System #20: Simplicity vs Complexity

I was just at an inspiring talk by the UVA President Jim Ryan. Before inaugurating a new innovation hub on Grounds, he gave a speech about "finding what's missing in the world." It was a speech about innovation, and our collectively ability to create. While working for the Charlottesville Angel Network (CAN), I currently have the great fortune of hearing and seeing many ideas come through. Each one of them attempts to find what's missing in the world. However, what's missing in the world is different than what you find missing in your world. The world is a large place, and to know everything that's happening out there is nearly impossible (no matter how much we'd like to think we can with our 24/7 news, and instant access to the movers and shakers of the world through social media).

While we all seek simplicity, we, until we understand a subject deeply, are doomed to create things that are far from simple. Every time we see a problem in our lives, there are countless ways to solve it. One way solves that problem, another way might solve a few collaterally, but the best solution solves all problems within that same domain with the simplest change.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

There's this programming language in our modern web called CSS. It, along with HTML, and JavaScript are responsible for most of what you interface with on the web. To simplify them for non-programmers, imagine a webpage as a human; HTML would be the bones (providing the structure), JavaScript the muscles (providing movement, dynamism), and CSS the skin (providing color, textures, looks).

Since CSS, is ubiquitous, it is, as you can imagine, used with varying degrees of proficiency. In its simplest form it allows you to style things like a button, for instance. So a new developer would be tasked with making a page for a website, and come across a button that doesn't look like the mockup that they've been handed. They would create styling for that particular button, solving and remediating that particular issue.

CSS, however, is cascading which means that rules that are applied at a high level, cascade down to anything else that matches that rule. So there are two situations here that could cause an issue in the styling:

1. Too general - all other buttons on any other page could be affected. Potentially ruining their design. This is called CSS leakage (ex. all buttons are purple).
2. Too specific - any other developer, on any other page, will have to recreate the stylings should they need them. Then if they all change...you'd have to edit every rule individually (ex. this button, on this page, is purple).

Both of these scenarios stem from ignorance. Since CSS is meant to cascade, the simplest solution is to architect the selector (the code that decides which button to affect) to be specific enough not to leak, but general enough to work for any buttons within the design of your website that would also need that styling.

I, as you can imagine, loved working with CSS. It was a system. It was both incredibly simple yet enormously complex. Every website was different. I loved understanding the implications that one simple little rule could have across the entire site. The biggest thing to keep in mind, I learned, was that CSS could be as powerful as the design system you used it for. If your designer handed you a web design where no button was the same, you had to fight against CSS to do what you needed to do. A good design had a place for everything, and each component (ex. call-to-action button, or pagination button) was reused throughout the site leading to a simple consistency and minimal code (rules).

Government

While working heavily with CSS, I realized how our government should operate the same way. Yet, that's quite the opposite of the direction that we've taken. A simple look at our tax could would make that abundantly clear. We are told that our tax code looks somewhat like this:

• 10%: Up to $11,610
• 12%: $11,611 to $45,120
• 22%: $45,121 to $107,590
• 24%: $107,591 to $231,250
• 32%: $231,251 to $403,300
• 35%: $403,301 to $609,050
• 37%: Over $609,050

Even this, gets even more complicated if you include whether you're married or not, or married and filing jointly, or the head of the household. Dismissing those complications for a moment, these percentages would be verging on understandable for everyone. This, according to CSS, would be a good system. The rules are simple, and, therefore, easy to notice deviations. Our tax code, however, is 6,000 to 7,000 pages long!

Why is it like that you ask? Because, like in bad CSS, it is filled with exceptions to the rule. It's because of exceptions, exemptions, credits, and other specialized rules. The crazy thing is that those exceptions, and most of the tax code, contrary to what we've been told, is actually our friend. All of these exceptions actually allows the ones who understand it to save a ton of money in taxes. Us suckers (generally the poorer, less educated folks) on the other hand, naively thinking that the rules should be straightforward, end up having to give up more of our income.

Those exemptions have been added in an effort to incentivize different aspects of our economy, however, the problem is they never get removed. Maybe, in an effort to get back to a tax code that regular people understand (and drastically increase tax revenue) tax exemptions should have an expiration date. They would then need to be re-ratified, to be renewed. This could apply to any law passed by our governments except for amendments. This simple rule would make our entire government leaner.

Are you getting overwhelmed with how many rules are coming up for renewal? Make better, simpler more cascading rules. Maybe something like System #13: One Tax.

Healthcare

In a similar vein, our current version of healthcare, with all of its incredible advancements has the same issue. The human body is an incredibly complex machine, and in our simplified understanding, we've sought out remedies to the symptoms that we've experienced. These solutions, like every medication currently available on the market, subdue a symptom, and create a side effect turning modern medicine into a large game of whack-a-mole. Each pill leads to needing another pill that can dovetail and hit multiple moles at the same time. The goal? To find a combination of pills that work together to hit all the moles at the same time. How many pills does that take? How many pills should it take?

Our problem is that we are far too intelligent for our current level of understanding. Maybe that's why, magic is frowned upon in every major religion. Aside from making you the center of your universe, with all the narcissism that can come from that, if we knew how, we'd probably do more harm than good.

For instance, what do we do when someone's vision starts to deteriorate? We prescribe them glasses. Or we might even spend loads of money to use a complex, automated system of lasers to trim the lens of the eye in just the right way to bring back 20/20 vision. Even after such an advanced procedure, they still revert to near sightedness after 10-20yrs. Both ways only alleviate the symptom, not the cause.

The cause, it turns out, is a complex interaction of hormones in our bodies that sense the sun. It senses whether we're in an open expanse, or stuck in a cave. Our eyes, skin, and pineal gland work in conjunction to produce Vitamin D, retinoic acid, retinal dopamine, and melatonin in the right amounts to tell our eyes to stop growing when exposed to adequate sunlight (primarily UV light), and tell our eyes to continue growing when it would serve an evolutionary advantage. How could it serve an evolutionary advantage you ask? As your eyes keep growing, you become myopic (near-sighted) this makes you better at seeing close up, and better at engaging your low light receptors (rod cells) in your eyes. Even though the mechanism is complex, the remedy is simple...get more sun.

Our bodies, and their intelligence are currently still far superior to our brain's understanding, and, dare I say, intelligence. Unfortunately, our culture of wearing sunscreen and sunglasses in order to protect ourselves from suffering, also, unknowingly creates more suffering in the form of disease. Read System #19: Embrace Suffering.

Agriculture

To drive the point home. We've recently been having more severe droughts, more numerous and severe wildfires, and our collective aquifers nationally have been being depleted faster than they currently are being replenished. Why?

In an effort to save homes, and properties, forest fires had been (though this is changing) put out as early as they've been spotted. However, our forests need fires. We have entire species that thrive and reproduce only after a fire. Instead of letting the natural course of forests take place, or helping it take place, out of fear we have artificially stopped fires from doing their jobs. Since they usually eradicate all the flammable material from a forest, we've instead allowed forests to stockpile that flammable material. Of course we're gonna have more severe wildfires when they have more material to burn! What's needed instead is to use our shepherding abilities to control a burn (which is finally become part of our best practice). We need to exhaust our forests flammable ammunition, and as a result, let them thrive!

On a similar thought, with our agricultural tendencies leaning towards large industrial scale farming and grazing, we've packed substantially more animals into the same area as they would by themselves leading them to need antibiotics, and require us to bring in food from outside (ie. hay, corn, skittles...) instead of letting them graze the grass that grows and thrives from their excrement in a virtuous cycle. Because of this density, the FDA has systemically been removing ponds from farmland to avoid attracting wild animals for fear of disease or killings. Furthermore, those ponds have been drained to make space for more farmland as those ponds guard really great soil.

Ponds, however, are the way that we refill our aquifers. Ponds allow water to seep down into the earth and get purified. Ponds moisten the soil and allow vegetation to thrive. Trees and vegetation have a cooling effect on the environment, they do that by evaporation and condensation. Taken in total, these create more rainfall.

However, dry soil cannot take in water which leads to water running off of the top. Even with a large rainfall, no water gets into the aquifers unless we have ponds to catch it and vegetation to shade the soil from the drying effects of the sun. This, ultimately, not only depletes our aquifers, but also causes our top soil to be eroded and drained into our waterways causing algae blooms which kill fish in our bays and lakes. By attempting to solve one problem, our governmental agencies, though they would claim to have increased GDP (Gross Domestic Product) by increasing the need to buy water, or food, or by virtue of allowing farms to pack more animals together, they actually have made the problem worse. We, in our ignorance, have made our problems worse. It's time we start to think in systems, instead of myopically focusing on problems.

Conclusion

Every system I've written about could be contained within this one article, as I'm a big fan of finding the one rule change (no matter how radical a shift it would be) that would upend the current way of doing things. Some of them, like System #1: Physically Fit, the Lazy Way changes your personal health and vitality, without too much repercussive impacts on other areas of your life, or other people's lives. Other systems, like System #13: One Tax, would create ripples of revolutionary change across the entire ecosystem of real estate, as well as any adjacent industries, and realistically, our entire economy.

These changes, however, require an understanding of the deeper mechanisms at work within an industry. It, sometimes, requires not to add, but to take away.

"An architect knows he has achieved perfection not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of The Little Prince)

Unfortunately, our system of exchange, for the most part, is geared towards selling something; it's geared towards adding, whether it's a product, a pill, or a new exercise routine. Not much credit, however, is given to those who can take away. We live in a world of "more is better," but sometimes less can be best. And as we depend on these external things to maintain our homeostasis we offload a part of ourselves to them...for better...or worse.

Less can be best.
- Yours Truly ;)

There is plenty of money to be made in being an Amazon, for instance. They drastically simplified the act of buying online. Beneath the veil, however, is an incredibly complex machine. Many startups can be created on consolidation, there's much money to be made. There is no product, however, that can only take away. A product, by definition is something. Even education can be thought of as adding. You would be adding ideas, adding thoughts, adding new perspectives. Sometimes, solving the issue requires you to take a step back and remove something from your life. I mentioned a product, a pill, or a new exercise routine, let's return to those within this context:

• A product - Maybe you have a sore neck from looking at your phone all day. Instead of buying a phone holder that drapes around your neck, perhaps we can look at the habit itself. Or how you engage with the habit.
• A pill - Instead of taking a pill to numb that neck pain, drowning out your body's way of talking to you. We could, you guessed it, look at the habit creating it.
• A new exercise routine - Maybe our cities could be better designed to allow us to engage in activity naturally by virtue of navigating it (ie. walking and biking) instead of needing to dedicate more time to do something that could be intrinsic to our lives. System #10: Human Centered Cities.

That's where consultants come in. We, with our deep understanding of a subject, the interconnected nature of its parts, and, hopefully, the way it interfaces with other subjects, can help you make the changes that are needed to bring back simplicity to your lives or businesses. With simplicity, comes vitality. Simple things allow energy to flow more readily. They do that by removing the obstacles to interaction. They do that by removing barriers to entry.

As we flex our muscles as makers, as creators, it is my deepest hope that we remember the world we are collectively creating. This world, by the systems we create, can be a world of distributed authority, collective engagement, and vitality; in cooperation with natural laws. Or we can continue to march down the path of unwarranted complexity by adding more and more unnecessary stuff, remedies, or policies. This form of complexity becomes the breeding ground for separation between those who understand and those who don't. Consumers, and creators. This leads to the creation of power dynamics. Power dynamics, ultimately, always lead to control.

It is my belief that we are heading towards a more "simple", inclusive world as our understanding grows. Simplicity takes an enormous depth of knowledge. Large Language Models (like ChatGPT), for instance, are ridiculously simple even while they appear massively complex. Sites like YouTube allow anyone with access to the internet and a phone to upload content and share their world. Cities are experimenting with being built around humans, instead of cars. Health experts are understanding the benefits of fasting, exercise, and promoting your body's natural ability to heal itself instead of needing surgery, or pills. Ultimately all leading back to you.

How will you contribute?