Roger’s $0.02 - Reductive Reasoning (Patreon)

Image "Digesting Duck"

It’s customary to ring in the new year with a New Year’s resolution. A practice in which a person commits themselves to remedy a perceived flaw in one’s behavior. Often this comes in the form of self-improvement goals like losing weight, drinking less alcohol, and spending more time with the family. You know all the things that sound great at the start of the year but eventually turn into a forgotten promise as the realities of life and the new year take hold. But I’m going to make one regardless. I commit, as much as humanely possible, to steer clear of reductive reasoning when analyzing news stories whether they’re political, economic, or tech-based. I figure that should hold for about three months before I fall off the wagon.

Reductive reasoning or more accurately reductionism at its core is the explanation of a complex concept or system by simplifying it into its constituent parts. Think of a car engine. Although the engine contains valves, pulleys, cam and drive shafts, pistons, fuel injectors, and ignition system I can reduce it conceptually to an air pump. Air comes in, gets heated through the detonation of fuel and air, and the superheated air does work as it gets expelled from the system. And reductionism has found use in science and mathematics where complex theories are underpinned by simpler foundational concepts. But the danger lies in going too far.

Oversimplifying things can lead to ignoring contextual and emergent properties when those systems intersect with other systems. In other words, there’s a tendency for some in the process of cognitive understanding to simplify things for the sake of simplification. For example “miracle cures” or “breakthrough diets” that explain their efficacy by breaking down biological processes of the human body to an absurdly simplistic level. When applied to social media you get a deluge of frankly bizarre claims but more worryingly seemingly intelligent social media discourse often indulges in reductive reasoning, boiling down complex topics like economics, history, or politics into single-sentence memes.

Reductive reasoning can have a corrosive effect on discussion and the understanding of things. Not unlike confirmation bias, which I wrote about two months ago, it presents a view of things tinted by poor contextual or foundational understanding of the subject matter which leads to flawed or totally wrong conclusions. So in a quest to make myself a slightly better person than the one from the previous year, I vow to be more circumspect in my approach to information I see on traditional and social media platforms.