I don’t know about you - I’ve encountered a quote attributed to Einstein in my late youth and found it funny. After that, it took me more than two decades to begin to really appreciate what it actually says:

“Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

My (simple) youth perspective was that the statement is self-evident, if you make it “as simple as possible”, then obviously you cannot make it any simpler - the “as possible” already says you’ve done everything possible.

I mainly remembered the quote because I found it funny, but I didn’t think much of it beyond striving to make everything as simple as possible.

Only as I grew older and faced more complex challenges, I began to see the true wisdom in Einstein's words.

The actual point of that pithy little saying, though, is a warning against oversimplification; not a problem I ran into much in my earlier computer development days - the problems were fairly simple to begin with.

The quote resurfaced for me in the last decade, especially as I observed gross oversimplifications in the political arena. However, too few people seem to address the dangers of oversimplification itself. Case in point: How many countries can you think of where a good deal of the public discourse is on the scourge of immigration - particularly the illegal kind - and that all we need to do is close our borders and the problem will be solved? As if!

Complex issues require of us a good understanding of all the factors involved, so we can also clearly figure out all the trade-offs and clearly label the trade-offs taken in the proposed solution. You will show more awareness of the problem and make it easier to understand why you chose your solution or challenge you on some of the assumptions of your trade-offs rather than just proposing a different solution with no clue how that one came about.