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The map is not the territory (2015)
- kebman 4y agoTerritory? The map is not the land. Or the map is not the real world. Just as any model is just that; a model and not the real thing. And as the saying is, all models are wrong, but some are useful. And maps are certainly useful!
- hoppyhoppy2 4y agoAre you responding to the article or just the title? The article makes these same points toward the beginning.
- TakeBlaster16 4y agoYou could paraphrase this submission as, "The title is not the article"
- kebman 4y agoI don't know. It's a little late and I had a few drinks. Cheers!
- rocmcd 4y agoI highly recommend the book The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller for an in-depth look at these kinds of issues (in addition to Taleb’s work). Mistaking the map for the terrain (or any similar metaphor) whereby you think you know how things work solely through the lens of easily quantifiable (and gamed) metrics seems to be the mistake of this era. The book really opened my eyes to this problem everywhere (including software), and it only seems to be getting worse.
- 8note 4y ago"Seeing like a state" also fits that bill
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoAs does "Capability does not equal intent."
- omginternets 4y agoJust FYI "Seeing Like a State" is a book, not a saying :)
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoThanks. Sounds interesting. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20186.Seeing_Like_a_State https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20186.Seeing_Like_a_Stat...
- omginternets 4y agoIt is! It's also quite long, but it's amenable to consumption as an audiobook.
- ghaff 4y ago>(Another thing holding the company back was simply its base odds: Can you name a retailer of great significance that has lost its position in the world and come back?) This seems significant. If you look at what's happened to most anchor department store retail at malls in the time since, it isn't pretty. You can look at the individual stores (Sears, Macy's, etc.) and find individual culprits to blame. But there's a reasonable point to be made that no one was in a position to turn JC Penney around even if they could have eeked out a bit more money for shareholders and debt holders.
- Der_Einzige 4y agoWasn't toys r us bankrupt but is now coming back?
- Vecr 4y agoApparently saved by military component work if you trust NCD.
- redler 4y agoIf you squint, perhaps Apple fits the bill.
- cykros 4y agoI definitely remember a time when you could refer to Apple computers as Fischer-Price machines and most people would find it an apt comparison. That time seems behind us, except for the particularly salty FSF warriors.
- astrange 4y agoSince you can sell a retailer brand to an entirely new company, it should be possible for anything to come back as long as you don’t count it actually being a different thing. Target, Kmart, Woolworths are all totally different and healthy companies in Australia.
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- dang 4y agoRelated: The Map Is Not the Territory (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487242 - June 2020 (35 comments) The map is not the territory (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19084102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19084102 - Feb 2019 (14 comments)
- jt2190 4y agoAn interesting, related thing I’ve noticed is in many learn to program tutorials and exercises there’s a failure to be explicit about when we are creating a model, and that modeling is a skill, and that skilled model-builders first and foremost create a model to solve a problem. I’ve seen too many cases where students are left on their own to flounder about deciding if cars should be composed of four wheels and an engine, and what about the doors? etc. Another flavor that traps experts in endless, pointless debate are taxonomies. Edit: See “The narcissism of small differences”, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differen...
- BLKNSLVR 4y agoThe best introduction to taxonomies: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevo... Jorge Borges also has written something directly related to 'the map is not the terrain'
- theoa 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science
- BLKNSLVR 4y agoAnd wrapping irony around itself in Borges' special way, parts of the map actually become the terrain: "tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar..."
- gopher_space 4y agoI've been trying to find the name of this film for ages, but it's a scientist explaining taxonomy by lining up a bunch of pencils sharpened to different heights in order of height and then arbitrarily dividing them into sections. Very much "the divisions are important but also decided on by some random guy, so keep that in mind."
- barathr 4y agoI like Chapman's piece on the subject -- "Maps, the territory, and meta-rationality" -- which is a deeper examination of what this classic saying really means: https://metarationality.com/maps-and-territory https://metarationality.com/maps-and-territory
- DoreenMichele 4y agoFinancial markets have no biological reality to tie them down After years of reading various things trying to use past financial data to predict the next depression, I read a thing where a guy said that people get lazy and self indulgent during good times and then work harder during bad times and that explained the ups and downs. I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but I stopped trying to find a model that used past financial ups and downs to predict the future. It's nonsense. There can be real world bits that are useful, like the Peak Oil model which is based on something real and has a real world proven track record. But lots of financial models are in the territory of a con game. I have a certificate in GIS, which involves literally studying maps. Maps have huge inherent issues if only because land is 3D and part of an imperfect globe and maps are 2D -- a flat drawing trying to unfold the surface of a ball and say something useful about it. Making good literal maps can be quite hard. I have a longstanding interest in award-winning graphics of various sorts because graphics are information dense and when they get it right, it's incredible. But maps often say more about the mind that created it than the physical landscape per se and it's a huge mistake to fail to recognize this fact.
- quickthrower2 4y agoRather than Lazy/Work hard it might be more speculate/save. In a bull market you are trying to throw more money in. In a bear you are trying to save. It is self reinforcing too.
- DoreenMichele 4y agoThat's reasonable, but it's still substantially about human behavior not some abstract algorithm that can be inferred. That's my main point. There's no certain number of years or something that causes it. It's human behavior and real world limits, like Peak Oil.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoI had a teacher, at a seminar I took, that kept saying "We need to know what 'Done' looks like." He also was the first person that told me the old Swiss Army maxim: "If the map and the terrain disagree, believe the terrain." Words to live by, as a delivery-oriented software developer.
- barrysteve 4y agoIf the map and the terrain disagree, then something needs to change. A target needs to be blown up, or the map needs rewriting.
- ThePadawan 4y agoHe also was the first person that told me the old Swiss Army maxim: "If the map and the terrain disagree, believe the terrain." Ah so that's why they keep accidentally invading Liechtenstein! /j
- colinsane 4y ago> If a map were to represent the territory with perfect fidelity, it would no longer be a reduction and thus would no longer be useful to us. if a map perfectly represented the territory it would be very useful to everyone mentioned in this article. with a perfect representation of the territory, you can just simulate different strategies and deploy the best one. no need for risk management: your perfect map allows you to eliminate all risk. a perfect map might not be possible if you’re an embedded actor, but that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t pursue the best possible map. the rest of the article is about recognizing flaws in your map. and guess what: when you identify a shortcoming in your map — which the author does and recommends others do — that’s identical in an information sense to just building a more detailed map. > improbable and consequential events seem to happen far more often than they should based on naive statistics. the author has quantified some thing (“consequential events”) and then stated that this thing occurs within some data set more frequently than would be consistent with that very dataset. i get what he’s trying to say, but when he phrases it this way it’s just a simple contradiction with an easy way out: build better maps. so, yes: the map is not the territory. if you build a map without complete knowledge of the territory (which is the majority of maps), then it has unknowable error bars. but maps are unavoidable: you can either explicitly follow a map, or implicitly follow one. Warren Buffet uses a map when making sense of the world. is it good, or bad, that the map he follows is accessible to only a single mind and has not been digitized and shared more widely? the biggest case to be made for ditching digitized/formalized maps is because this allows you to retain more hidden information, which is the basis for gaining an edge in financial markets. but the author didn’t really argue the futility of maps based on embedded actors — it was mostly an argument that too many people are engaged in map-making without first understanding the boundaries of the territory. and that’s no argument that informal maps are intrinsically superior to explicit maps.
- pdonis 4y ago> with a perfect representation of the territory, you can just simulate different strategies and deploy the best one. no need for risk management: your perfect map allows you to eliminate all risk Such a perfect map is impossible because it would need to have infinite accuracy, and its consequences would not be computable. > if you build a map without complete knowledge of the territory (which is the majority of maps) Which is all maps. Complete knowledge of the territory is impossible.
- stephc_int13 4y agoI think this is an important idea, not new but probably not widespread or well understood enough. One specific map that I think can lead to some reasoning errors is the way we abstract numbers. Our most common and widely used abstraction of numbers has infinite at both ends, and this is a perfectly valid, practical and coherent way to represent real numbers, as long as we stay in the realm of the abstraction. But real things like particles or planets might not be perfectly abstracted by this model. Reasoning about real things with this model in mind (especially infinity) can lead to weird conclusions, like the 100% likelihood that we live in a simulation.
- BLKNSLVR 4y agoThe extension of 'the map is not the terrain' is 'the simulation is not the universe'. I'm not sure if that's an exact example of what you're saying, but, for me, if any conclusion is that we're living in a simulation, then it's simulations all the way down. Or, we're living in a simulation because we understand and process the universe and our experiences through the filter of our brains, and our brains are, to some degree, an abstraction engine. Our physical bodies exist in the terrain, but the entirety of our conscious lives is lived through the map.
- stephc_int13 4y agoNo, we are not living in a simulation. And what I am saying is that the simulation hypothesis is a logical conclusion given our abstract way of representing numbers and infinity. Basic things like real numbers are also an abstract model.
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- Barrin92 4y agovery surprised to not see Borges mentioned once, who addressed this question in the short story The Exactitude of Science by asking what would happen if the map was as large as the territory (and likely borrowed that concept from Lewis Carroll), in fact it's short enough to fit in a HN comment. …In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
- hamiltonians 4y agopast performance not indicative future results , as its often said.
- goldwind 4y agoI actually read their book that they produced about mental models. It was interesting, but I wish there were games or behaviors that allowed me to actually use the models taught
- bcbrown 4y agoThis essay mentions the work of Alfred Korzybski. The book containing his life's work is called Science and Sanity. I've read about half of it, but I found it to be very challenging to read. For anyone interested in what he has to say, I would recommend the following: S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action Stuart Chase, The Tyranny of Words
- miika 4y agoIn that case, universe doesn’t behave according to “the laws of physics”. Because the laws we’ve determined is the map.
- paulmd 4y agoWasn't this established back in 2007 in the seminal work of B. Movie?