Simplifiers and Complexifiers

There are, apparently, STEM people and humanities people. However, I often find this distinction unhelpful.

The pure mathematicians "feel" much closer to the English lit people who do analyze poems, and the most quantitative of psychologists or sociologists or political scholars to be much closer to the economist, or the physicist.

I claim the line does not actually divide along subject matters at all. Instead, a much more meaningful distinction is the simplifiers and the complexifiers.

The simplifiers seek to try and predict the world, while the complexifiers seek to understand the world in all its nuances. The simplifiers love building simple, predictive models.

This is, like everything, a spectrum, though. And, like many spectra, a horseshoe model of sorts exists — the extremes wrap around. The logicians are, in some sense, the purest simplifiers (it doesn't get more simple than the axiomatic building blocks), but there is something so wonderfully "nuance-capturing" in trying to get all of the edge cases.

Contrast this with machine learning, so on the extreme "simplification" approach, that the field is founded on the fundamental belief (bitterly learned) that we will not understand what is going on, and we must sacrifice our understanding at the altar of larger magic boxes. Lacks the elegance of physics, say, but predicts really damn well.

The complexifiers, by and large, think that there is no understanding the world without all its nuances. If you're not careful, such attitudes can lead to dangerous "everything-bagelism" — of course you can't solve a problem without "nuance" — and thus considering all the systematic issues — and trying to solve everything with everything.

I'm personally a "humanities person" (I enjoy writing, thinking about history and economics and politics and humans), but with a very simplifier like approach — I find simple, predictive theories so elegant. Even more so, when they explain such complex phenomena as human behavior. Some forms of political analysis do this well — think of Trump's policy as in pursuit of "first-order greatness." Or PG's "write simply." Or the gravity model of economic trade (which predicted the existence of real cities underground).