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When in doubt, apply this principle: KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)
Known as well as Occam's Razor: a problem-solving principle suggesting that when faced with competing explanations, the simplest one with the fewest assumptions is usually the most likely to be correct.
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The universe has a tax on deliberation.
Rationality collapses into "just do things" quickly. In a live environment, thinking is not free; every extra second spent optimizing carries opportunity cost, the cost of delay. So while additional reflection has marginal benefits in an abstract, costless world, once you factor in delay, the net value of further thinking peaks—and then drops—quickly. Figure 2B captures this as a direct order with an exclamation mark; there is a moment when the right move is to "Stop thinking and act now!". - Source
The diagram is from the paper: "Computational rationality: A converging paradigm for intelligence in brains, minds, and machines". Gershman, S. J., Horvitz, E. J., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2015). Science, 349(6245), 273–278.
"Imagine driving down the highway on your way to give an important presentation, when suddenly you see a traffic jam looming ahead. In the next few seconds, you have to decide whether to stay on your current route or take the upcoming exit—the last one for several miles— all while your head is swimming with thoughts about your forthcoming event. In one sense, this problem is simple: Choose the path with the highest probability of getting you to your event on time. However, at best you can implement this solution only approximately: Evaluating the full branching tree of possible futures with high uncertainty about what lies ahead is likely to be infeasible, and you may consider only a few of the vast space of possibilities, given the urgency of the decision and your divided attention. How best to make this calculation? Should you make a snap decision on the basis of what you see right now, or explicitly try to imagine the next several miles of each route? Perhaps you should stop thinking about your presentation to focus more on this choice, or maybe even pull over so you can think without having to worry about your driving? The decision about whether to exit has spawned a set of internal decision problems: how much to think, how far should you plan ahead, and even what to think about.
This example highlights several central themes in the study of intelligence. First, maximizing some measure of expected utility provides a general-purpose ideal for decision-making under uncertainty. Second, maximizing expected utility is nontrivial for most real-world problems, necessitating the use of approximations. Third, the choice of how best to approximate may itself be a decision subject to the expected utility calculus—thinking is costly in time and other resources, and sometimes intelligence comes most in knowing how best to allocate these scarce resources."
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Rube Goldberg machine
A Rube Goldberg machine is a deliberately overcomplicated contraption that performs a simple task through a long, comical chain reaction of unrelated steps, named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg who often depicted such inventions.
