Apreche.net

It seems that no matter what aspect of life you look at people have create a geometric, visual or mathematical model to describe it. Politics is the big one. The model of politics is a straight line. On the right side of this line is the craziest fascist and on the left I guess there’s an anarchist. In the middle are the centrists and so forth. It seems that models like this have good and bad effects. The good is that it gives people a context in which to think about things. It’s a lot easier to relate things to each other when you have a visual model in which to place them. It’s hard to think about ambiguous model-less things. If you can envision it its much easier, that’s why comprehending god or infinity or four dimensional objects is so hard. The bad is that it restricts thinking about the particular subject to the model we have chosen. So if we choose a straight line for our political model, but someone comes up with a new view that doesn’t fit in the model it gets discarded. People have as hard a time understanding it as they do the concept of infinity because it doesn’t fit in their ingrained visual model.

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