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Well, You Have To Keep Your Maps Straight (4.00 / 3)

There's always "To see the world in a grain of sand/Or heaven in a wild flower/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour".

But that's the fractal side of things, in which the same structure repeats itself at different levels of scale.

What I'm getting at here is how, for example, personal thrift, which the individual needs to get through hard times, is terrible for economy as a whole if everyone practices it.  There's no way to understand this using the type of analysis that's scaled to the individual.  This is why micro-economics and macro-economics are two distinct fields.  It's why you can have a society virtually free of individual racists, yet still have tremendous racial injustice, with vast differences in unemployment rates, arrest and incarceration rates, infant mortality rates, etc., etc., etc.

If you want to understand these things, you've got to approach them at the proper level.  You can understand the micro from the macro, because the macro deals with the system of all the micros interacting together.

But from micro to macro things happen that you can't foresee.  You can't construct the whole from the parts, because part of the whole is the interaction of the parts that only happens when they become parts of the whole.

This mathematical example is just a very basic demonstration of that fact.  It shows that you don't need to get very fancy before this principle kicks in.  Points and lines are all you need.  

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sun Jul 05, 2009 at 21:44:08 PM CDT

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