The map is not the territory (2015)
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Re: The map is not the territory (2015)
#2Territory? 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!
Re: The map is not the territory (2015)
#3Territory? 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!
Are you responding to the article or just the title? The article makes these same points toward the beginning.
Re: The map is not the territory (2015)
#4Territory? 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!
Are you responding to the article or just the title? The article makes these same points toward the beginning.
You could paraphrase this submission as, "The title is not the article"
Re: The map is not the territory (2015)
#5I 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.
Re: The map is not the territory (2015)
#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 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.
Re: The map is not the territory (2015)
#7I 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…
"Seeing like a state" also fits that bill
Re: The map is not the territory (2015)
#8Related:
The Map Is Not the Territory (2015) - 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 - Feb 2019 (14 comments)
Re: The map is not the territory (2015)
#9An 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_differen...
Re: The map is not the territory (2015)
#10I 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: