COMPLEX AND LOVE

When the Tatum kept spinning in the climax of the movie Inception, I’m pretty damn sure none of us have understood the movie altogether. But, we boasted like its one of the best movies in cinema history. Yes, indeed it is one of the best movies. But why do we like that we don’t understand? Why do we like it, even if the plot is so complicated?

When we, writers/bloggers, began writing we would have used more passive voice in our writing (I did so). In our perspective, writing ‘Being a complex solution, deciphering it is an uphill struggle’ would have sounded more intelligent than writing just ‘It is a complex solution and it is difficult to understand’. We would have thought that using passive voice and jargon makes readers think that ‘the writer really knows the stuff’. This phenomenon of preferring complexity over simplicity is called Complexity bias.

Marketing strategies make use of our complexity bias extensively. We tend to pick a hair dye with the label ammonia-free than the other one that hasn’t. We prefer organic eggs over the normal ones. Many of us won’t even know the significance of ammonia-free or organic. Anything you sell by labelling it as Herbal or Ayurvedic, people will buy it. The more jargon you use in the label, the more will be the sales.

There is a fact that ‘Humans are pattern-seeking animals and we are skilled at finding patterns whether they exist or not’. Rabbit in the sky, Orion in stars, snake in fingerprint, Ghost in Ink spill, etc., etc. Whether the cloud intentionally shapes itself as rabbit, whether stars place themselves to form Orion, doesn’t matter. We believe its a rabbit or Orion or snake cause we see the pattern.

Your life is different from mine. Today I use a giant driller to bore a well in my backyard. The same day you feel a slight 2.0 Richter earthquake in your locality. It is a simple two step event. Our pattern seeking trait instantly connects these two steps and comes to a conclusion that I caused the earthquake in your locality by using a giant driller.

Except the fact that I live in India and you live in The USA! Without this key fact, the pattern definitely makes sense. But it doesn’t make it true!

Our world is a chaos. Independent events always occur at random. But we never see the world that way. Our pattern seeking trait links such innumerable independent events and forms a logical pattern to satisfy our affinity with complex. In simple words, Complex is an order we found in disorder (chaos).

Such a complex pattern will be more than just convincing and an infinite number of people would actually believe in that. In a chaotic world, collecting the key facts is impossible. Until you hear the fact, the complicated pattern would entirely make sense. This is how conspiracy theories are born. Conspiracy theories are the ultimate desires of our love with complexity.

We boast Inception, because we love complexity!

We prefer jargon, because we love complexity!

We give birth to conspiracy theories, because we love complexity!

Complexity feels like progress. Complexity makes us feel like we are a step ahead of the common mob. But it goes hand in hand with difficulty. Without a regular maintenance the complexity will perish. Though each part contributes little to the complexity, a slice to my single nerve would cause a major damage to my complex body.

Complexity is in our DNA! We cannot remove it, but we can simplify!

“LIFE IS REALLY SIMPLE, BUT WE INSIST ON MAKING IT COMPLICATED.”

– Confucius

P.S : I hope this post is not complicated 😉

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