The map is not the territory (2015)

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.

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.

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.

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.