I disagree with the article. I think it is always possible to come up with reasonably small theories that capture most of the given phenomena. So in a sense, you don't need complex theories in the form of large NNs (models? functions? programs?), other than for more precise prediction.

For example - global warming. It's nice to have AOGCMs that have everything and the carbon sink in them. But if you want to understand, a two layer model of atmosphere with CO2 and water vapor feedback will do a decent job, and gives similar first-order predictions.

I also don't think poverty is a complex problem, but that's a minor point.

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pdonis a day ago | parent | next [-]

> I also don't think poverty is a complex problem, but that's a minor point.

I'm not sure it's a minor point. I don't think poverty is a "complex" problem either, as that term is used in the article, but that doesn't mean I think it fits into one of the other two categories in the article. I think it is in a fourth category that the article doesn't even consider.

For lack of a better term, I'll call that category "political". The key thing with this category of problems is that they are about fundamental conflicts of interest and values, and that's a different kind of problem from the kind the article talks about. We don't have poverty in the world because we lack accurate enough knowledge of how to create the wealth that brings people out of poverty. We have poverty in the world because there are people in positions of power all over the world who literally don't care about ending poverty, and who subvert attempts to do so--who make a living by stealing wealth instead of creating it, and don't care that that means making lots of other people poor.

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JackFr 20 hours ago | parent [-]

When all of humanity was hunting and gathering and living at subsistence levels, the was no poverty. It only shows up with wealth.

Pretty simple.

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DoctorOetker 16 hours ago | parent [-]

This.

Every sedentary society has historically scared its members of the dangers of the nomadic lifestyle, heathens, ...

The implied conclusion being that since our ancestors switched from nomadic to sedentary it must have been preferable, a kind of informal democratic collectively and individually approved choice.

Surely sedentary must have been better, how else could such a transition have been sustained?

Rather easy how else: its perfectly possible for average or mean life quality under sedentary lifestyle to be a net setback compared to nomadic lifestyle, since slavery can't be effectively implemented in a nomadic lifestyle, whereas the sedentary lifestyle creates both the demand for labor (routine monotonous work in the fields) and the means to enable slavery (escaping nomadic tribes under Brownian motion is much easier than escaping from a randomly assigned position deep in a larger sedentary empire, even if you escape the sedentary village, the stable neighbouring village will happily return you to "your owner" so that he would hopefully return the favor if ever he catches one of "their slaves").

It's easy to claim a net improvement in life quality ... by discounting the loss of life quality of the slaves!

Nomadic lifestyle was simply outcompeted by sedentary-enabled slavery!

	▲	pdonis 15 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> even if you escape the sedentary village, the stable neighbouring village will happily return you to "your owner" so that he would hopefully return the favor if ever he catches one of "their slaves") Tell that to all the people who ran the Underground Railroad in the pre-Civil War US, not to mention all the other ways that Fugitive Slave laws were persistently violated. I think you are vastly underestimating the benefits of a modern "sedentary" society. But as I pointed out in my other post, if you really don't think they're benefits, then you can simply forgo them. Go and live an off grid subsistence lifestyle. There are people who do that. But of course they don't post on the Internet.
	▲	pdonis 15 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If you think a subsistence nomadic lifestyle is preferable to a modern "sedentary" one, then how are you able to post here? Subsistence nomads don't have Internet access (to name just one of umpteen things we "sedentary" moderns have access to that they don't). There are ways to live off grid if you really think it's preferable.

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munificent 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I think it is always possible to come up with reasonably small theories that capture most of the given phenomena.

I can write a program (call it a simulation of some artificial phenomenon) whose internal logic is arbitrarily complex. The result is irreducible: the entire byzantine program with all of its convoluted logic is the smallest possible theory to describe the phenomenon, and yet the theory is not reasonably small for any reasonable definition.

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js8 21 hours ago | parent [-]

That's true but I can still approximate what the system does with a simpler model. For example, I can split states of the system into n distinct groups, and measure transition probabilities between them.

Thermodynamics is a classic example of a phenomenological model like that.

	▲	munificent 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> That's true but I can still approximate what the system does with a simpler model. For any strategy you might apply to do that, I can craft a program that similates a phenomenon that defies that strategy.