Blog Adventure 8: Addition Paradox

The Addition Paradox is a meditation on problems and solutions.  The addition paradox is when adding something as a solution sometimes backfires.

Earlier we noted the Winning Man’s Paradox, which is the idea that problems multiply where solutions simplify.  One example of this is how Alexander the Great cut the Gordian Knot instead of wasting time working to solve the puzzle.  Still another is the idea of the grieving spouse.  A spouse, told he will be left because he is needy and not fun, then accidentally gets more needy and more un-fun when worrying about the problem.  Genius musician Bobby McFerrin said you might have trouble, but when you worry, “you make it double.”  So don’t worry, be happy.

I’ve been thinking about David Owen’s Green Metropolis:  Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability, which is the idea that the suburban sprawl has been more detrimental to the environment than urban sprawl.  Because people sought to escape the garbage and pollution of cities, they mistakenly thought they were being more green by moving into the suburbs.  The worst aspect of this has been the rise in greenhouse gases, which are far worse in suburbia and suburbanized cities than in New York City.

Likewise, the New Yorker Magazine ran an article earlier this summer 2010  about the traffic problem in Moscow, Russia.  Moscow’s government attempted to alleviate traffic problems by adding more traffic lanes to the roads.  Paradoxically (I say!) instead of solving the problem, this invited more people to drive, and more traffic jams to occur.

Immanuel Kant is relevant here.  He says man is predisposed to seek answers for questions he cannot answer.  His epistemological system is a criticism of pure reason which helped science achieve the legal right to get answers about knowledge and the material world.

I think, in a vein similar to Kant, that the Addition Paradox works this way;  that we cannot escape wanting to bite off more than we can chew and yet cannot chew whatever it is when we do such a thing.  We always try to go for the bigger gun, the bigger answer, the bigger whatever, but we do that at the expense of keeping something controllable and (here again similar to Kant) fathomable.

Efforts to solve a problem can be detrimental to the solution process, and getting solutions.

Of course the subtraction paradox works in a similar way.  But things never seem to get so small that they are out of control, and unable to be solved.

Side Note about Winning Man’s Paradox:

In a conversation with my brother’s friends last night, someone said to me last night that solutions don’t simplify because solutions are the end result of a process. Good, I have to think about this.  So I’m wrong about the word ‘solution’.  What could be between the problem and the solution?

Next, someone else said that these are all in our heads.  So for problems and solutions to exist at all, they have to be invented.  Okay, so I don’t have anything for this.  They are right, of course.  If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, it really doesn’t make a difference about much of anything.  Even then, we are only able to fathom that based on a thought we pose here and now (this is fortunately inescapable — that’s some phenomenology for you, kids).