alt Hacker NewsToday I learned there’s a name for the general version of this idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory
At a certain point in a solution everything you do to optimize (“push”) in one area will cause a negative effect in a different area (“bulge”).
But this is a nice concrete example.
Replies
shayonj • today at 5:48 PM
v interesting. Thanks for sharing. I kept seeing this phenomenon of "no free lunches". TIL about the waterbed theory.
I like minimal irreducible inherent complexity of a problem or a system (waterbed or zero-point would work I guess) and then you can derive some form of a law of conservation of complexity… if you can measure it. You can definitely feel it, though.
edit: see also ‘No Silver Bullet’ and its essential vs accidental complexity; but don’t disregard Kolmogorov, either, even if it isn’t strictly engineering.