen variables, generating pretty pictures, sometimes lots of them, and then the moment you ask them what the dominant variables are and how those variables relate to each other, that is, scale with each other, they haven't got a clue. Or the geochemist, enamored with his fancy, state-of-the-art isotope mass spectrometer thumping his chest about the latest designer isotope system he's measured or how much more precise his measurements are compared to everyone else's in the world. Then it turns out that the geologic problem that geochemist is trying to solve can be more easily, and perhaps, ironically, more robustly resolved using more mundane tracers like major elements. Or take the ecologist who tries so hard to find a meaningful correlation between say species diversity and some random variable like mean annual precipitation, and tries to make meaning out of senseless scatter by applying all sorts of statistical analyses. Worse are the people in the medical field who proclaim with the fanciest statistics that there might be correlations between cancer and whether you watch TV. In many of these cases, the statistics is used blindly by the operator, and more often than not, used to give the impression of credibility when it's not there.
It's a disease. We scientists love to complicate life. We talk in jargon. Because, if it wasn't complicated, if we weren't erudite, all the years we've spent holed up in the lab would seem like a waste. We think complication makes us look smarter. There is of course a time and place for complication. There is a time for statistics, for high precision measurements for high precision's sake, for tweaking a thousand parameters to see how far we can push a numerical code. Yes, there's a time for it, but I can guarantee you that most of the time, it's not needed.
But there are serious problems with complication. Complication and the air of sophistication might indeed make us look smarter. Jargon certainly makes us look good. But once we fall into this trap, we start alienating ourselves from the public. Nobody can understand us. Is that really what we want? Scientists MUST have societal value. At the very least, we must be able to communicate our findings, our enthusiasm. There's no reason to keep scientific knowledge to ourselves. My guess is that one who desires sophistication is really one who knows very little and is merely posturing for fear that someone might find out how ignorant they really are. I know that when I was younger, I sometimes found myself spewing out jargon as an easy way to get out of a bind. This trick worked when the audience didn't really know that much about the topic at hand, but all it took was an astute member in the audience, or sometimes an unexpected expert, to see through all of that and with one fell swoop knock my legs from under me. And I deserved it.
Now, ignorance is not a bad thing at all, as long as you know what you don't know. Sort of like of what Rumsfeld said. There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. The first two are key. The last one is the one that will take you down and you must strive to always convert your unknown unknowns to known unknowns and finally to known knowns. If you don't know what you don't know, you're pretty much hopeless and I can't really help. Only until you know what you have to know will you make progress.
Ok, back to the point of this diatribe. What I'm trying to say here is that we need to drop the facade of sophistication and go back to fundamentals. Start simple. If you can't explain your problem in simple manners, it probably means you don't understand at all, or, funny enough, you've made the problem so complicated in your mind that you have no hope of actually solving the problem - ever. By simple, what I mean is, can you explain, at least conceptually, your problem in a cartoon? Draw a picture of what you are envisioning. You'd be surprised how revealing forcing yourself to sketch a cartoon might be. Just the act of doing it will open your mind, open the box, and so on. And once you think you know how something works, and by work, I am implying that you now think you know what variables might be important, draw a graph of one variable against the other. Don't get lost in too many variables. Consider first order variables, that is, the most important variables. There are usually only a handful of first order variables. If you find yourself dealing with more, like ten, it means it's too complicated. Break the problem down into sub-problems that are, well, simpler. Always break things down and consider each part separately first before you link them back together.
And when you draw that graph, ask yourself, does Y increase with X or vice versa? Does it go to infinite or does it grow asymptotically to some value? Don't even bother putting numbers for now. Just make sure you understand the sense of behaviors. This is called intuition and it can take you a long way, sometimes to success, sometimes, unfortunately to failure if your intuition is wrong. Once you've got a set of graphs, you've got a model in the making. It's still not that useful because you don't have numbers, but to have numbers you now need equations. Now is your time to turn your intuition into equations. Simple equations at first. Can your equations explain all the phenomena you see? If yes, good. If no, then you can start to consider additional complications. Or perhaps your intuition was wrong. Do you see where I'm coming from? Start simple and build up.
There is nothing wrong with being simple. In fact, the ability to present concepts in a simple way reflects a great command over the problem. I should mention that the beauty of being simple extends far beyond just science. Consider Steve Jobs, who took the art of simplicity to an extreme, and you know the end of that story. Consider Mozart's piano pieces. Beautifully simple, so simple, that you can't get the tune out of your head. You remember it. Or consider the Ramone's three chord piece "Twenty fours, I want to be sedated". Unbelievably simple, and yet, it's a home run. I know it's a home run because even my 2 year old nephew can't keep away from that tune. Or a Rothko painting. Simple. Difficult to render, of course, but the concept, the product is simple, and you are moved. So you see, simplicity has its virtues.
Don't ever be afraid (or embarrassed) to be simple.
Next time, I will talk about when it's fine to be in a rut and how to get out of rut when it's time to get out.
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