Feynman’s Razor

> Maybe adjusting some straps and seat positions is more intuitive than digging for advanced options. Maybe it's significantly more difficult to surface options in digital mediums without introducing friction as a side-effect, because you're always fighting over screen real estate and screen legibility, instead of being able to just add a latch on the strap that's there when you need it and invisible when you don't

You design a different car to win F1 races, to take a couch across town, to drive a family on a weekend trip, to win rally races, to haul a boat … but in software we don’t want to do that. We want everything to do everything because “niche” markets are too small for companies to keep growing into the stratosphere.

See also: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. (zawinski's law)

I still wouldn't call it a razor.

A razor is when you have a large number of potential explanations and want a simple rule to check if it worth further scrutiny. Occam's razor is the most famous, it says that the simplest explanation is probably the right one, Hanlon's razor is another one, it says that stupidity is more likely than malice.

Here it is just a guideline "don't dumb down", but there is no simple rule that tells if a message is dumb or not. For example, in the topic of science, a razor could be "numbers without error bars are dumb". It only takes a few seconds to see or not to see error bars, so you can quickly drop the ones without to focus on those that have.

I get the feeling that there’s an inverse correlation between the number of people that think the military is a competent meritocracy and the number of people that actually served in the military.

It’s a giant government bureaucracy, with plenty of stupid internal politics, and gross incompetency. No better or worse than any other large organization.

Funny, I always thought Feynman's Razor was along these lines (from 1979 QED lectures in New Zealand, response to audience question):

> Q: "Do you like the idea that our picture of the world has to be based on a calculation which involves probability?"

> A: "...if I get right down to it, I don't say I like it and I don't say I don't like it. I got very highly trained over the years to be a scientist and there's a certain way you have to look at things. When I give a talk I simplify a little bit, I cheat a little bit to make it sound like I don't like it. What I mean is it's peculiar. But I never think, this is what I like and this is what I don't like, I think this is what it is and this is what it isn't. And whether I like it or I don't like it is really irrelevant and believe it or not I have extracted it out of my mind. I do not even ask myself whether I like it or I don't like it because it's a complete irrelevance."

As far as complexity and how to explain things to people without technical experience of the subject, the rabbit hole always goes deeper. Here's a nice quote from the rotation in space section of the caltech lectures:

> "We shall not use these equations in all their generality and study all their consequences, because this would take many years, and we must soon turn to other subjects. In an introductory course we can present only the fundamental laws and apply them to a very few situations of special interest."

> My favorite comment was from lisper...

Cool! Someone noticed me!

:-)

(I find this noteworthy because I've been putting all this effort into writing a series of blog posts about the scientific method and I've gotten very little feedback on that. But this little throwaway comment, that gets attention! Life is funny sometimes.)