Quote of The Day: Arrogance and Simplicity

I’m reading about the Grameen Bank now and came across this gem in Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty by Muhammad Yunus, describing what he learned from his economics mentor, professor Georgescu-Roegen at Vanderbilt:

He also taught me that things are never as complicated as they seem. It is only our arrogance that prompts us to find unnecessarily complicated answers to simple problems.

The statement is true in many contexts, especially in my experience in technology. Sometimes we spend a lot of time devising a clever solution when a much simpler, less elegant approach would have worked faster, more effectively, and more directly. But technologists are always thinking about the big picture, scalability, repeatability, etc. and we don’t trust “easy” fixes. There must be a catch. “That works now, but what if [insert improbable scenario here] happens?

We want to stamp our own creativity on solutions, to make them ours, to feel that our own unique brilliance is part of the solution. It’s a weakness of character we have to constantly watch for because sometimes, everyone is too busy ignoring the obvious solution and nothing ever gets done.