What is reductionism? Why do we reduce things? Why everything in life is complex? Why we do not want to deal with the complexities of life? How reductionism reduces our quality of life and then life itself? How do corporations make money by making you more lazy and greedy? Why you must not reduce the complexities of life?
A. What is Reductionism?
Reductionism is essentially making a short version of a complex mechanism or process.
For example, a novel is a story that binds different characters in the story, their thought process, their behaviors, their interactions, their challenges, their emotions, their struggles, their interaction with the world, and the changes based on the interaction. So when you read a novel, you travel through the storyline and get immersed in the story. However, everyone doesn’t have the time, money, or energy to buy books and read them, feel them, visualize them, experience them, understand them, and live them. They are just interested in the story. So when the story of a novel is written as a “plot” or summary, that is reductionism.
From the above example, we understand that complex processes that are time-consuming, energy-consuming, takes effort, and take patience to execute are often beyond the use of common people. Therefore the reductionism theory is used to make things available, and accessible to a larger population, who can not benefit from the actual process due to their limitation in the resources.
One of the great examples of reductionism is the value of PI.
The Value of PI up to the first 100 digits is 3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679. However, it is not a cup of tea for every brain to remember all these 100 digits. There will be possibly lesser than 1000 humans alive in the entire 8 billion human population whose brains and genes support a mathematical brilliance to understand, comprehend, remember, and work with such a huge number. In order to make Pi more accessible, understandable, and usable, we use a simple approximation Pi=22/7, which results in 3.1428. The error in the first four digits after the decimal is only 0.0013. This error is 0.04%.
Anything where the shortcut gives you a result with less than 1% error than using a long, complex, and original process, is considered to be a good approximation or reduction.
