So the mathematical analysis of the less is more effect is precisely the ‘just enough is more effect’. I can think of other examples where additional information impairs performance by distracting (but there is no formal analysis that I’m aware of). Many, but not all, insight problems have this as one source of difficulty. A related example is the Moses illusion (”How many animals of each type did Moses take onto the ark?”).

You can pound a nail with a rock and with a hammer. A rock is simple, it’s actually less. A hammer is elegant: it’s intuitive, discoverable, and effective. The design of a hammer seems natural, obvious. It seems like less. And yet modern hammers are the fruit of hundreds of years of experimentation, experience, design, redesign, and testing and yet a lot of work goes into making a modern hammer.

That’s the wonderful thing about elegance. It’s so subtle and obvious that it can be difficult to fully explain. It’s less, or at least it seems like less, and yet it is also more.