His examples are awesome. HN might be a good example too. Up/downvotes seems easy to improve upon, but perhaps most "improvements" would hardly make a dent.
However, due to the nature of the publications today, nobody is going to be honest and say: "You know what, we really thought that this advanced technique was going to be better. We tried our best, as you can see, but the improvement is really tiny."
There should be some credible way of reporting negative findings, which are surprising.
There are journals, such as the Journal of Negative Results (http://www.jnr-eeb.org/index.php/jnr) for ecology, that do try to fill this gap. But they don't have the same impact value.
This is fair enough, up to a point: you should be aiming for results that will change the field.
The title of this post seems to be a reference to the famous paper of Wigner titled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences." It is a very readable paper and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
I wonder if some of the benefits of simplicity come from the reduced probability of making errors. I know that in my own research, I always try to use simple methods or at least augment more complex methods with graphics and simple methods.
That being said, I think it is useful to know the complex methods, even if you don't use them.
US accidentally dropped a hydrogen bomb in the ocean (11 atomic bombs have been lost by the US total). Taking the opinion of fishermen, pilots, Navy officers, weather men etc, and simply averaging their estimations on a map the bomb was found in a day.
