Is Complex/Complicated/Simple Subjective?

I suspect the short answer is "to a certain degree." Most of Snowden's work I've seen tends to imply that the domains of Chaotic/Complex/Complicated(knowable)/Simple(known) are mostly objective "in-the-world" adjectives.

However, Dave's current guest blogger (Boudewijn Bertsch) has a long discussion of the difficulty of getting health care experts to effectively train diabetics to manage their own care. The life expectancy of a diabetic varies dramatically depending on how well this task is done.

My over-simplified summary of her post is that Expert (grounded in analysis of the Complicated) Doctors tend to toss Novice Patients (for whom diabetes management is, at least initially, more Complex than Complicated/Simple) off a cliff by giving them a set of Best Practices (the way a Simple context is addressed). Bottom line: widespread failure.

I posted the following comment (which translates the dynamic into an engineering context):

As an engineer whose primary interactions are with other engineers, I frequently see the same sort of "sink-or-swim" mentality.

The same kind of motivational issues arise when an "expert" engineer is working with a "novice" engineer in a context that is complicated to the expert, but is complex to the novice.

It is often difficult to convince an expert of the necessity of probing behavior to help the novice successfully move the context into the complicated/simple domains.

I suppose it's easier to tell a patient to "follow these instructions" (best practice), and leave him on his own to adapt them to his specific context via uninformed trial-and-error probing. It's not surprising that many patients don't have the reserves to successfully translate a set of generic best practices to specific behaviors that address the unique needs of their situation.