Map is not the territory

One of my favorite ideas from Shane Parrish’s Mental Models book which I read recently is this:

The map is never be the territory.

Harold Fisk’s Meander Maps of the Mississippi River (1944)

In other words, the “description” of the thing, is not the thing in itself.

It’s so applicable, that it doesn’t exist to me as this abstract idea anymore.

So, the Argentinian writer Luis Borges, in his brilliant allegorical style, summarized the mental model nicely in a one-paragraph short story, On Exactitude in Science:

… 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.

—Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

This is a fictional tale of a map that is so precise of its’ “territory” that it is “useless”, after all, one could just follow the territory instead of using the map. Why use a map then?

It’s a brilliant thought experiment which highlights the fact that maps are lossy, and you lose a lot of details in the process, and this is not a bug, but a feature of it being a map.

Even the best maps are reductions, and they’re never perfect. They differ in their exactitude..

And this is my commentary on the notion that AI is taking away all the “human jobs”, it would at the end of the day, AI can only be an approximation, and cannot exactly replace the human.

It could probably be more than what a human can do, or sometimes, less than what humans are meant to do. Love, care and kindness etc, are not something they can exact, and can only mimic.

My thinking now is that, as long as these approximations exist, the human jobs are not going away any time soon.

I do have a similar argument to suggest folks to read raw transcripts.

This is quite a contrary opinion still, and we’re more used to referring to summaries. Maybe that’s a quick nugget and has faster absorption, but we do mistake comprehension for understanding sometimes. They are not the same. If I do have the luxury of time, I would personally prefer reading through the raw transcripts to get more higher dimensional granularity to what’s going on..

If we extend the analogy, the raw transcript is almost like the “territory” we’re speaking about. And the insights generated, are more or less like the “map”. And the map can never be equivalent to the territory.

Apart from this quirk to read raw transcripts, I also have a similar asymmetric thumb rule when it comes to reading long form blog posts. Some of them are really high alpha, high signal, so when a writer deeply resonates with me, I go the last mile and read the whole essay end to end.

I want to read it in its lossless format, without it being stripped of any details.. as “map is not the territory”, I do prefer waltzing through the territory in some occasions, and not use the map instead..