Complications

An expensive Swiss watch will have lots of "complications"; those wonderfully engineered elements of the device that adds fascination, status and costs, but make no difference to its essential function of telling the time.

As a general rule, professionals from lawyers to bureaucrats thrive on "complications." In a delicate dance, they take something basic, wrap it in layers and layers of complication that make it inaccessible to the layman without expensive advice from somebody who can translate it into the real world. It is a very profitable dance of power.

Complexity does strange and unpredictable things to complicated.

An article in the Economist gives a great example. The central bureaucracy in France has wrapped the whole issue of the pandemic in complication, from a fifteen option form needed to leave home to matching available vaccine to those who need them. In the latter case, a handful of young data scientists have solved the problem unasked by creating an interface that connect…