Refusing to be Confined to Limited Dimensionality

Yet I exist in the hope that these memoirs… may find their way to the minds of humanity in Some Dimension and may stir up a race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality.
Edwin Abbott Abbott (Author of Flatland)

Most analyses fail for a simple reason: They’re too shallow.

They describe complex problems in two dimensions…when the real answers live in seven, ten, or more.

Call me a rebel.

I refuse to solve multidimensional problems with flat thinking.

Over the last 15 years, I’ve found that once you start working in higher dimensions, something uncomfortable happens:

You can’t go back.

Because you start seeing where others are wrong.

In 2018, in Example 1, working on the then-pressing issue of “Prompt Global Strike,” I wrote of a 2-Market, 7D system consisting of adjacent markets for Fighters and Bombers (Market 1) and the missiles they carry (Market 2). I then discovered that the best (i.e., affordable) way to accomplish the mission was to develop short-range hypersonic missiles and deploy them from aircraft operating from multiple forward-based airbases. The problem with the missiles was that their cost went up dramatically with range. Ignoring this caution, the USAF went ahead with its 1000-mile hypersonic AGM-183A missile. It was canceled after one was built (as the analysis suggested in advance). The USAF is restarting this program. It was too expensive before. It will fail financially again.

With 2023’s Example 2, I dove into a pair of dependent markets, that for 1) Business Aircraft and 2) their Turbofan engines. There, I found that both a large business aircraft and its primary engine were hard against their Demand Frontiers. Since engines accounted for about 25% of the aircraft’s cost, if the recurring costs for both were sufficiently low, the solution to increase profit was to lower the price of the plane and its engine simultaneously.

Example 3, issued this year, covered five markets and 16 dimensions simultaneously. Among other things, the work done there revealed that Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) cars and Electric Vehicles (EVs), despite having different product forms, both lie on the same Demand Frontier because they perform the same function. In the same vein, Unmanned Airborne Systems (UAS) performing reconnaissance shared the same Inner and Upper Demand Frontiers as satellites performing the same function. Who knew these platforms had common sales limits until we did the multidimensional analysis?

The future of finding the most profound insights belongs to those who can describe and solve problems with sufficient depth and breadth. Using unlimited Dimensionality enables that.

Thanks, Edwin Abbott Abbott.

#hypernomics #flatland #dimensionality