Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

2025-03-04   mentalmodel extremelyimportant sketch

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"–Leonardo da Vinci

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler—Einstein

• Brooks' No Silver Bullet essay touches to the same thing.
  

  • Essential (irreducible) and Accidental (reducible) complexity
    

"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• also see What can we remove? by Steph Ango (archived)
  

"Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better."–Edsger Dijkstra

• also see Merchants of Complexity
  

• saw the quote in https://1mb.club/about/
  

"Simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability."–Edsger Dijkstra

"Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple."–Steve Jobs

"You can always recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity."–Richard Feynman

Elon Musk's 5 step engineering process rightly involves simplification and removal of non-essentials

• step 2: delete parts
  

• step 3: simplify and optimize
  

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