Simple Ideas
The most common sin of intelligent minds is complexity. A simple idea just feels not enough. This happens when status starts meddling with real discovery. Imagine if all research you published, or any engineering achievement you made, was never attributed to you—you’d just state the obvious every time.
Poor Charlie’s Almanack is my favourite book. At the back of it is an insightful quote.
Charlie Munger
There is an old two-part rule that often works wonders in business, science, and elsewhere:
- Take a simple, basic idea; and
- Take it very seriously.
What causes intelligent people to bias towards ever more complex ideas? I’d argue it’s status. If you’re intelligent, you have all this institutional backing, you have so many eyes on you. There is a lot of fear in coming up to the stage and communicating a very simple idea, and getting an “Okay, and?” response.
You’re trying to start a multi-billion-dollar company, and you go to an investor and say, “We’ll just sell at the cheapest markup and make money through memberships”? Fuck no—how can you make that much money through such a simple business model? Well, Costco can. Just take a simple idea seriously, and it’ll do you wonders. The world is already complicated as is.
Complex ideas make you feel safe. It’s hard to know if you’re wrong with complex ideas, and people don’t like being wrong. Complex ideas have so many moving parts that they are often untestable in practice.
On a similar note:
I argue chasing contrarian ideas is the same disease. It’s more for looks than for the pursuit of truth.
I see an increasing number of people chasing “contrarian,” “non-obvious” ideas, especially in the startup space. This is quite unfortunate. There is no point chasing contrarian ideas for the sake of being contrarian. The point isn’t to be different; the point is to be different and correct.
An idea being simple or obvious doesn’t make it any less useful or any less true. Obvious ideas should be stated.