Does an idea have to be more complex to be considered truer?

Does an idea have to be more complex to be considered truer?
Why do prefer complex and abstract systems over simplified ones?

Complexity and "Truthiness" have no relation

Wut?

Besides, most people seem to prefer simpler ideas. How do you think our democracies function?

The more generalized a statement, the less useful it will be in specific applications, and vice versa.
The more specific a statement, the more testable it is, and the more likely it is that the statement will be soon disproven or modified. This is a good thing.
Complexity is a double edged sword. It can be used to mask obfuscation as dazzling, because the inherent property of the sublime is that it evokes an awe difficult to reduce to a single source. However, sufficient complexity is necessary to discuss complex concepts in whole, depending on how predictable they are and the patterns they imply. The idea is to build a foundational framework that becomes more concise and specific over time, reducing them to constituent principles that are bite-sized enough to properly learn and clarify them. To truly explain something is to explain it away. This is why people hypnotized by pretentious mysticism hate the reductionism inherent in science - humans really are "just atoms, bro" on a fundamental level, but it's the trivializing implications of the word "just" that's the problem here. The small block is not truly preeminent over the larger structure in any system, I believe, but we make these mental incisions as a necessary method of gaining understanding, due to our brains themselves being limited by a kind of scarcity imposed by cognitive load on working memory.

Literally one of the pillars of logic is the simplest explanation is the best

Spicy hot take incoming.

As the history of thought progressed, irreversible shifts gradually took place, and truth -- a category which is entirely constructed, has become more complex. One can't write like Plato today, the simplicity of these ideas are just anachronistic. Truth is like a flower that blooms as history progresses, and whether you liked it more as a spud or in its current state, it can't go back to a previous instance of itself. You can only go forward, which really is a bit horrifying and sometimes truth feels more like a budding asshole getting progressively more grotesque, but it is what it is.

*preferred
The word you forgot to mention is preferred, user.

>Truth is like a flower that blooms as history progresses
worst clause I've read innaminnit

>One can't write like Plato today, the simplicity of these ideas are just anachronistic.

I disagree with this. A lot of ancient philosophy has fucking blown my mind, and very few modern people are actually literate in it. There's also a selection bias here: we know what we've learned, but we don't know what we've forgotten.

I didn't mean to say Plato is less truthful or less important than what proceeded him. On the contrary, I study him in depth in university and his thought is extremely deep. But the way he presented these ideas, and approached them, is very simple compared to modern philosophy and contemporary philosophy. Simple not in the pejorative sense of poor or lacking, but in the the sense of concise, contained, as opposed to sprawling, maximal. In Plato's time, truth could only be said and understood in those terms, but now our truth can't be expressed like that, it requires a different approach.

>In Plato's time, truth could only be said and understood in those terms
tell that to Glaucon or any other interlocutor Socrates ever had

Bumping because the OP has realized something extremely important which I will elaborate on.

So basically, what the OP seems to have realized is this: to a certain degree, complex systems/ideas/philosophies are /attractive/ to intelligent humans. Because it gives them something to do with themselves, there's a "there" there, and we do have RL examples of where more complex systems improve on earlier, simpler models (the general progression of the sciences).

This is part of why even /smart/ people (incorrectly) recoil from nihilism: nihilism, in addition to being true, is also /dumb and void and gives you nothing to work with/. The intellectual hates this on purely intellectual grounds, as there's no fun to be had with the idea. This is why you get Nietzsches uselessly flailing against the void, pretending some qualified mastery of the problem, and nonsense like the recent youtube clip, "existentialism" (as if that rescues anything), etc.

Smart adults and lawful, productive adults hate hate hate the notion that the edgy 16-year-old might actually be right about the essential features of the world. Just because the kid is naive and is not in a fully adult position to deeply appreciate why he is right, /does not mean that he is not right/. He is. And if Veeky Forums is concerned for the truth, then Veeky Forums would do well not to forget this.

"Furthermore, the very attempt to define how a philosophical work is supposed to be connected with other efforts to deal with the same subject-matter drags in an extraneous concern, and what is really important for the cognition of the truth is obscured. The more conventional opinion gets fixated on the antithesis of truth and falsity, the more it tends to expect a given philosophical system to be either accepted or contradicted; and hence it finds only acceptance or rejection. It does not comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of truth, but rather sees in it simple disagreements. The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. But he who rejects a philosophical system [i.e. the new philosopher] does not usually comprehend what he is doing in this way; and he who grasps the contradiction between them [i.e. the historian of philosophy] does not, as a general rule, know how to free it from its one-sidedness, or maintain it in its freedom by recognizing the reciprocally necessary moments that take shape as a conflict and seeming incompatibility."

The poster immediately showed that the content of the remainder of his ideas can be disregarded when he identified truth as a category which can be "entirely constructed" (read: socially constructed, a favorite undergraduate inculcation). No, fool, the world, which clearly contains truths exterior to humanity, keeps on turning whether someone is around to appreciate the fact, or not. Or even if you would qualify this in the appropriate ways, then it will still go on being the practical case that the above evidence-based assumption with regard to daily operations is valid, as everyone knows. So that what remains is merely academic. So that truth is not wholly an invention, but partially (indeed, largely) contingent on the world.

Occams razor

Wrong premise. Bullshit thread.

What is Occam's razor?
The only way to see if it works is to test an idea in the lab. Doesn't matter if it's complex or not.

BULLSHIT UNDERAGE NONSENSE

>The only way to see if it works is to test an idea in the lab
This is the wrongest sentence of all time and in all aspects

The complexity of the cause is directly correlated to the complexity of the effect.

Humans, their governments, societies, and industries are complex systems with many different factions participating in shaping them. Because there are many different reasons and motivations at play, you shouldn't expect one single explanation for them all.

The simpler the system you're observing is, the simpler the explanation can be.

haha delete this garbage. Are you 12?

How do we test ideologies like Fascism and Communism in a lab?

Typically specificity is necessary to really be truthful.

Joseph Mengele did a pretty good job of that.

>No, fool, the world, which clearly contains truths exterior to humanity, keeps on turning whether someone is around to appreciate the fact, or not.

Prove it.

Fuck off Hegel