Two great illustrations of this concept from literature come to mind:
* Borges's 'On Exactitude in Science' [0] about a map that is as large and as precise as the territory, which renders it useless;
* the wonderful Eschaton scene in Infinite Jest [1], with Pemulis screaming: "It’s snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!
This point gets made enough over time that one suspects it's an enduring trait of our cognition to mistake the two. It certainly comes up when people present and talk about epidemiology models.
I think the best example of the map being the territory is videogames. The map file might literally be the source of truth of what is on the territory.
I saw the title to this post and immediately thought of these two things. I clicked on the comments, and you've already named them. What great writers!
I wonder if it's even useful anymore to consider mental models in the context of financial markets, even if it's just used as a metaphorical warning sign.
I read an assertion recently that of all the "markets" in human civilization/culture, the financial one is the only one where we have truly have brought maximum resource and human capital to bear. With that in mind, no one is ever surprised when the next fat tail undoes hundreds of millions in mere moments, even when the capital was managed by ostensibly "smart" individuals.
The map is certainly not the territory there, but for the average individual they're going to have a hard time understanding the map, the territory, the map legend, anecdotes about the map etc...
> I read an assertion recently that of all the "markets" in human civilization/culture, the financial one is the only one where we have truly have brought maximum resource and human capital to bear.
Are you thinking of this book?
If I had to name the single epistemic feat at which modern human civilization is most adequate, the peak of all human power of estimation, I would unhesitatingly reply, “Short-term relative pricing of liquid financial assets, like the price of S&P 500 stocks relative to other S&P 500 stocks over the next three months.” This is something into which human civilization puts an actual effort.
It's been a while since I read it, but I generally like the author's writing style and find it engaging, although I know for some people it feels long-winded. I remember when I read it I felt it had an insightful and balanced take on several societal problems, which while not entirely different from other perspectives I've seen, was at least a lot more thorough and didn't just stop at "because bankers are greedy" or "because the government is incompetent".
I think the part that really shook me, and made a lasting impact, was this:
But in the early days when Omegaven was just plain illegal to sell across state lines, some parents would drive for hours, every month, to buy Omegaven from the Boston Children’s Hospital to take back to their home state. I, for one, would call that an extraordinary effort. Those parents went far outside their routine, beyond what the System would demand of them, beyond what the world was set up to support them doing by default. Most people won’t make an effort that far outside their usual habits even if their own personal lives are at stake.
It made me think hard about what trying hard to really fix something looks like, and what options I fail to entertain. And since reading that I've become more willing to actually do what's necessary to solve problems, even at risk of inconveniencing myself or worse, looking weird. Sometimes I meet people who prioritize not looking weird over the lives of themselves and their loved ones (like in the early days of the pandemic, when non-Asian people were still too embarrassed to wear masks in public). And when I find myself thinking that way, I think back to this book and think, let's make an extraordinary effort today.
I think the book would be better without Simplicio though, who is a pretty annoying strawman character.
> The map is certainly not the territory there, but for the average individual they're going to have a hard time understanding the map, [...], the map legend [...]
It's true in many fields of engineering and scientific research, including geography and map-making. Just see how complex Geographic Information Systems [0] (basically computerized maps) have became.
The financial markets are aware of the models of them, and use that knowledge to subvert their expectations.
The financial markets may be the biggest intelligent entity that ever existed.
The only way to second guess them is to figure out a tru theory, and NOT PUBLISH IT. I expect there are many such theories producing a lot of wealth to people who don't talk about it.
Financial markets are also unusually tough because it's such a wicked problem. If there weren't so many smart people trying to predict them, they'd be easier to predict.
A.E. van Vogt wrote a fantastic SF novel based on the concept of "the map is not the territory". It's called "The Players of Null-A", if I remember correctly. It became a trilogy. I've re-read it multiple times and in fact, had just started reading it again. Some things did not age well since it was written in 1946, but overall fascinating stuff.
The first book is actually called “The World of Null-A”. I picked it up at a local used book store last year and enjoyed it. Haven’t read any more of the trilogy yet.
Even actuallier, the first book was titled "The World of Ā" but "to reduce printing costs, the 1953 and 1964 Ace Books paperback editions were entitled The World of Null-A, and the symbol Ā was replaced with "null-A" throughout the text." [1]
Ah, thanks for mentioning that. If you get the chance, the other two are pretty great as well. As an aside, one of my favorite authors, Neil Asher, recently blogged about A.E. van Vogt:
1. We have many maps, models, or concepts - different ways of viewing the same situation. How we choose which map is often more important than the overall accuracy of our maps. Changing perspective often beats getting more accurate data.
2. There is no reason to have any emotional or sentimental attachment to one’s knowledge. Think of “your knowledge” the same way you would think of “your map collection”. Edit (or discard) them with extreme prejudice!
This type of epistemology is that of a naive realist and is much more wrong than the Platonist the author tries to ostensibly criticize. Naive realism is outdated by almost 240 years.
Indirect realism or correlationism. The first would mean being aware of mental representations instead of physical objects, and the second is Kantian where the mind structures the noisy flux of sensations according to categories of thought like space and time. The second also means that the way we experience the world depends on the kind of creatures we are, and not the way the world is.
The map is actually about necessarily true properties that the territory is built on. That in any experience the features of the map exists in the territory.
The author argues instead not to be confused with the map because of potential deviation from the reality of the territory. But the map is about the categorical truths of reality which the territory is conforming to.
It’s what guarantees mathematics’ “unreasonable effectiveness”. Mathematical or scientific maps are discussing necessary properties of all human experience—-a type of knowledge called the a priori synthetic.
What’s interesting are cases where the map is the territory. The Facebook map of your friends just is the graph of your Facebook friends. The chain of command for the military just is the chain of command. Etc.
Ehhh, the chain of command in the military is defined by regulations (the map) because you never know exactly who is going to be incapacitated at any given moment. Therefore while today a peer platoon leader might have no authority over me, if our company commander is killed tomorrow and my peer has seniority, he may suddenly have command authority over the company.
So while I get your point, I wonder how much people miss the map due to obscure knowledge requirements and think it doesn't exist.
Such well-specific label territories are often artificial. Your Facebook social graph is a poor proxy for your actual IRL social network (or whose opinions you interact with the most, etc)
Big bureaucratic organizations (or other less responsive intelligences) often try to force the territory to conform to the map, for convenience of steering, but it seems like there is a significant map/territory mismatch in the generally interesting/important cases.
Wouldn't "using maps in business" be subject to precisely the points of this article? How then is this a "better" resource, rather than a tangentially related one?
* Borges's 'On Exactitude in Science' [0] about a map that is as large and as precise as the territory, which renders it useless;
* the wonderful Eschaton scene in Infinite Jest [1], with Pemulis screaming: "It’s snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!
This point gets made enough over time that one suspects it's an enduring trait of our cognition to mistake the two. It certainly comes up when people present and talk about epidemiology models.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJpfK7l404I -- I think this Decembrists music video does Eschaton wonderfully.