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The map is not the territory (2015)

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Re: The map is not the territory (2015)

#41

Post by DoreenMichele »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #39
DoreenMichele wrote: post #11

Financial 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…

Rather 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.

That'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.

Re: The map is not the territory (2015)

#42

Post by gopher_space »

jt2190 wrote: post #9

An 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 e…

I'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."

Re: The map is not the territory (2015)

#43

Post by BLKNSLVR »

astrange wrote: post #30
ghaff wrote: post #6

>(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…

Since 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.

Way off the original topic, but anyway: In the Australian context Dick Smith is an interesting case study:

https://foragerfunds.com/news/dick-smith-is-the-greatest-pri...

Re: The map is not the territory (2015)

#45

Post by [deleted] »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #29
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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…

No, 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.

[deleted]

Re: The map is not the territory (2015)

#46

Post by theoa »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #21
jt2190 wrote: post #9

An 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 e…

The best introduction to taxonomies: 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'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science

Re: The map is not the territory (2015)

#48

Post by BLKNSLVR »

theoa wrote: post #46
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best introduction to taxonomies: 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'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science

And 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..."

Re: The map is not the territory (2015)

#49

Post by AA-BA-94-2A-56 »

pdonis wrote: post #15
colinsane wrote: post #14

> 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 y…

> 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…

To agree with you and further what you've said...

Even if the map is infinitely perfect, your understanding of it is imperfect. Because your mental model of the map is the actual map you follow, it is the actual map that you follow. Because you are imperfect, even if your map is perfect, the map you follow is imperfect.

Therefore, the saying is always true.

Re: The map is not the territory (2015)

#50

Post by lionkor »

jt2190 wrote: post #9

An 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 e…

OOP can be a minefield in this sense, yeah. It needs to be taught correctly, and even then, it brings the problem domain into the solution, which makes it difficult to reuse.
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