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Tag: Waxing Philosophical

Truncated Scale

Published by Editor B on Thursday, 23 October 2008

A friend recently commented on how our country is politically polarized. Yes, I feel that — but I also feel that many of us are apathetic and alienated from the political process.

How could these both be true? It seems contradictory, paradoxical.

Perhaps the answer, or part of it, has to do with our narrowly circumscribed political dialog. I’ve been puzzling over how to better express the idea.

Say you’re looking at two marks on a wall. If you’re standing very close, with your nose practically touching the plaster, you will see the two marks as rather far apart. But if you stand back and look at the whole wall, you might say that that the marks are quite close together.

Or take a bar graph. It’s a well-known fact that if you chop off the bottom of a bar graph you can exaggerate differences and make them seem bigger. There’s a whole chapter on this in How to Lie with Statistics.

Or say you listened to nothing but grandpa’s record collection. You might think dixieland and bebop represented the absolute opposite ends of the musical spectrum. And you’d be right, insofar as 1940s jazz was concerned.

All of these seem like variations on the same phenomenon. This has surely been observed and documented by those who study human cognition. What’s vexing me is I can’t think of the name for it. The only term I’ve encountered that seems to make sense is “truncated scale,” but that’s hardly ubiquitous.

Anyway, my theory is that some of us are “zoomed in” on two marks on the wall.

Tightly Circumscribed

From this close view, the differences are vast and passions run high. There is a sense of polarization between these two diametrically opposed points.

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Voting Philosophy

Published by Editor B on Friday, 19 October 2007

My voting philosophy is pretty simple. Here are my general rules:

  1. Vote against the incumbent, if there is one.
  2. Don’t vote for a candidate of either of the two major entrenched parties.

These are not rigid by any means. I’ll make an exception if I believe in a particular candidate or if some other calculus suggests itself.

Of course, following these rules often means voting for someone I don’t know too much about, or voting for someone who has values that are antithetical to my own. But I’m OK with that. These candidates usually don’t have a prayer of winning anyway.

For the record, I don’t consider voting for a no-chance candidate to be “throwing my vote away.” It’s a protest vote. This is not a frivolous choice. Given the current state of affairs, I think protest is the only rational approach. When the top contenders do not inspire, there’s no other way to express one’s displeasure. I wish we had a “None of the Above” option in many cases.

If I follow those rules tomorrow, I might vote like this:

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Ultimate Arguments For and Against Having Kids

Published by Editor B on Monday, 8 May 2006

Note: I was working on this miniature essay just before Katrina. I’ve only just finished now.

I fully realize that most people don’t think much about whether or not to have kids. They either know what they want and act on that instinct, or they don’t think about it at all and just do what comes naturally.

But I’ve never been like most people. In fact, one of my favorite pastimes over the years has been philosophical speculation on the implications of having children — or not, as the case may be. Over the past year, especially, my thinking on this matter has crystallized. And the crystal is perfectly opaque. I am deeply ambivalent.

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