%title 2010-11-01 11:30:59
%date Addendum to 'Res Est'
:blog:fossil:diary:

I had a few more thoughts on the <a href="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/2010/10/01/res-est/">earlierÂ entry</a> and I don't want to belabor anything, though this may come rather close to the last post, but I hope to make just a small addendum to that with three points. Â This has been sitting in the 'drafts' queue for a while now, and was mostly written. Â Sorry for flooding!

<!--more-->

Many of those things can be considered 'greater than the sum of the parts'. Â When you look at politics, for instance, you can look at it as being different levels - federal, state, county, city, and so on - but you if you take all of those politics together, you get something that's much more complicated than just the sum of the levels. Â When thinking about legalizing marijuana, you can see that Colorado and several of its cities are all okay with the issue, and so medical marijuana dispensaries have popped up everywhere. Â However, marijuana is still illegal at the federal level. Instead of it it just being two different laws, an interaction between the two laws occurs, with federal agents acting under the marijuana-is-illegal law and state agents acting under the marijuana-is-legal law.

The same goes for partisan politics: while states may have several republican elected officials, counties and the country may have more democratic elected officials. Â The result is far more complicated than many people attempt to reduce it to. Â Instead of this current election being a fight between socialism and free-market liberalism as the media is putting it, it's much closer to being a fight between a loose amalgam of left-of-center ideas and a loose amalgam of right-of-center ideas. Â Neither extreme - though they are represented - will win out due to the fact that the sum of the parts being much more complex than any of the parts would like to believe. Â In other words, this is not good and evil (I'll let you pick which is which), this is abstract thing and abstract thing.

Perhaps the reason that so many are so okay with talking so much about those things when they know so little is that they have a tendency towards behaving as fractals. Â That is, you can start with the big picture and a general understanding of the concept - enough to form (and thus voice) an opinion - but you can drill down almost infinitely deep to find that the issue does not become clear cut, but instead becomes more and more complex with more and more magnification. Â This is sort of the opposite of the previous point, leading to a weird sort of feedback loop: each of the parts is probably just as complex, if not more so, as the whole system.

A big theme in finance seems to be the discussion between those who are interested in macroeconomics and those who are interested in microeconomics. Â With macroeconomics, the focus is on the flow of need and want through the entirety of the economy. Â If you drill down, you get to microeconomics, which focuses on scarcity and how that affects decisions made by households, firms, and individuals. Â Most stop there, but you can focus on scarcity itself and the concept of limited goods, or look at the concept of money as a representation of labor, or look at society as a collection of actors with needs and abilities and how they interact with each other, or even look at how each individual has a different internal representation of their worth to themselves, their family, their friends, their community, their country, and the world at large. Â Needless to say, the entire concept of the financial system just gets more complicated the closer you look, and while self-similarities appear here and there, perhaps the actual complexity is just as infinite as the length of a fractal's border.

Finally, it seems that it's easier to form strong opinions about something the <em>less</em> you know about it, rather than the other way around. Perhaps due to seeing both sides of the issue, whether through research or exposure, it gets harder to be one-sided about an issue. Â With the previous point in mind, one can look at the Mandelbrot set and generalize it as looking like a fat, spiky bird as seen from the top, but zoom in and change that generalized image as one goes, and of course this differs from person to person.

When I grew up, I was raised to think of religion as being a mildly malevolent group of forces determined to get people to act the same under the cover of benevolence. Â Most of this concept came from my mom, who had had a difficult time with her family's religion growing up. Â However, the more I researched, the less I was willing to just believe this out of hand: it seemed that a good many religions focused on social justice, and even those where social justice wasn't evident in the religion itself, schisms and portions within the religion had lead to groups that focused on social justice.

It's easy to see how that would work from the other side as well, though. Â Someone who was brought up in a religion that provided everything they needed for all of their life finally realizes that certain things about the scriptures or certain stories in the news don't add up to a completely benevolent organization. Â One of my good friends, John Wright, went through something like this with the LDS church: while much of the religion and many of the people provided the spiritual outlet that he needed in life, certain things began to irk him about the texts the church used and the way the institution was run. Â Finally, after his first year of college at Brigham-Young University, he moved to Fort Collins to go to CSU and filed his apostasy officially with the Mormon church.

It's difficult to say where this study leads us, since on the surface it appears to end in ambiguity about the things we know most about. Â My composition professor, Dr. David, believes that it leads to the desire to study the issue more - specialization - and finally production or implementation of the ideas that remain, some of which are likely to be very impressive indeed. Â Thus, a beginning composer might write a two minute piece in the style of his favorite composer, which he considers the best there is, but an experienced composer might write a twenty-minute large-ensemble work that incorporates new ideas formed in the process of his study of the subject.

Until the point when you know enough about something to form real ideas and not just blind opinions, though, the previous article stands: it's a thing.
