How to avoid complexity in life and business? - himanshu

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How to avoid complexity in life and business?

himanshu<br>Aug 12, 2026

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Complexity is a state with high entropy. Something is complex only because there is either high uncertainty/too many possible explanations/outcomes. Wherever a situation involves the use of word many or something similar, that situation is complex.

For example :<br>question: How many men robbed you, Sir?<br>A: There were too many of them. They all wore different clothes.<br>B: There was only 1 guy, 6 feet tall with a scar on his right cheek.

You see, if the police went out looking for person B, they’d simply try to find someone who matches the description. But if they went out looking for A men, then it’d be impossible to find everyone.

I guess u get the point. But does this mean that if there are too many of something then the situation/state is unsolvable? Nope. You see, a modern computer is made of billions of tiny NAND gates :

This small gate can create every other logic gate required to build a computer. Such a simple electronic equipment creates a device that does emails, plays music, create art, watch fifa etc. It’s not that the whole machine is not complex. It is. But at it’s simplest form it’s just a bunch of circuits glued together.

This is a very reductionist approach, many would say. And I don’t disagree if you think that many complex things in life are simple with reduction and become complex with emergent properties. Like AI is just a bunch neural nets, made fundamentally using a single neuron which is glued together with trillions of other neurons. But the intelligence of that complex structure was hard to predict before we stitched them together. The intelligence is an emergent phenomenon. Just like hydrogen and oxygen are not wet, yet the water which is 2 hydrogen and 1 oxygen molecule, is WET.

Things with different properties when combined can lead to creating something with an entirely different set of properties.

So to avoid complexity in life and business, one must first recognize the kind of uncertainty he/she is dealing with. Once that’s done if it’s a reductionist idea then he must get to the bottom of the thing, get to the core to understand it better and solve it. If it’s a emergent idea then one must go through all possible paths and back-propagate to reduce the error for future outcomes.

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