 I have kind of a hard time finding my way around groups of clustered buildings, they just seem too complex. Historically, philosophers have a long and frankly embarrassing history of trying to reduce very complex systems to very simple sets of ideas that are easier to argue with other philosophers about. For example, Plato suggested that these four elements, yes only four of them, were composed of these four geometric solids, for reasons like, hey, this thing is spiky, so it would hurt if you touched it, and fire hurts if you touched it, so it must be made of this thing. This is pretty hilariously wrong in retrospect, but it was actually the basis for a bunch of books and treatises and debates about the nature of matter for centuries afterwards, and largely because it's simple, and we love simple. Imagining that complex problems have simple answers is attractive, because easy answers are at least answers, instead of, well, you have to consider this and you have to take into account this effect on the other thing and tell me how to fix it. But it's actually pretty rare to find a big problem that's easy to understand or fix. I mean, it's not a bad thing to try and generalize and find patterns, that's what this thing's for, that in Storing Queen lyrics. But most of us don't have access to the big picture and its intricacies, so we try to reason from analogies and stories and factoids that we read one time on Reddit, so it's really easy for us to overreach and end up on Plato's side of hilariously wrong. There's actually a psychological basis for this, because if you don't know a lot about something, you don't know enough to know how much you don't know about it. This is called the Dunning-Kruger effect after the psychologist who first published a paper on it in 1999. Dunning and Kruger found that if you don't know a lot about something, you're likely to underestimate just how much stuff there is to know about it, and then overestimate what percentage of that stuff you do know. Like, I don't know a lot about economics. Because I don't know a lot, it would be very easy for me to look at what I do know about balancing my monthly budget and say, hey, this isn't that complicated. The government has a problem with debt? We should just have it stop eating out so much, maybe cancel a couple of its credit cards, see if it can carpool to work. I might also be critical of economists, people who've spent their entire lives developing an intricate and intimate understanding of a field that I only know like three things about, because what, it took you four years of advanced mathematics and game theory in college to learn supply and demand? The Dunning-Kruger effect is especially important when you live in a place that elects people, because it makes us more likely to elect politicians who propose simple laws that we can understand, as opposed to laws drafted by panels of experts who have access to knowledge that we don't. Like, people have been voted into office campaigning on things like shutting down entire branches of government to save money or pulling all of our troops out of everywhere immediately. Never mind that those things have insanely far-reaching and complicated implications that are impossible to predict and possibly disastrous. They're selling us an easy answer, and we're more likely to buy it, regardless of its accuracy. We like to understand things, but it's important to remember our tendency to ignore complexity just to feel like we understand things, to feel like we're making well-informed decisions instead of pushing random buttons on a giant switchboard and hoping for the best. Don't get me wrong, simplicity is a great ideal to aspire to, but we should also recognize our bias against complexity, and aspire to a realistic understanding of what we actually know. I've been trying for a long time to avoid talking about YouTube celebrities, even the ones who inspired me to start recording thunk, because I don't want to trade on their success. But I can help it! I love John Green, I love him and his poofy hair and how eloquent he is and how he's so charming and even his ridiculous phobias make him likable and ahhh! John Green probably said it best. The truth resists simplicity, but a close second might be philosopher and mathematician Alfred Wethead who said, seek simplicity, but distrust it. Have you ever had a moment of realization that you didn't know as much as you thought you did? Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share. Oh and speaking of sharing, if you want a free thunk sticker to put on like your car or a binder or a loved one, just send your address to thunkshow at gmail.com. I'll send it to you in the mail and I'll see you next week.