Don’t Take Refuge in Complexity

DON’T TAKE REFUGE IN COMPLEXITY

This maxim argues that we sometimes get lost in the complexity of a problem to avoid the hard thinking needed to get to its core. Milton Weinstein, who was also mentored by Howard Raiffa, is a former student and coauthor of Richard’s. He served as a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health for many years, and recalls that when Richard taught analytic methods in the 1970s, he used to have students critique complex dynamic models created by authors who claimed that the strength of their models was their complexity. “The authors argued that the models were so complex that their outputs could produce results that the unaided human brain could not possibly understand intuitively. Richard and I taught just the opposite. While a model can yield a result that might not have been obvious, an analyst’s job is not complete until he or she can decipher the intuition behind the unexpected result – and be able to explain it to decision and policy makers in plain language (maybe with the help of a diagram or two). Models whose results remain a mystery are not useful; models that can be translated into intuitive insights and be broadly understood can be useful.”[15]

Glenn Loury, a former colleague of Richard’s at the Harvard Kennedy School and now a professor at Brown University, recalls how Richard helped him avoid unnecessary complexity: “As an economist, this is my quintessential Zeckhauser maxim. When I worked at the Kennedy School, my office was just a few steps down the corridor from his. So, I would often encounter Richard to discuss ideas. The subject of our fascinating and far-ranging dialogues varied, but typically some tidbit of analytical economics would animate our exchange. The main lesson that I took away from those many conversations with Richard some thirty years ago is captured beautifully by this maxim. And it has had a profound impact on my own work ever since. For I often find myself taking refuge in complexity, when trying to model an economic phenomenon. Invariably, it turns out that when doing so I am really hiding from my failure to identify the critical question at hand. By seeking comfort in complexity, I find myself moving too quickly from analysis to meta-analysis. I end up looking for generality without knowing what are the insights which can most usefully be generalized. This, in a word, is obscurantism and – in no small part due to Richard’s influence – I am dead set against it!”

Lorae Stojanovic, an undergraduate research assistant for Richard, says, “In my own work for Professor Zeckhauser, my first reaction to a difficult problem is often to think about how I might apply a complicated technique to it, instead of really understanding the basic problem at hand. This approach is not necessarily borne from poor intentions: I may be excited to apply something I learned for a class, or think of an interesting new way to approach the problem. But was the added complexity essential to solve the problem? Probably not. As such, many times when I’ve come to Professor Zeckhauser with what I think is an exciting, complex, solution, he has listened carefully to my reasoning and then completely overturned my idea with a much simpler way to do things.”

Sometimes we take refuge in complexity to avoid the analytical work that might be helpful to solve a challenging problem. But as W. Kip Viscusi suggests, this is a grave mistake. Kip is a professor at Vanderbilt University who credits Richard with turning him into an economist when Richard supervised his undergraduate and PhD dissertations more than forty years ago. He has published more than thirty books and 300 articles (many coauthored with Richard), focusing primarily on risk and uncertainty. He recalls using this maxim in the context of analyses where some components cannot be precisely estimated. “Rather than do a reasoned analysis, some people would rather pronounce the problem as being too complex and not amenable to analytic tools. I have found that this maxim is pertinent to almost every risk and environmental regulation issue. The coronavirus crisis of 2020 is the most recent example of where the maxim comes into play. Some have suggested that the estimates of the illness risks and the likely economic consequences are too uncertain to even think about doing an analysis. But this is exactly the kind of situation in which thinking analytically is likely to yield the greatest dividends.”

This embrace of simplicity can also be useful in moving projects forward. Scott Leland, who directs a research center at the Harvard Kennedy School, says Richard uses the simplicity maxim with the senior fellows that come to the Kennedy School for a short period (typically a year). “Our fellows begin the program wanting to write a book on macroeconomic policy, or financial regulation, or healthcare. Their initial efforts are often mired in complexity. Richard has them pick a small but important subtopic and recommends: ‘say something interesting.’ That will become a stand-alone paper. Oftentimes, that’s enough to be a successful fellow. If they write three or four of those, they have chapters that might lead them back to their original goal of writing a book.” Scott adds, “I use versions of this maxim all the time. If I’m planning a meeting, start anywhere – start simply – and build. If I’m planning a project, strip it down to the bare essentials – the simplest case – and flesh out the details as you go.”

The simplicity maxim is important when asking questions to understand the work of others. Ted Parson, a former colleague and coauthor of Richard’s and now a professor at UCLA, said, “Figuring out a simple way to ask something helps get your own thinking clear. Just do the calculation of the potential benefits and costs of asking a simple question, which might be perceived as a stupid question. The downside risk of asking the stupid question is that listeners unfavorably update their prior impressions, and you experience a moment of embarrassment. Both downsides are remediable and pass quickly even on the occasions when you don’t successfully remediate them. The upside benefit is that you actively clarify your own understanding in a way you can’t always achieve without the effort to put it into words. Moreover, you clarify the issue for bystanders; you might help yourself and others gain a new insight; and you gain the gratitude of those others who were also confused. Particularly once you consider the habitual biases against taking little risks, the balance almost always favors asking the question. You also gain a little admiration from others for your courage, but that’s an undeserved bonus: they only think it took courage because they didn’t think through this calculation.”

Gary Orren, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, says that the simplicity maxim is violated more than it is followed. “It is common sense, but not common practice. Why is the simplicity maxim easy to understand, but hard to do? For one thing, the issues we work on are often complex—how to deliver affordable high-quality health care, preserve national security in a world with nefarious non-state actors, or manage a globalized economy. Such issues are not easy to simplify concisely. Furthermore, we were actually taught to violate the KISS principle in school. When we were asked in a history exam ‘why did the Roman Empire fall?’ typically we wrote furiously away, filling as many bluebooks as possible. We then let the instructor search for the three or four key points buried in our brain dump. Maybe we were awarded an A in school for that, but we won’t get an A in the real world with that approach. We cannot take refuge in complexity and bulk. Our audiences will not edit our thinking and communications for us. We must edit, that is, simplify them ourselves.”

Simplicity in coaching baseball

Gary Orren:

I may have first learned about the power of simplicity on baseball fields, growing up playing baseball in the Midwest and then coaching Little League teams in New England. Is the hardest thing to do in sports hitting a pitched baseball, as Ted Williams once observed? I tried to teach boys on my teams how to hit a baseball. I vividly remember one summer early in my coaching career when I read several books on the science of hitting, including Ted Williams’ popular guide. I then prepared and delivered to the team a comprehensive presentation complete with illustrations and diagrams. The following week I was traveling out of town, so my assistant coach took my place at the team practice. He innocently asked the boys what they recalled from my presentation the week before. He witnessed blank stares and heard a few mumbles of “I don’t know.” My presentation was a blur.

When I returned home, I contacted my assistant and asked him how the practice had gone. He told me the truth. He reported that the boys had implicitly given me a flunking grade. Once I recovered from this embarrassing grade report, I admitted to myself that I had overwhelmed them with too much detail. Hitting a baseball that is hurled at you at high speed from a relatively close distance is a daunting task involving a myriad of complicated factors. My thinking and my presentation had been hijacked by all this complexity. I had sprayed a fog gun into the dugout.

I sat down to prepare a new presentation. It was time for me to get my thinking and my teaching straight. The simplicity principle was my lodestar and salvation. At the next team practice I decided to concentrate on the three factors I thought were most important. “It’s all about the three Hs: Hands, Hips, and Head.” Hands: how you grip the bat with your hands and where you hold your hands in relation to your torso. Hips: how you orient your hips toward the pitcher and swivel them as you swing. Head: how you keep your eyes on the ball all the time, from watching it in the pitcher’s hand to trying to see it touch your bat. Hands, Hips, and Head. That became our mantra. I simplified the complexities of hitting a baseball into its three core elements. They were digestible and sticky.

By the way, a corollary of the simplicity principle is the Rule of Three. Scholarly research studies and anecdotal evidence attest to the special power of three. (For example, all around the world, people say “On your mark, get set, go.”) That season our baseball team won the championship for 11-year-old boys in their division of the Newton, Massachusetts, Little League.

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