Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to simplicity

simplisticity
Robert — (archived)

I don't see much connection between your first three paragraphs and what I wrote. I didn't bring up "sophistication", which is a subjective quantity, unlike complexity, which can be objectively measured. Nor did I say anywhere that complexity must be accompanied by big words.

As for the difference between photographs and cartoons, it looks like you got the basic point without seeing the ramifications. A cartoon gets its meaning across by providing insufficient detail, and relying on the imagination of the viewer to fill in the details and provide an interpretation. A cartoon is an applied optical illusion. The simplistic worldview is entirely subjective and strongly dependent on preexisting prejudices and dogma. It too is an illusion.

Reality is complex, and an objective perception of reality acknowledges the complexity.

A striking example of oversimplifying complex reality is the way that your perception of the hideous complexity of the situation in Iraq collapses into an untenable choice and a false choice: Stay-the-course, or surrender. Attempting to impose simplicity on complexity has led you to a dead-end in which you're intellectually powerless to think of a way out of the situation. You and Bush...though to give Dubya some credit, I suspect that he's desperately looking for somebody, like the ISG, to throw him a face-saving lifeline. He's backed himself into a corner with the extremist rhetoric portraying rational change as "cut-and-run", and now he needs a scapegoat to provide cover when he acknowledges reality and changes strategy. I hope so, anyway...the alternative is to watch America go down to ignominious defeat, and I don't want that.

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