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The Frameless Picture
Why Extreme Reductionism Is Not The Best Approach To Understanding The World
“If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.”
― Slavoj Žižek
There are many ways to understand the world we live in. One of the most practical ways to understand it is to put elements of it into a framework. A framework is commonly understood as a basic structure underlying a system, concept, or text. Sure, frameworks are delightful — they are like learning from someone else’s experience. What if you could just put a straw into a genius brain and consume all the knowledge. Very convenient but very biased as well.
An even easier way to understand the world is to use a shortcut called reductionism. For instance, linguistic reductionism is the idea that everything can be described or explained by a language with a limited number of concepts, and combinations of those concepts. If you take this idea further, it is easy to conclude that the stock market (as measured by the DJIA or the S&P 500 index) fell a 3,000 points in a single day because of the COVID-19/coronavirus pandemic. Of course, the virus in and of itself was one black swan event that resulted in the bedlam in the market but it is most certainly not the only one. In other words, it could be the straw that…
