alt Hacker NewsI’ve long held the opinion that humans ‘over’-value complexity. It’s why we can spend so much time tasting, analyzing, and enjoying fancy coffee or whisky - despite the fact that almost everyone is repulsed by them the first time they try them. Literature might be the same?
To be clear, I enjoy all three!
Replies
The simpler pleasures and pains of life are easier to speak to and we have a lot more (proportionally) media that reflects those experiences. Particular media does it better and worse and so there's a hierarchy, but if you are looking to have your enjoyment of good food and drink reflected in a story that's pretty easy to find.
But life is often more complex than that and it requires great skill to accurately reflect that complexity in creative works. When you're struggling with an experience that is difficult to talk about and understand, a creative work that seems to "get it" can be really valuable in sorting out how to think about that experience. I rarely need help in describing how much I like coffee, but I welcome good writing on the subject of "how should one understand the mixed experience of being very close to someone who you often disagree with."
To add on - complexity itself is a perceptual feature introduced by language - we treat and describe things as though they are made of an unimaginable number of tiny parts. So this also increases the fun of the wordy wine/coffee/whisky descriptions!
Don't forget software engineering
I get your idea but I wonder about the construction of this argument:
Is it the complexity itself people value, or the rewards of things that are complex? IME, the most valuable things are complex. Maybe that's because there is not enough capacity in simplicity to contain exceptional value (speaking very generally and loosely - we really need to define terms).
Also, I certainly think people value complex things, but I strongly disagree that they are over-valued. All the best things in my life seem complex.
I could imagine that complexity stimulates the brain in a different way and that adds to reward.
Good writing isn't complex for complexity's sake though. Mistaking complexity for quality is the most common mistake when it comes to writing — and I allege one central reason why many people like and trust LLM output.
I'd argue that complexity is not even the right word to describe what the author describes. Thickness or depth is more accurate.