The map is not the territory (2015)

As a researcher, I've always loved this 1946 one-paragraph short story by Borges about the blind obsession some people develops for models:

. . . 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.

"The map is not the territory" is so widely known as to be almost a truism, but the post's conclusion is an excellent, pithy summary of the practical implications of this idea:

> you do not understand a model, map, or reduction unless you understand and respect its limitations

This simple but powerful corollary is easily and widely overlooked, perhaps because the mind's use of maps and models as stand-ins for reality runs so deep that the full import of this statement about the profound unknowability of the world around us is too terrifying to permit contemplation.

One point the post makes is the failure of the restructuring of J.C. Penney. I don't agree that it was a total failure, I just think the board lacked the courage to get through the hard times that had been predicted by Johnson from the beginning. Yes, it scares away the coupon clippers, but re-establishing trust in a brand takes some time. Everyone is tired of the idea of these one-day sales that happen at random times, and they make stores less appealing because it always feels like you're missing out on some deal if you just waited, which usually means that you just go to Amazon instead. The customers you lose (the coupon-clippers and budget shoppers) are the worst possible customers, and in the long run you'll be better off without them.

I caught wind of the changes too late; by the time I got around to visiting one of their stores, they had reverted to the insane random discount model, so I couldn't make any headway because every sticker read like an essay; with some insanely high price "marked down" to a slightly more reasonable price, and my faith that either price was real was practically zero. I guess we'll never know unless another store tries to give it a go; the model of "buy a bunch of stuff online and return all the stuff that doesn't work" feels wasteful and limiting, and physically browsing is just a better experience except for the convenience, so anything to make the brick-and-mortar experience more predictable is welcome.

The map/territory insight is a very impressive one, and can often cut to the center of a debate, decomposing it into an argument about semantics.

My two favorite examples are the idea of defining "species" and the idea of defining "life". In both cases we have rough criteria, but both are things that are kind of "we know it when we see it" but with the understanding that at the edges we have cases that don't quite work because the definitions are convenience (and descriptive), not fundamental (and prescriptive).

So people debating whether horses and donkeys are the same species because they can interbreed are trying to make the territory fit the map.

And people debating whether a virus is "alive" are also trying to make the territory fit the map.

Both "being alive" and "belonging to the same species" are useful concepts on a gross level -- distinguishing plants and rocks, and horses and monkeys, but they break down at the micro level, which is totally okay, because we don't need a perfect model for it to be useful, so long as we constrain ourselves to the domain where it is useful.

I like Farnam Street.

However this one article title is probably the best example I’ve seen of how the ENTIRE self-industry is really just recycling insight that was developed in the early 1970’s ad infinitum.

It’s not that self-help is bad, in fact is was incredibly useful for Americans looking for guidance which depended on inner connections when this stuff started to emerge after Vietnam.

However...now...it’s just so passé.

Or, has described by Umberto Eco "On The Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1"

A different but related point:

Having a map is not the same thing as knowing the way.

This is one reason why documentation isn't nearly as useful in software development as people think it should be.