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> I also don't think poverty is a complex problem, but that's a minor point.

I'm not sure it's a minor point. I don't think poverty is a "complex" problem either, as that term is used in the article, but that doesn't mean I think it fits into one of the other two categories in the article. I think it is in a fourth category that the article doesn't even consider.

For lack of a better term, I'll call that category "political". The key thing with this category of problems is that they are about fundamental conflicts of interest and values, and that's a different kind of problem from the kind the article talks about. We don't have poverty in the world because we lack accurate enough knowledge of how to create the wealth that brings people out of poverty. We have poverty in the world because there are people in positions of power all over the world who literally don't care about ending poverty, and who subvert attempts to do so--who make a living by stealing wealth instead of creating it, and don't care that that means making lots of other people poor.

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When all of humanity was hunting and gathering and living at subsistence levels, the was no poverty. It only shows up with wealth.

Pretty simple.

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> I think it is always possible to come up with reasonably small theories that capture most of the given phenomena.

I can write a program (call it a simulation of some artificial phenomenon) whose internal logic is arbitrarily complex. The result is irreducible: the entire byzantine program with all of its convoluted logic is the smallest possible theory to describe the phenomenon, and yet the theory is not reasonably small for any reasonable definition.

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That's true but I can still approximate what the system does with a simpler model. For example, I can split states of the system into n distinct groups, and measure transition probabilities between them.

Thermodynamics is a classic example of a phenomenological model like that.

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