[In-Depth Look] When the Dimension Changes, the Result Also Changes

Kim Dong-chul, Ph.D. in Engineering · Advisor at Bespin Global

Several years ago, I suffered from back pain. First, I applied a pain relief patch to my back. Then, I went to an orthopedic clinic, had an X-ray taken, received anti-inflammatory medication, and underwent physical therapy for a week. Out of anxiety, I also visited a well-known qigong therapist for treatment. I underwent a four-dimensional treatment with more than four different prescriptions. However, the problem was that after the symptoms subsided, I had no way of knowing exactly why the back pain had improved.

Dieting is not a new topic. However, losing weight healthily is not simple. If you simply aim to reduce your body weight by 10% and cut down on food or suddenly engage in excessive exercise, yo-yo effects will only follow. You need to set a more advanced goal. Instead of aiming to lose weight, the goal should be to have a healthy body by building lower body muscles and reducing visceral fat in the upper body. Additionally, to solve the problem, it is necessary to introduce the difficult dimension of time.

The stock investment craze is sweeping through. To invest in stocks healthily, happily, and enjoyably, you need to control the dimension of greed. If you earn 5%, you should be happy, but many cases end up losing money by being greedy to earn 10%. This is an act of confining oneself to a one-dimensional perspective. Once you have made an investment decision or executed a sale, it is good to step back and look at the bigger picture.

Michael Shellenberger, well known as an environmental guru, persuasively dealt with cases where results change by expanding dimensions in his book Apocalypse Never (2020). Regarding why wildfires in the U.S. become large-scale, he treated human intervention as a new dimension. Wildfires used to occur naturally. However, as fire control and security developed, even small fires were quickly extinguished, causing an excessive accumulation of unburned kindling in the forests, so when a fire did start, it became a massive one. From a temporal perspective, although the overall frequency of wildfires and the resulting damage have significantly decreased, because wildfires are only treated as urgent news at the current moment, public perception of wildfires may be distorted.

Another interesting example is the topic of saving whales. The whaling industry peaked in the 1900s. People used whale oil to light fires and produce margarine and soap. However, with technological advances, kerosene became the lighting fuel, and margarine and soap were produced using palm oil, a vegetable oil, causing the price of whale oil to plummet and eliminating the need to hunt whales. What had a profound impact on whale survival was the development of technology bringing substitutes and political logic. However, most people are probably familiar with videos of Greenpeace braving rough waves to interfere with whale hunting. The truth can appear differently depending on the interpreter, but there will be differences in weight.

A sheet of paper is flat and two-dimensional. Cartoons drawn in newspapers are two-dimensional images. If two airplanes meet on the same trajectory in two dimensions, they will naturally collide. However, in three-dimensional space, airplane collisions do not easily occur. Discovering the proper dimension to explain a phenomenon brings us closer to measuring the truth. If measurement is possible, management is possible, and if management is possible, improvement can be made. Efforts to approach reality in actions such as treating illness, successful dieting, satisfying stock investment, and improving perspectives on news are like efforts to see both the forest and the trees simultaneously.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.