Most problems have elegant, easy solutions?

Question

yet we make things complicated because we (humans) don't have all the information we need. Do you agree?

Bradley P: If you had the knowledge to earn large sums of money (legally), and had the ability to act on that knowledge, wouldn't that change your situation? The problem may have started from complication, yet the solution may be simple. (p.s., I am not offering the solution, or I would take it myself!!)

ikiraf: History repeats itself because people l feel people lack the information on how to solve their problems. Who would spend one second under a tyrant if they knew how to become free and prosperous?

vonhiggins: The puzzleman indeed knows the elegance in the problem. I am a man of faith. so I believe the puzzlemaster to be God. I have always felt like we were in some sort of lab.

Answer 1

Nope, I don't agree, sorry.

The problem with this question is that it fails to adjust for time and time-related factors. Simply put, it isn't just that *I* may make my life complicated, but rather that I also have *centuries of* complexity piled up behind me in a backlog that may or may not ever get resolved.

And sometimes that complexity doesn't stem from lack of information, so much as it does from lack of *self-control* or basic human decency, which in turn makes messes that require some complexity to clean up.

More specifically....I'm dirt poor (online only because my computer is donated). I've been fighting that all my life, with little to no success.

One consequence of this is that for the time being I live in public housing. At any given moment, 70-80% of my neighbors will be African-American (there is some turnover as people move in and out of the building). This can make matters complicated whether I have *all* of the information I need or not, just because *other people* don't necessarily have all the info *they* need...and also because there is a prior context, like I said earlier, that is *several centuries* old.

Why? Because in spite of my efforts to be a decent human being....I'm a white guy. Which means people assume things based on the probable historical misconduct of my own ancestors. To put it as politely and tersely as possible. People (of color, in my building) who don't know me either *assume* I will be a jerk (follow historical precedent) or just don't have *time* to deal with me because no matter what *I myself* do, my mere presence represents a *complication* to them.

And that is just *one* small example, one of the more straightforward ones actually. I spend about half of my time on Yahoo Answers here going on about some of the others. Point is, I can make *my own* life as simple as I can....and yet, the complexity has an inertia of its own courtesy of my father's decisions, my mother's decisions, my nation's decisions, on and on. There's a backlog, or at least an undertow, to it.

People don't exist, in a vacuum, outside of the contexts of time. We are at once *systems* unto ourselves, as well as *parts of* many overlapping *other* systems. And things both change with time, and *add up* with time as well.

Edit: But again you ignore the consequences of *time*. When I was younger I *thought* I had an Answer--stay in school, get the education, get the grades, do the work, get a Bachelor's Degree and get a "good job". However....in the time it took for me to *execute* that Plan, that Answer, *Times Changed*. People moved the target. The job I was aiming at largely *disappeared*, it either got outsourced or eliminated entirely in the name of seeking "more productivity".

And this sort of thing happens all the time on a larger scale too. Consider the "New Economy" for a moment. For well over a decade, business people were treating the internet and Web-based business as The Next Big Thing and as a "this changes everything" kind of paradigm shift. They were...

Until corporate malfeasance in the form of "cooked bookkeeping" shook people's confidence, until Resident Dubya started to blather *on and on* about "this here's a *bubble* folks", and until Big Banking and Big Oil teamed up to Just Say No, quite thoroughly and massively (whether you believe they were behind 9-11 or not...changes in Bankruptcy laws attacked the *possibility* of ordinary people earning wealth, and the whole "war on terror" business shoved Big Oil and its demands *front and center*).

Point is....chances come, yes, but they also *go*. Causes and effects change, and *time* is the calculus by which we make *sense* out of changes happening "now" and at times "not now", so to speak.

I hope this helps, or at least makes sense. ^_^ Thanks for your time!

Answer 2

"Most" is redundant, insoluable, and inelegant. Logic dwells in the uncultivated matter, not in "information". Consider a difficult solution as viewed by the credulous observer, the one who lets another solve the problem. It is the puzzle-man who KNOWS the elegance in the problem. The aesthete blinks at the finished thing and is quite satisfied with the solution.

Answer 3

No... we humans are Cluster-F@#ks anyways!!! Problems would not be problem if they had elegant easy solutions..., because if we had such information, the so called "problems" would not exist to be defined as problems...!!!
What part of this is not obvious? That is why we are not divine!

Note: not all problems have simple, elegant, or easy solutions. Some problems require complex answers. And others have no solution... they just are! Such is the human condition. I feel you have not read much history.

Answer 4

ar is accel of raptor vr is speed of raptor dr is distance traveled by employing raptor vy is speed of you dy is distance traveled by employing you. ar = 6 m/s^2 vr = ar t + vro = ar t vr = 4 t upto max of 25 m/s tmax is 25 = 4 tmax tmax = 25/4 sec dr = ar t^2/2 + dro dro = -40 : ar = 6 m/s^2 dr(tmax) = 4 (25/4)^2 - 40 dr(tmax) = 625/4 -40 = 116.25 m vy = 6 m/s dy = 6 t dy(tmax) = 6 (25/6) = 25 m : he has already have been given you so dr = dy 4 (t)^2 - 40 = 6 t 4 t^2 - 6 t - 40 =0 2 t^2 - 3t - 20 = 0 (2 t +5)(t- 4) = 0 t = 4 and discard t = -5/2 he gets you in 4 seconds dy = 6 (4) = 24 m

Answer 5

One must believe there is a problem for a problem to exist, if there are no problems, solutions aren't necessary; only choices and actions taken towards the final inevitabilty.

Answer 6

I believe so... we try to solve problems with knowledge missing the main ingredient wisdom.

Chandra A

Answer 7

You can fix a dent by denting it. Infinite recursion. Infinite recursion can be construed as a simple elegant idea.

So it might depend on how you define things.

Answer 8

We make things complicated to impress other people

Answer 9

Got to justify my pay,