People have a hard time with complexity. But we can’t just cut things out of context and call that simplicity.
People like simple.
In fact, we like it so much, that we’re willing to ignore reality to make everything “fit”.
It’s like we’re tearing some paper, throwing half away, and pretending everything important was on the side we kept. This month’s data is there, but the year-to-date? Nah. We’re just gonna believe we’ve got everything we need.
Complexity’s a hard sell.
One of the problems with explaining the complexity of life is that complexity isn’t attractive. We desire for things to be more simple.
Honestly, we say “it’s complicated” and half of the people are already zoned out.
We really do need to figure out how to make things more simple.
So we cheat.
We often think of simplicity as streamlining or only doing what is essential. In many contexts, this is true.
But for many other contexts, the situation is far less easy to reduce. What we’re actually doing is taking short cuts that don’t always take us to where we should be going.
And sometimes, the only way to make things simple is to break them. The complex can’t be reduced. So we just pretend that it can be. And then do it anway.
A lot of what passes for obvious in our world today is inseparable from misinformation. Because we’re often running on only some of the information.
We mistake partial for simple.
A partial truth may be easier to understand. And spread. But it is hardly better than deception.
Real truth takes real work to simplify.
Physicists work hard to reduce complex computations and generations of study so that you and I can figure out whether a car counts as “fast”. Medical professionals use decades of training and experience to help us understand whether a bump is something we should worry about.
The words scrolling on the ticker of cable news? Almost always the wrong kind of simple. The same may often be said of politicians pontificating or randos on the internet. But not always.
Real vs. Fake Simplicity
Spotting the difference between real simplicity and the fake stuff is less a matter of who is speaking or why. Some experts are quacks. And many politicians actually do follow the data. People can be biased and genuine. Just as they can be unbiased and unreliable.
If someone’s “hot take” makes more sense the more you add to it, chances are it is solid.
Most misinformation or disinformation is predicated on stripping a story of its context or anything that is inconvenient. But they almost always wilt at expanding the context or dealing with all of the data (not just the stuff they’ve cherrypicked).
Because life isn’t simple. But we’re all just trying to make it make more sense. And some of those short cuts to make things make sense? They often tend to leave out the details they don’t really want to deal with.
Throwing handfuls of truth in the trash doesn’t make it disappear. But it does make it hard for us all to actually deal with it.