 |
| Apple's iPod ads are a brilliant example of simplification. |
It's always great to keep things as simple as possible and great things are achieved this way. Apple and their products are perhaps one of the most best examples of the effectiveness of this.
Web design and smartphone app designs have been improving on this too, by not overloading the user with too many distractions or options, but still providing access to their large feature sets when they are needed.
This is all well and good, but the term "oversimplification" exists for a reason. There is a fuzzy line where if you simplify past it, you distort the result and/or take away the usefulness or beauty of the outcome.
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler"
- Generally attributed to Albert Einstein.This simplification is largely involved in why large numbers of people who lean left in politics are seen by some as weak, or earth-loving hippies, or seem to go on and on about human rights, even for people who have violated the rights of others.
Drug addicted junkies. I read an article today that was suggesting that drug addicts should somehow have their rights to birth children restricted somehow until they're clean. After all, they'll just screw their kids up right? Then those kids will probably turn out as junkies too, and/or just extract money from the system through welfare and not even care that other people are working hard and paying for them via taxes. All because these useless people chose to take drugs all day and produce useless offspring.
Oversimplification.
People have an amazing ability to perceive their world. We see things, then our brains cross-reference what we're seeing with what we've seen in the past, what we've heard in the past, what we've eaten, what we've touched, what we've felt, where we were when we last saw something like that and all other memories it holds of that seem relevant and apply those models of our past onto our current perception.
We also use these models of our world to predict our future and determine what we can do now to make our own future better. For example, we've seen car accidents, so we try to be safer on the road to ensure we don't get into a costly or even fatal accident.
We apply our models on other humans too. We predict what others are going to do next by thinking, what would I do next? Try to relate to their current feelings based upon what we've felt.
But doesn't work, and a lot of the time, you're wrong.
There was an excellent series on SBS called First Contact, where "normal" white Australians signed up to learn about Aboriginals. At the start of the series, one of these people, a young girl was calling Aboriginals "wasters", and saying everyone has the ability to make choices to better their life.
She later found out that her assertion was wrong, particularly because disabilities happen (in particular, FAS).
What about all the drug addicts though? It's not possible that all of them are mentally handicapped, right? Incorrect question.
One might say, you're either mentally handicapped and can't make logical decisions OR you're not, and you can, but this would still be an oversimplification. Human brains are incredibly complex and your consciousness and outlook is based upon not only your biology at birth, but also the environment you've lived in, and your entire summary of previous experiences, and how they were stored in your brain at the time, and your current condition.
Given all the experiences you've had, one building on top of each other for every waking second (and non-waking second), you can see how we get such a wide variety of people on this earth.
What happened to those drug addicts? What conditions led them to be addicted to drugs? Were they severely and repeatedly beaten by a relative? Were they raped by someone they had trusted over a number of years? Constantly starved by their parents? Did their parents force drugs into them? Did someone they know offer them the opportunity to feel good for a few hours? What age were they when this happened?
Can't we just sterilize them and "break the cycle"?
Can you see this is not simple yet? Do you still want to infringe on the rights of someone whose lives you really know nothing of? It doesn't matter if it's temporary, it would only isolate the addicted person away from their community or remaining friends even more than they already are, compounding the problem.
These are not simple problems. There are no broad and simple solutions.
We treat people with cancer. We help paralyzed people become independent and even walk again. Surely the time spent administering such a program to neuter would be much better spent of more supportive ways to, you know, help these people? Let's start by maybe not calling them junkies.
Just for completeness, here's the misguided and overly simplistic article that I had mentioned earlier.
