#45 - Simplification
Why we are simplifying more and more, and how it drives us toward absurdity.
It’s accurate to say that the world has become exponentially more complex with the dawn and rise of the internet. In past writing I’ve shared two core aspects shaping our reality:
We’re seeing an exponential increase in the volume of information as well as the volatility (or variance) within that information.
Society has reacted to this at a psychological level: the feeling of being overwhelmed is dominant in the world today.
Neither point should be controversial. We’re awash with information, and increasingly stressed out because of it!
A natural and predictable response is to simplify ideas and messages in order to cope with the chaos. But simplification only works well when you accurately and completely understand the topic you are trying to simplify. Given the natural complexity of the world, accurate and complete understandings of any topic are exceedingly rare.
Without the full picture, any simplification is quite likely miss one or more essential aspects of an issue. But things get even worse when you simplify atop existing simplifications! A miss is multiplied by another miss and multiplied by another. You’ll quickly reach the point of absurdity. While any single simplification may seem reasonable, the end result is absurd.
Each layer of simplification from the sphere further distorts from reality.
Our media and political landscape today leverages multiple layers of simplifiers. Even “experts” are often working atop several layers of simplifications and almost always relying on such simplifications from outside their own narrow field of expertise.
Relatedly, the general population is in the throes of the ad-driven economy. This creates an arms race for our attention which leads to more and more ‘meaning’ being crammed into less and less time/attention. You see the pattern everywhere: jump to the conclusion, make it sound life-or-death, rinse and repeat.
Critically, each time an idea is compressed, nuance is lost. Throughout, each idea becomes more likely of distorting the complex reality.
Any issue can highlight this, but let’s choose abortion. Narratives against ‘the other’ have been simplified to either being “for baby killing” or “against women’s rights.” In practice these statements describe almost no one. Through a series of simplifications of nuanced issues, we quickly reached a point of absurdity.
What’s alarming though is that these simplifications tend to stick and, in a hyper-polarized time, embed themselves on each side even if the simplifications are absurd. But that’ll be a story for next time!