What is reliability vs complexity?

Reliability vs complexity is a concept in personal epistemology: A simple agent that fires consistently beats a complex agent that fires intermittently.

Example: You design a sophisticated morning routine: journal for 20 minutes, meditate for 15, review your goals, do a cold plunge, then read for 30 minutes. It works twice. Then you sleep in once, skip the plunge because it's cold, drop the journaling because you're behind on email, and the whole sequence collapses. Your colleague writes one sentence in a notebook every morning before coffee. She has done it for 300 days straight. Her single-sentence agent has produced more cumulative insight than your five-step system produced in its two appearances.

This concept is part of Phase 21 (Agent Fundamentals) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for agent fundamentals.