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TOPIC: ISSUE25 - "Anyone can make things bigger and more complex. What requires real effort and courage is to move in the opposite direction-in other words, to make things as simple as possible." WORDS: 666
TIME: 00:59:20
DATE: 08/01/2010 21:16:35 Complexity VS Simplicity The world we are living in is paradoxical. Humans are trying to make this world complex by alternating modern technology at a speed and amplifying multidisciplinary knowledge. What humans also seek for is simplicity. To be simple and get rid of duplication and redundancy makes people enjoy a convenient life. But does it require more effort and courage to make things simple or complex? The speaker contends the former. While I partially agree with the claim that simplification needs much effort sometimes, complication is not so easy as that anyone can make it. To begin with, making things more complex is not that easy as alleged by the speaker. While I concede that making things bigger by repetition or adding triviality is facile, that is not what real "complexity" is. By saying complexity, we mean something that is difficult to understand or deal with and it involves so many parts of details. As a result, complicating things sometimes requires deep knowledge and understanding, and the ability to include integral details, especially in the field of science. A paradigmatic example is the studying of the number pi. For common people it is only a simple number used to calculate circle related and they have no ideas how to make this simple number more complex. However mathematicians have a lot to say regarding pi, like how to use it in formulas, how it can be calculated in an exacting way, how to form a series in a way that it converges to pi and so on, about which, huge amount of scientific papers have been published. In short, not anyone can make things bigger and more complex at least in scientific area. Nevertheless, efforts and courage are requisite if one wants to make things as simple as possible, as asserted by the speaker. Firstly, it is possible that if somebody would like to simplify something, large amount of information will come immediately into mind so that one does not know which to include. Consider, for example, if I am asked to introduce China as simple as I can, what I say might be its vast territory and abundant resources, its five thousand-long history, its fifty-six ethnics or its burgeoning economy, none of which should be missed out and none of which could be simply demonstrated. Secondly, simplifying certain things need a width of information, with which, one would know what is appropriate to be included. A telling example is the in the field of accounting. In order to synthesize huge amount of numbers and present clearly in the financial statements printed only in a few pages, accountants need to have knowledge of intricate accounting standards as well as understanding of the operation of the company. Another example could be lawyers, who need to be familiar with almost every rule in a legal system. Only in this way can a lawyer know which law to cite in order to defend effectively. Thirdly, simplification sometimes mean taking out the essentials, which can only be accomplished with a deep and profound knowledge. For instance, after Professor Merton Miller received Nobel Prize for his inevictable excellence in developing theories concerning capital structure, he was asked by a TV program to explain his idea - the famous MM model - as simple as possible to be understood by the general public. He said (and I paraphrase), “A company is like a pizza, how many pieces you have does not affect how much you eat.” This clearly and simply demonstrate the idea that under an ideal world, how a company is structured does not matter. It is his erudition that makes possible to simplify a sixty-page work. To sum up, making things as simple as possible requires effort because it needs width and depth of knowledge to pick up essence and even that there are still things which is almost impossible to simply. In addition, making things complex is also not that easy, which demands of deep understanding, too.
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发表于 2010-1-8 21:25:12
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