| Complexity is the outcome of misunderstanding. The misunderstanding can come from lots of areas. It could be from a requirements perspective: “I understand what I can build easily, but not what you want.” It could be from an engineering perspective: “I understand what you want, but I don’t understand how to build that cohesively.” It could be from a scientific perspective: “No one knows what tools we need to investigate this.” I saw mentioned in other comments that CAD software doesn’t allow for sketching. As someone who was originally trained in drafting the old way, and who has used modern CAD systems to produce models for fantastically large physical simulations, I largely agree that sketching is lost. But the sketching that I can do on paper is just not at the same level of complexity as I can kinda do on my computer. But the complexity of using the new tool obscures the fact that my model is much more complicated than I could otherwise manage using old tools. And that’s because I’m still learning. In fact, I have to “deploy” while I’m still in learning mode about a problem, unlike before, where I had to understand the problem in order to use the tools to draft the thing. Being able to do something with a half-formed idea sounds like sketching, but when non-experts rely upon it, it’s pretty fragile. Because it wasn’t done. Building a memex (something the author disparages multiple times) is super hard because we still don’t understand how to represent ideas separately from language, our original mental sketching tool. But people built Altavista and Google and LLMs anyway. And yeah, they’re super complex. How does TCP/IP work over wireless connections? Poorly and with a lot of complexity. Why? Because the concept of a connection is ill-defined when communication relies on ephemeral signaling. But despite the complexity, it is useful and fun to use only half-baked ideas. Just like it’s fun to use language to describe stuff I don’t understand, but merely experience. Graduation. Being a parent to a sick child. Losing a loved one. |