Complexity

How Complexity Influences People.

The growing complexity in computer science and electronics influences everyone.

Computer manufacturers use the complexity of their product to mislead their consumers. They emphasize the cpu in their products and point out how fast their spinning disk hard drive is. This misdirects the consumer from reality. The customer is pushed away from realizing that maybe spinning disk hard drives aren’t in the same speed class as cheap ssd’s, or from that beyond a midrange cpu, the cpu doesn’t play nearly as much of a factor as it might seem.

There’s no incentive to help the consumer understand what they are doing. If anything, the incentive is to mislead consumers. And this practice misleading happens in most industries with complex products and services. Complexity shouldn’t be this big of a barrier to effective consumer decisions. Computer sale could be put down to a simple 4-5 pointers based on what the consumer wants to do with it. Something like an important component graph:

moving large files -> ssd media creation -> ssd gpu cpu word processing/mail/videochat -> anything/chromebook gaming -> gpu cpu ram ssd

Obviously, I don’t know everything here, but I think a sticker or poster with this kind of information at computer stores would save a lot of frustration with hardware. Many customer’s computer angst starts before they turn on their own computer.

This kind of abuse of customer trust is too prevalent in the tech industry.

Other industries that I’m aware of similar practices:

• Consumer audio
• Healthy food companies
• News, particularly political news
• Research publications
• Nevermind, pretty much every industry, but definitely some more than others.

Sometimes I think that information just moves too fast with no filters for quality. As the complexity of the world increases, the skills required to discern between quality information and garbage information disappears. Quality information now has to desguise itself as fluff to be seen by anyone. Kind of makes me think that disconnecting entirely is becoming the only option. Hopefully there will be a new service that restricts both speed and quantity of information to insure a reasonable quality of information. Just enough to start a conversation, but not too much as to give people headaches.