Week 10 Day 3 - Framing
0A mental frame is a simplified way of dealing with a complicated subject. For example, is government the solution to problems, as many progressives think, or is it the cause of a lot of problems, as many libertarians think? The reality is very complicated, as the American government is a huge entity, with impact in many different sectors of the economy, both here and abroad. But the human brain has a hard time dealing with nuance and complexity, and will often substitute a simple representation instead.
For this reason, it is very common in politics and debating to introduce your frame as the correct one, and new representatives entering Congress will be actually given a guide as to what language they should use when talking about issues. It makes a real difference if what you're debating is a woman's right to choose (who could oppose that?) or if what you're debating is a baby's right to live (who could oppose that?) If you concede the frame to your opponent, you'll usually lose a debate, so what happens is that both sides will typically insist on using their frame, and then they proceed to talk right past each other, and nothing gets resolved.
Frames are important in computer science as well. What presuppositions and assumptions we make when writing a program can often times have fatal consequences. If you just naively assume that a sensor will always give you a number between 1 and 100 and then one time it doesn't, it can cause your plane to fall out of the sky (the Boeing 737 MAX crashes were caused by software not handling bad sensor data correctly) or for your heart defibrillator to trigger or not trigger when it should, and so forth.