The Great Abbreviators

Aldous Huxley wrote an extended new introduction to the 1958 edition of his Brave New World. It is worth reading in its entirety but the opening paragraphs are a great insight.

The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and sim­plification help us to understand -- but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our compre­hension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formu­lated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

But life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything. In practice we are generally forced to choose between an unduly brief exposition and no exposition at all. Abbreviation is a necessary evil and the abbreviator's business is to make the best of a job which, though intrinsically bad, is still better than nothing. He must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification. He must learn to concentrate upon the essentials of a situation, but without ignor­ing too many of reality's qualifying side issues. In this way he may be able to tell, not indeed the whole truth (for the whole truth about almost any important sub­ject is incompatible with brevity), but considerably more than the dangerous quarter-truths and half-truths which have always been the current coin of thought.

With the dense complexity of our productive lives and the plethora of cheap informational fodder via the internet, brevity is at an ever greater premium.

I think we have a long ways to go to master the art of pertinent abbreviation, the reduction of the complex to its fewest elements without losing predictive value. The simple model is only useful to the extent that it provides easier access to an idea that is still useful in its simplified form.

I suspect that for this reason (difficulty of reducing complex ideas to simple models), that the more complex a society, the more important that there be a shared culture. That shared culture makes the rendering of complex ideas into still useful simple models much easier because of shared knowledge and values. Absent that shared orientation and knowledge, every step towards reduction requires discursive explanation, defeating the goal of simplification.

Is it then true that increased societal complexity must also be yoked to increased consistency within the culture? I have a suspicion that there is some feedback mechanism going on between productivity, complexity, and cultural homogeneity. Increased productivity is dependent on increased complexity and increased complexity is dependent on increased cultural consistency. Perhaps.