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I'm a radical. I have an abiding interest in understanding and attacking problems at their roots. From my point of view, the value of liberalism is that it codifies and institutionalized the great radical struggles and achievements of the past-what once were "untkinkable", such as the abolition of slavery, or the attainment of legal equality for women.
Much of what we take for granted is never seriously questioned. And much of that is simply false. Fortunately, much of that doesn't really matter all that much. But some of it does, intensely so. And so does getting a handle on the deeper common denominators that keep us from questioning what's taken for granted as we should, and keep us from seeing things from a different, more liberating, more insightful, more inclusive perspective.
In this diary, I want to discuss one of the most fundamental factors that keeps us from questioning things deeply enough, and developing new perspectives. I call it "thinking from small to big," as opposed to "thinking from big to small." The later is the abstract concept behind the slogan, "Think globally, act locally." The former is simply what comes naturally, given how our brains are wired. But it's also natural to grow beyond that sort of thinking. Indeed, that's one reason why human societies around the world have routinely venerated their elders as unique sources of wisdom-one function of age is to expand the horizons of ones vision, and to come to see the particulars that fill our lives when we are younger as pieces of a larger, unified whole.
My main discussion here is going to be a bit abstract. In fact, it's going to be about mathematics (heavy on pictures aka "diagrams", light on numbers, but still, math).The reason for that is simple: virtually all of human cognition has patterned aspects to it, and mathematics if the language of patterns.
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