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roystgnr comments on In Defence of Simple Ideas That Explain Everything But Are Wrong - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'd agree that most of the best scientific ideas have been relatively simple... but that's at least partly selection bias.
Compare two possible ideas:
"People with tuberculosis should be given penicillum extract"
"People with tuberculosis should be given (2S,5R,6R)-3,3-dimethyl-7-oxo-6-(2-phenylacetamido)-4-thia-1-azabicyclo[3.2.0]heptane-2-carboxylic acid"
The first idea is no better than the second. But we'd have taken forever to come up with the second, complex idea by just sifting through all the equally-chemically-complex alternatives; we actually came up with it as a refinement of the first, much simpler (in the context of our world) idea. There are surely many even-better complex ideas out there, but searching through idea space brings you to simpler ideas earlier and so they're disproportionately represented.
And possibly the simple ideas which look true are the shadows of the more complicated truth.
And possibly they are the only path to the truths which we can find.
The puzzle in science is not really 'the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics'.
It is 'the unreasonable effectiveness of simple ideas'.
And the puzzle, as you say, is that there have always been simple ideas to lead us to the more complicated ideas.
But as you point out, that may well have a simple explanation.