This world is extremely complex and deceptively simple.

Yes, I started with world, but I want to talk about more down-to-earth things.

Many things in our modern life, like electricity, water supply system, heating. The final product can be simple enough, but whole process of producing and delivering is not.

Talent could be very simple from outer perspective, but people mistake the lucky boost and forget about days of practice. You just can’t see it.

Our brains. Connections of neurons, that’s it. Parts responsible for some work. Simple model? Yes. In reality it’s complex as hell.

Human lives. Same cycle, same growing stages. But billions of details.

Legal system consists of individual laws almost anyone can read and understand. Multiply it, add additional layers – interaction between laws, exceptions, precedents. All layers are simple, if you can decompose them. Complexity in layers, in composition.

Even if you can see parts of it and glue connecting those parts, it could be very difficult to understand the whole system.

Sometimes complexity lies in history. Something works on understandable concept, which works on understandable concept, which… It’s simple, because we know each concept already. For example, food preservation and cooking. We know salt preserves, heat kills bacteria, fermentation works. But each concept was discovered separately.

So complexity could be in different forms and types. And we shouldn’t forget about it.

And what’s wrong with it? Nothing. Abstraction layers are good for understanding. Simplicity is a design goal.

Our brains cannot hold full complexity of anything simultaneously. So it has to compress. A light switch is just a light switch, not electrons and grid infrastructure.

But there’s a difference between using a simple model and mistaking it for the whole system. Hiding complexity is good, forgetting about it – that’s where problems start.

The most dangerous place to forget this is other people. You could easily apply some simple model on any human and forget about details.