Gurus who give overly simplistic advice

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Well, why would I even do either of these things. Why would I imagine all possible conditions or events that would inhibit or prevent a desired outcome?

I will give you why I do this. It is a learned behavior on my part that I developed over the years b/c I had for years an undiagnosed communication disorder (didn't get diagnoised until I was 29). When one doesn't know what one is supposed to in various situations that can crop up and when others get tired of your endless questioning one then develops a coping mechanism which I call the Screech Maneuver. This comes from the Saved By the Bell episode in which the teacher talks so fast none of the class understands them. So, everyone flunks the test but Screech. Zak or slater asks how Screech passed and he said he studied everything. That's what I sorta do.

When Fnord does say it is me, he is sort of right.

Why would I have this need to over define a simple situation to the point that only the situation could possibly exist?

B/c of my thinking style and my ASD and Pragmatic issues I don't see the situation as simple as others would.

If I'm told to put a pot of water on the opposite side of the stove I would be extremely confused. I would look at the top of the stove as a Cartesian plane. Left is opposite of right and vice versa. Back is opposite of Front and Vice Versa. And, Back, Left is even more opposite of Front, right.

When Fnord says the issue is me again is sort of right.

But, I don't know what I can really do to fix this issue especially in various social situations including the college course Fnord brought up but not limited to it as well. I wish I had an effective solution for this but I honestly really don't. Unless, there is an effective solution(s) I would need things broken down for me and things spelled out. I have the gut feeling that with that problem Fnord mention the student and I were and are missing a certain subtext and context and certain that professors and mathematicians go by that most students simply pick up and assume that those like myself and that student have issues with and/or we don't know. And, that subtext and context could be so glaringly simple.

My grandmother would say "you're so smart you dope."

Fnord’s student over-interpreted the solution to the question, I feel, because the student thought that “this can’t be so simple!”

So the student thought that there were elements that just didn’t exist, but was thought to exist through implication.

The student didn’t understand, in this instance that “a cigar, sometimes, is just a cigar,” as Freud allegedly said.

Well, if your major was anything else than deep theoretical mathematics, then I find your teachers highly unreasonable, probably exercising their superiority over students.

For different levels of a problem, different levels of complexity are required. Constructing numbers from the empty set is relevant to a question about minimal set of fundamental axioms but it's completely irrelevant to calculating if you can pay your debt this year. However, the latter may require understanding several banking terms completely irrelevant to the former.

I'm sure "students giving overly complicated answers" come mainly from their difficulty to tell what is and what isn't relevant in a freshly aquired material. It's generally the point: which complexities are and aren't relevant to the particular problem?

I understand your analogy about the cigar but I don't get how it applies for this problem.

Magz, another thing! Simple and Complex are relative terms as well. What may be simple for you may be complex for me. When someone is telling me to keep it simple or stop overthinking I have to ask how? How do I do that?

From my perspective, the student missed other subsets in the entire set. Yet, Fnord and this professor would say we're both wrong. I don't understand why. And, Fnord will not explain his rationale.

I know the problem too well, whenever I come to some new problem, I see it bottom-up - myriads of details, each of them complex itself, that build up, or fail to build up, to some big picture. It's like a jigsaw puzzle... or like I couldn't stop seeing the world through a microscope. "Can't see the forest for the trees" - that's me and probably that's you as well.

I find it useful to ask for "the big picture". Like, what do we need to achieve? And then I try to ignore the detais irrelevant to the given goal. It means, yes, start from something overly simplistic and try to fill it with only the details that would change the big picture.

It's a bit like encoding videos: you give a key frame every now and then but between them you just code the differences from the previous frame, keeping the details from the previous frame unless they changed. It's not perfect, it can create artifacts sometimes, but it allows us to view watchable videos on limited bandwidth.
Our brains have limited bandwidths, too. So, smart encoding of detailed knowledge every now and then and relative approximations in beetween is a resonable algorithm for dealing with the reality.

This!

Magz, this is a well thought out answer. Not to simple and not to complex and you use an analogy I can relate to. I'm going to start trying your idea in various situations and see what happens. You definitely rock!

So, if the goal is to boil something or cook something with a pot on the stove looking at it from a bigger picture sort of way the answer is to putting the pot on the opposite side is to place the pot on the eye that would be easiest for the person to use and cook with the pot. So, if it is on the right move it to the left and vice versa towards the front.

I'm glad you find it useful.
Funny thing, I only now realized I did exactly what I described: as I learned about your detailed IT knowledge, I used it as a "key frame": (it's not my key frame but my "movie" is visible enough in that region) to describe my model of knowledge management in relation to something I expected you to know in detail (actually, probably much more detail than me) and in big picture.

I believe there may be a practical problem with many Aspies: our "key frames" of detailed knowledge can be in regions unexpected by others, sometimes completely unfamiliar for them. IT is not that bad, many people at least have some ideas about it.

Sometimes, 1, 2, 3 is actually just 1,2, 3. That’s what I meant about the cigar analogy.

In some applications you need to know how to derive them from the empty set.
In some applications you need to know how they are encoded in IEEE standard.
Still, on the outermost layer, they are just 1, 2 and 3, with all the widely-known properties of 1, 2 and 3.

I meant the “consecutive integers” thing.

I confess to a total ignorance of “IEEE.”

I hope you are doing okay today, Magz.

Not bad, thanks.
My daughter's school anxiety worries me but I think I'm otherwise slowly emerging from the worst of depression.

The IEEE part was adressed at Cube - as an example that there can be details and internal structure beyond the "simple" things but you don't have to remember of them all the time - just when they are relevant to a particular problem.

Are you doing ok as well?

I just thought of another example:
To construct a calculator, you need to know, among other things, how to translate numbers to electric signals.
To use a calculator, you just need to understand the symbols you put in and the symbols you get as a result.

But even if you do know how a calculator works inside, you don't need to remember it when calculating the cost of your groceries.
Different levels of detail required for different problems.

PS: And if you want to write a philosophical monography about calculaturs, don't insist I read it

I’m doing all right. Thanks. How about you?

There is a theory that a component of autism is the inability of the brain to get rid of neurons which a “normal” brain would find redundant. Thus, both increasing the size of the brain, and causing too much input, including redundant input, to bombard the autistic person.

Rather like the “intense world theory.”

https://www.cut-the-knot.org/ghint.shtml

9 dots problem.

Before I read this I didn't have a full understanding of the purpose of 9 dots problem. I had problems with this. I couldn't make heads or tails of this problem and here is why. I was always told that it was a lesson to think outside of the box or more specifically my box. Until I read this, part of what I considered my box was the assumption that I was supposed to follow the instructions and constraints. In other words, I can change the amount of lines I have to draw and increase them. In fact, I could've assumed that I was supposed to solve the problem at all.

But, what the problem is really saying is to think outside the box of a constraint I have without violating the explicitly stated constraints of the problem.

But, those who would use that as an exercise or other websites besides this didn't explain this that clearly. I can go outside of any box I wish except the explicitly stated constraints. I didn't realize that.