I think people overcomplicate explanations because they don’t arrive to the truth immediately (e.g. by enumerating all possible answers, ordered by length) but basically by semi-randomly walking in a maze of hypotheses and finally stumbling upon the truth—so their path is not necessarily the shortest path.
(Later people travel the maze more, and notice shortcuts.)
Like, someone considers an option A, it is wrong, but seems kinda correlated. So afterwards they try “A and B”, and it works. They don’t notice that B alone would have worked too, because they are coming there from A.
(But later someone is too lazy and tried B alone, or they forget the A part, and they find out it works anyway.)
Sometimes you just find a better perspective. For example, imaginary numbers were invented as solutions to polynomials, but if you think about them as 2D coordinates, it is much easier. That’s because when people tried to solve polynomials for the first time, it wasn’t obvious that the answer will be somehow two-dimensional, but it turned out that it is. Starting with two dimensions is intuitive, then you add the geometric interpretation of complex multiplication (multiplying by i means doing it rotated by 90 degrees) and you are done.
I think people overcomplicate explanations because they don’t arrive to the truth immediately (e.g. by enumerating all possible answers, ordered by length) but basically by semi-randomly walking in a maze of hypotheses and finally stumbling upon the truth—so their path is not necessarily the shortest path.
(Later people travel the maze more, and notice shortcuts.)
Like, someone considers an option A, it is wrong, but seems kinda correlated. So afterwards they try “A and B”, and it works. They don’t notice that B alone would have worked too, because they are coming there from A.
(But later someone is too lazy and tried B alone, or they forget the A part, and they find out it works anyway.)
Sometimes you just find a better perspective. For example, imaginary numbers were invented as solutions to polynomials, but if you think about them as 2D coordinates, it is much easier. That’s because when people tried to solve polynomials for the first time, it wasn’t obvious that the answer will be somehow two-dimensional, but it turned out that it is. Starting with two dimensions is intuitive, then you add the geometric interpretation of complex multiplication (multiplying by i means doing it rotated by 90 degrees) and you are done.