Overthinking

Well, my pizza solution would have been to find a measuring tape and divide the circumference by eleven with your phone calculator ;)

But is it our problem to over think everything. School, university, bureaucracy, everything we encounter in life pushes us into that direction.

Probably to stop us from getting killed. Something evolutionary...

Even in the movie 3 Idiots, at the end of the movie, the man with the pen points out that there's a reason for the complexity: bits of graphite flying around in zero gravity near instrument panels and people's eyes, etc.

Simplicity is great, but sometimes complexity is warranted. More importantly, assuming other smart people (many other smart people) are wrong without deep thought is not a good idea.

I totally want to work on an augmented reality cake divider now. Point phone at cake to get a divider overlay.

Who cares about pens and pencils, use an ipad :)

Overthinking leads to over-enginnering, because humans aren't great at knowing what to do with all the free time we'd have if we did our job in 10% of the time :) Perhaps overthinking is required to keep us busy. Even though we all claim our time is money, in reality most get paid by the hour and not by the amount of work that has been accomplished. Plus complexity gives more weight to what we do, allowing us to claim that there's no shortcut to where we're going. That degree, that level of experience, are all job requirements that protect us.

Experienced entrepreneurs often fall for this trap. Too much prior knowledge of a particular industry leads them to quickly find faults in most ideas, and the just-do-it attitude that leads to simple approaches that stun everyone slowly fades.

The part about the string made me smile a bit, because I guess there aren't too many climbers on Quora. As any salty old trad climber knows, it only takes a couple of wraps around an object before the rope (or string in this case) becomes fixed to the object.

So unless you're lucky, the process would actually look like: take string, make space between thumb and index finger, wrap some number of ... oh, darn, it didn't come out even at all ... rats, can't move my fingers ... OK, start over, let's make the fingers a little farther apart ... wait, rats, didn't get 11 even wraps that time either ...

(I experimented with this before posting my comment, just in case.)

Or you could, y'know, take the string, measure the circumference, divide by 11. Or, you could throw away the string, take the diameter of pizza -- which is written in black marker on a tin or cardboard round and displayed on the wall at every pizza joint I've ever been to, I think -- and multiply by 3 and divide by 11 and space your cuts about that far apart.

There's a lot of good stuff out there on the benefits of "thinking like a child" -- learning to clear your mind of the preconceptions and opinions and expectations that we tend to develop as we get older. I don't think this post was a step in that direction, though.