the map is not the territory

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pages: 147 words: 39,910

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish

Albert Einstein, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bitcoin, Black Swan, colonial rule, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, feminist movement, Garrett Hardin, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Bogle, Linda problem, mandelbrot fractal, Pepsi Challenge, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, Richard Feynman, statistical model, stem cell, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem

The goal of FS is to master the best of what other people have figured out. True to this mission, everything in here began with someone else. Any reproduction of this book requires written permission. www.fs.blog ISBN: 978-1-9994490-0-1 Contents Preface Acquiring Wisdom General Thinking Concepts: The Map is not the Territory Circle of Competence First Principles Thinking Thought Experiment Second-Order Thinking Probabilistic Thinking Inversion Occam’s Razor Hanlon’s Razor Supporting Ideas: Falsifiability Necessity and Sufficiency Causation vs. Correlation Acknowledgements Landmarks Title Page Table of Contents Preface Introduction Body Matter Acknowledgments Cover _ The key to better understanding the world is to build a latticework of mental models.

Also known as the “Lady Photographer”, she was an artist who lived and worked in Lebanon and Palestine. Jacobs, Jane. 1916-2006 - American-Canadian journalist, author, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her work has greatly impacted the development of North American cities. The Map is not the Territory The map of reality is not reality. Even the best maps are imperfect. That’s because they are reductions of what they represent. 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. A map can also be a snapshot of a point in time, representing something that no longer exists.

Key elements of a map In 1931, the mathematician Alfred Korzybski presented a paper on mathematical semantics in New Orleans, Louisiana. Looking at it today, most of the paper reads like a complex, technical argument on the relationship of mathematics to human language, and of both to physical reality. However, with this paper Korzybski introduced and popularized the concept that the map is not the territory. In other words, the description of the thing is not the thing itself. The model is not reality. The abstraction is not the abstracted. Specifically, in his own words:2 1. A map may have a structure similar or dissimilar to the structure of the territory. The London underground map is super useful to travelers.


pages: 556 words: 95,955

Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted by Daniel Sokatch

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, indoor plumbing, Live Aid, lockdown, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, one-state solution, Salesforce, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, traveling salesman, urban planning, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

4.The British Are Coming: World War I, the Balfour Declaration, and the Establishment of the British Mandate (1917–39) 5.Israel and the Nakba: Independence and Catastrophe (1947–49) 6.The Dispossessed 7.The Fifties: State Building and Suez 8.The Big Bang: The 1967 War and the Reality It Created 9.Roller Coaster: From the Yom Kippur War to the First Intifada (1968–87) 10.Shaking It Off: The First Intifada 11.Israel Is Waiting for Rabin 12.As the Clever Hopes Expire: The End of Oslo 13.The Bulldozer’s Last Surprise 14.The Democracy Recession PART TWO: WHY IS IT SO HARD TO TALK ABOUT ISRAEL? 15.The Map Is Not the Territory 16.Israel’s Arab Citizens: Shared Society or Segregation? 17.A Love Story? Israel and the American Jewish Community 18.The Settlements 19.What We Talk About When We Talk About BDS 20.The A-Word 21.The Other A-Word 22.Red Cows in the Heartland: Israel and Armageddon 23.The Case for Hope A Lexicon of the Conflict Acknowledgments Bibliography Notes INTRODUCTION HAVE YOU EVER found yourself at a dinner party when the topic of Israel came up, and you wanted to flee to another room?

Why are there so many land mines when it comes to talking about, and criticizing, Israel and its policies? And what’s the evangelical Christian obsession with Israel all about? Once we’ve unpacked these (and a few other) questions a bit, we may have a better sense of why they can drive so many otherwise sensible people a little bonkers. CHAPTER 15 THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY IN THE LATE 1990s, I decided to photograph road and street signs in Israel (mostly in Jerusalem) that had been altered or vandalized, almost always to excise the Arabic place names from the bi- or trilingual signs. There were hundreds of examples. In the pictures, you can see the Arabic place names blacked out with paint or covered over by ultranationalist Hebrew-language bumper stickers.

Generations of Palestinian and Israeli kids grow up with maps that tell them that they are the sole rightful owners of the land. And when those deeply rooted perceptions and assumptions don’t match reality, look out. That’s a key ingredient in the recipe for another generation of conflict and hatred. When it comes to this contested region, the map is not the territory. Archaeology, too, is a conflict zone. Despite the fact that there is an abundance of actual historical and archaeological evidence clearly supporting the connections of both Jews and Palestinians to the land, a lot has been invested in not only establishing the best and most compelling historical claim, but also denying the connection of the “other.”


pages: 401 words: 93,256

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, butterfly effect, California gold rush, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Firefox, Ford Model T, General Magic , George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, IKEA effect, information asymmetry, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mason jar, Murray Gell-Mann, nudge theory, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Veblen good, work culture

‘It doesn’t matter what something tastes like in blind tastings, if you put “low in fat” or any other health indicators on the packaging, you’ll make the contents taste worse.’ In the testing that they had conducted the biscuits had been unpackaged, and they had forgetten that packaging will also affect the taste. 6.8: The Map Is Not the Territory, but the Packaging Is the Product The Polish-American academic Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) is perhaps most famous for his dictum that ‘The map is not the territory.’ He created a field called general semantics, and argued that because human knowledge of the world is limited by human biology, the nervous system and the languages humans have developed, no one can perceive reality, given that everything we know arrived filtered by the brain’s own interpretation of it.

6.2: How to Buy a Television for Your Pet Monkey 6.3: Lost and Gained in Translation: Reality and Perception as Two Different Languages 6.4: Mokusatsu: The A-Bomb, the H-Bomb and the C-Bomb 6.5: Nothing New under the Sun 6.6: When It Pays to Be Objective – and When It Doesn’t 6.7: How Words Change the Taste of Biscuits 6.8: The Map Is Not the Territory, but the Packaging Is the Product 6.9: The Focusing Illusion 6.10: Bias, Illusion and Survival 6.11: How to Get a New Car for £50 6.12: Psychophysics to Save the World 6.13: The Ikea Effect: Why It Doesn’t Pay to Make Things Too Easy 6.14: Getting People to Do the Right Thing Sometimes Means Giving Them the Wrong Reason 7: How to Be an Alchemist 7.1: The Bad News and the Good News 7.2: Alchemy Lesson One: Given Enough Material to Work On, People Often Try to Be Optimistic 7.3: Sour Grapes, Sweet Lemons and Minimising Regret 7.4: Alchemy Lesson Two: What Works at a Small Scale Works at a Large Scale 7.5: Alchemy Lesson Three: Find Different Expressions for the Same Thing 7.6: Alchemy Lesson Four: Create Gratuitous Choices 7.7: Alchemy Lesson Five: Be Unpredictable 7.8: Alchemy Lesson Six: Dare to Be Trivial 7.9: Alchemy Lesson Seven: In Defence of Trivia Conclusion: On Being a Little Less Logical Solving Problems Using Rationality Is Like Playing Golf With Only One Club Finding the Real Why: We Need to Talk about Unconscious Motivations Rebel against the Arithmocracy Always Remember to Scent the Soap Back to the Galapagos Endnotes About the Author Copyright About the Publisher Rory’s Rules of Alchemy The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

“Academics Have More to Declare than Their Genius,” Financial Times, June 24, 2009. Kates, Steven. The Global Financial Crisis: What Have We Learnt? (Cheltenham, U.K.: Elgar, 2011). Kay, John. “Economics: Rituals of Rigor,” Financial Times, August 25, 2011. Kay, John. “The Map Is Not the Territory,” October 4, 2011, at www.johnkay.com/2011/10/04/the-map-is-not-the-territory-an-essay-on-the-state-of-economics. Kay, John. “Why Economists Stubbornly Stick to their Guns,” Financial Times, April 15, 2011. Keen, Steve. “Like a Dog Walking on Its Hind Legs: Krugman’s Minsky Model,” March 4, 2011, at www.debunkingeconomics.com.

Just when I had begun feeling proud of my little trope, a friend pointed me to Wendy Brown’s “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-democratization.” Originality is an overrated virtue. 2 Video recordings of much of the proceedings are available on the Web at www.ineteconomics.org. 3 Kay, “The Map Is Not the Territory.” 4 Tankersley and Hirsh, “Neo–Voodoo Economics.” 5 Tiago Mata, at History of Economics Playground, at http://historyofeconomics.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/inet-bw-of-history-repeating/#more-2002. 6 Stephan Richter, www.theglobalist.com/storyid.aspx?StoryId=9096. See also the account by Yves Smith at www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/04/page/3, which suggests that the video available at the INET website may have been redacted.

For a number of examples on the right, see the Chicago interviews of John Cassidy (“Rational Irrationality”) or Taylor, “How Government Created the Financial Crisis.” History is always the first casualty in any economics dispute. 6 See www.britac.ac.uk/events/archive/forum-economy.cfm. The Queen’s question is also discussed in Kay, “The Map Is Not the Territory.” 7 See, for instance, Jane Smiley’s novel Moo, or Olivier Assayas’s film Summer Hours. 8 Sorman, “The Free Marketers Strike Back.” 9 Thoma, “What Caused the Financial Crisis?” 10 Here is the economist David Levine: “I was reading your article ‘How Did Economists Get It So Wrong.’ Who are these economists who got it so wrong?


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

But your true understanding is measured by your ability to describe what you’re doing and why, without using that word or any of its synonyms. * 169 Fallacies of Compression “The map is not the territory,” as the saying goes. The only life-size, atomically detailed, 100% accurate map of California is California. But California has important regularities, such as the shape of its highways, that can be described using vastly less information—not to mention vastly less physical material—than it would take to describe every atom within the state borders. Hence the other saying: “The map is not the territory, but you can’t fold up the territory and put it in your glove compartment.” A paper map of California, at a scale of 10 kilometers to 1 centimeter (a million to one), doesn’t have room to show the distinct position of two fallen leaves lying a centimeter apart on the sidewalk.

So is the 747 made of something other than quarks? No, you’re just modeling it with representational elements that do not have a one-to-one correspondence with the quarks of the 747. The map is not the territory. Why not model the 747 with a chromodynamic representation? Because then it would take a gazillion years to get any answers out of the model. Also we could not store the model on all the memory on all the computers in the world, as of 2008. As the saying goes, “The map is not the territory, but you can’t fold up the territory and put it in your glove compartment.” Sometimes you need a smaller map to fit in a more cramped glove compartment—but this does not change the territory.

Given the seeming absolute stability and universality of physical laws, it’s possible that never, in the whole history of the universe, has any particle exceeded the local lightspeed limit. That is, the lightspeed limit may be, not just true 99% of the time, or 99.9999% of the time, or (1 - 1/googolplex) of the time, but simply always and absolutely true. But whether we can ever have absolute confidence in the lightspeed limit is a whole ’nother question. The map is not the territory. It may be entirely and wholly true that a student plagiarized their assignment, but whether you have any knowledge of this fact at all—let alone absolute confidence in the belief—is a separate issue. If you flip a coin and then don’t look at it, it may be completely true that the coin is showing heads, and you may be completely unsure of whether the coin is showing heads or tails.


pages: 151 words: 38,153

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough by Peter Barnes

adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, banks create money, basic income, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Money creation, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stuart Kauffman, the map is not the territory, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy

But the book I started is finished and in your hands. IT’S IMPORTANT TO DISTINGUISH between economics and our economy. The terms are often conflated but refer to different things. Economics is a body of thought; our economy is a system that functions in the real world. As has been said in other contexts, the map is not the territory. Our economic system is real terrain, and economics is a picture of it, necessarily inaccurate and incomplete. Much has been written about the deficiencies of contemporary economics. I’m more concerned about the defects of our actual economy. But to understand those defects—and to fix them—we must start with a sufficiently wide lens, which is why conventional economics is a problem.


pages: 168 words: 47,972

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts

dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, follow your passion, George Santayana, Lao Tzu, large denomination, personalized medicine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the map is not the territory

Sure, expat cafés and card games have their place, but there’s more to it than just that, and a lot of the other stuff involves just diving into the unknown — accepting an invitation to a wedding in some small town where you don’t speak the language, or just wandering around the streets and alleys and talking to whomever strikes up a conversation with you, and so on. I kind of like spending a lot of time on my own, so it has been a challenge going out and doing stuff with local people. — TOM BOURGUIGON, 25, GRAPHIC DESIGNER, OHIO ———— The aphorism “The map is not the territory” looms ever larger as I get lost in the intricacies of a culture, giving up any hope of understanding, while love and appreciation between us grows. — ELDON HAINES, 70, NASA PLANETARY SCIENTIST, OREGON VAGABONDING PROFILE John Ledyard He saw that if anyone appeared insane it was not the island cannibals or the grease-encrusted Aleuts or the stony-hearted Tartars, but the one who visited them.


Yoga Nidra Meditation by Pierre Bonnasse

the map is not the territory

With regular training on a daily basis, the practices fall into place on their own, even at night. Everything is clear and luminous: a new flavor that changes life, our way of knowing ourselves, and of being. The philosophy is essentially practical. The knowing and the being are reunited in a harmonious, benevolent, and nourishing dance. The map is not the territory, but it allows us to move forward on the path, to lose ourselves then to find ourselves; it lets us be seized by what “is neither lost nor found.” I can relax without practicing yoga nidra, but I cannot practice yoga nidra without being relaxed just like in meditation. In wakefulness, the relaxation essentially operates on the level of the physical body and its tissues.


pages: 807 words: 154,435

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

And having asked where data come from, it is also important to ask what model is being used to interpret it. Remember the fate of the Literary Digest which predicted a landslide victory for Landon, not Roosevelt. Even now pollsters disagree about how to translate the raw data they collect into predictions of results. The map is not the territory Models can also be used to reproduce large – real – worlds. Engineers must have comprehensive and quantitative understanding of how aircraft and bridges will respond to changes in wind speed and shear. Bridges can literally be modelled by the construction of small-scale replicas, although the degree to which the properties of the model carry over to the bridge itself requires experience and judgement.

The paradox is demonstrated in the oft-told story, perhaps most eloquently described by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, of the quest to create a perfect map of the world. 15 The search ends with a map which itself completely reproduces the world, and is therefore useless. A map, or a model, is necessarily a simplification, and the appropriate simplification is matched to a purpose – a walking map differs from a subway map or road atlas, even of the same area. ‘The map is not the territory’, in the famous words of the Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski, and the same is true of models. 16 Nevertheless, some models successfully represent the essential features of the system which are needed for accurate prediction. And these representations are the basis of the scientific advance which followed the formulation of Newtonian mechanics.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

But making what we do now more productive is just the beginning. We must share the fruits of that productivity, and use them wisely. If we let machines put us out of work, it will be because of a failure of imagination and a lack of will to make a better future. PART I USING THE RIGHT MAPS The map is not the territory. —Alfred Korzybski 1 SEEING THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT IN THE MEDIA, I’M OFTEN PEGGED AS A FUTURIST. I DON’T think of myself that way. I think of myself as a mapmaker. I draw a map of the present that makes it easier to see the possibilities of the future. Maps aren’t just representations of physical locations and routes.

It is essential to look through the labels—employee and independent contractor—and examine the underlying reality that they point to. So often, we live in the world of labels and associated value judgments and assumptions, and forget to reduce our intellectual equation to the common denominators. As Alfred Korzybski so memorably wrote, we must remember that “the map is not the territory.” When you put yourself into the mapmaker’s seat, rather than simply taking the existing map as an accurate reflection of an unchanging reality, you begin to see new possibilities. The rules that we follow as a society must be updated when the underlying conditions change. The distinction between employees and subcontractors doesn’t really make sense in the on-demand model, which requires subcontractor-like freedoms to workers who come and go at their own option, and where employee-based overtime rules would prohibit workers from maximizing their income.


pages: 622 words: 169,014

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, basic income, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Doomsday Clock, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Ford paid five dollars a day, heat death of the universe, lone genius, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair

Heinlein also became interested in General Semantics, a discipline developed by the Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski. In his monumental book Science and Sanity, Korzybski warned against the fallacy of confusing words with their underlying objects, as expressed in the aphorism for which he would be best remembered: “The map is not the territory.” General Semantics was a mental engineering program that trained its users to avoid such mistakes, and Heinlein was particularly drawn to the concept of “time binding,” which stated that man was the one animal that could build on the abstractions created by previous generations—but only if it knew how.

Asimov, In Memory Yet Green, 245. “the worst science fiction writer unlynched” Ibid. “I wanted to make sure he remembered me” Knight, The Futurians, 116n. the only game fit for adults Patterson, Learning Curve, 194. “a grisly horror” RAH to Robert Bloch, March 18, 1949, quoted in Patterson, Learning Curve, 198. “The map is not the territory” The term first appeared in Korzybski’s paper “A Non-Aristotelian System and its Necessity for Rigor in Mathematics and Physics,” December 28, 1931. RAH and Leslyn met Korzybski in 1939. Patterson, Learning Curve, 236. “for plot twists and climaxes” Leslyn (Heinlein) Mocabee to Frederik Pohl, May 8, 1953.


They Have a Word for It A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases-Sarabande Books (2000) by Howard Rheingold

Ayatollah Khomeini, clockwork universe, Easter island, fudge factor, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, junk bonds, Kula ring, Lao Tzu, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, The Home Computer Revolution, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons

Alexandra David-Neel, The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects Fishing baskets are employed to catch fish; but when the fish are got, the men forget the baskets; snares are employed to catch hares; but when the hares are got, men forget the snares. Words are employed to convey ideas; but when the ideas are grasped, men forget the words. ChuangTzu ~anguage is the road to God, but words are the tools of the Devil. The map is not the territory. Terms may be used, but none of them are absolute. Don't bite my finger, look at where I'm pointing! Language collides painfully with paradox when words are used to direct people to the realm of spiritual matters. Possibly more blood has been shed throughout the centuries over differing interpretations of holy scriptures than over all the mercantile or territorial dis- Spiritual Pathwords putes combined.


pages: 361 words: 76,849

The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of Work by Scott Berkun

barriers to entry, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Broken windows theory, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, future of work, Google Hangouts, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Kanban, Lean Startup, lolcat, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, post-work, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Stallman, Seaside, Florida, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the map is not the territory, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Hsieh, trade route, work culture , zero-sum game

The prevailing attitude at Automattic was that any big project is simply a series of smaller ones, and I liked this. It avoids the stupid things that happen on projects by never allowing you to fall in love with your grand plans. As the joke goes, if you don't have a plan, then you never worry if your plan is wrong. And as the pithy saying goes, the map is not the territory. If you make an elaborate map, you forget the world may change for the worse while you're staring at your beautiful little map. People drive off cliffs and into lakes because their GPS device told them there was a road, but there wasn't. Without the GPS, that can't happen. In project terms, if you make only small maps, of, say, the next two weeks, you never run the risk of your map being very wrong, and you learn more from the present since it has your full attention.


Designing Search: UX Strategies for Ecommerce Success by Greg Nudelman, Pabini Gabriel-Petit

access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business intelligence, call centre, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, folksonomy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, performance metric, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, search costs, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social graph, social web, speech recognition, text mining, the long tail, the map is not the territory, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Finally, it is important to note that, although this framework can be helpful and these five ecommerce search roles apply to most ecommerce projects, this generalized framework is not precise. For any framework to be maximally useful for a specific project, you should refine it through direct observation of customers and careful study of key performance metrics. As the prominent philosopher and the father of General Semantics Alfred Korzybski so eloquently stated, “The map is not the territory.” You can neither camp on the little triangles that represent mountains on a map nor go swimming in those blue patches of ink that represent lakes. Rather than viewing this role framework as “reality,” use it as you would a map—to help you navigate your ecommerce search design projects, and as the foundation for developing your own approach—subject to change as you get more data and gain a better understanding of the needs and behaviors of your customers.


pages: 600 words: 72,502

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

The proxies that have come into standard use in the policy and business domains, proxies that have become indistinguishable in the minds of their users from the efficiency they are supposed to measure, have been converting the historically Gaussian, bell-shaped distribution of outcomes in the American economy into a differently shaped and problematic curve—known as a Pareto distribution—that threatens the future of democratic capitalism in America. The Problem with Proxies A model is but one representation of reality. As the saying goes, the map is not the territory. Because there is an infinite variety and amount of data in the territory—a tree here, a depression there, etc.—the map by necessity leaves some things out and highlights other things, usually determined by what we want to use the map to know. A topographical map will highlight natural terrain.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

Economists value logic, parsimony, and elegance—sometimes more than reality—and like an academic paper to have some impressive algebra to express the logic. I have been asked by journal editors to insert some equations that say in algebra the same as the surrounding words. The linguistic philosopher Alfred Korzybski (1933) famously warned against believing too much in a model: ‘The map is not the territory.’ The aim in modelling should be finding a happy medium: between navigating around London only via Tube; and making the opposite error of piling on descriptive detail without any analytical abstraction in a kind of Borgesian paradox where the entire territory is the only possible map (Borges 1975 [1946]).


pages: 342 words: 72,927

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

The study even found that the size was proportional to the time they had spent memorizing and navigating London’s roads.5 When we drive on unfamiliar roads, or walk in strange cities, or travel on the London Underground, we do not have the knowledge. We rely on designers to help us navigate. If they fail to do a good job, we end up squinting at confusing message boards, blaming ourselves because we missed a motorway junction, or spinning around in circles at the exit of a station. The map is not the territory The most fundamental piece of navigation design is the map. Yet maps are always simplifications. Like the mental models they help construct, they distort space, prioritize certain features and leave others out. The question is not, what is most topographically accurate? The question is, how would you like your perception to be manipulated?


pages: 290 words: 82,871

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets by Michael Blastland

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, cognitive bias, complexity theory, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, epigenetics, experimental subject, full employment, George Santayana, hindsight bias, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, nudge unit, oil shock, p-value, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, selection bias, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies

I simply suspect over confidence, especially in the form that modelled outputs reach the public, where they tend to lack recognition of the uncertainties. Those interested in a critical approach to these questions could do a lot worse than begin with John Kay’s essay on modelling in economics: ‘The Map is Not the Territory’, available on his website: johnkay.com. 4 Tom Gash, Criminal: The Truth About Why People Do Bad Things, London, Allen Lane, 2016: an excellent book; clear, thoughtful and readable. 5 See also Pat Mayhew, Ronald V. Clarke and David Elliott, ‘Motorcycle Theft, Helmet Legislation and Displacement’, Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, vol. 28, no. 1, 1989. 6 These criticisms are marshalled (and referenced) in an impressive book against current research methods: Raymond Hubbard, Corrupt Research – The Case for Reconceptualizing Empirical Management and Social Science, London, Sage, 2015. 7 Duncan J.


pages: 337 words: 87,236

Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History by Alex von Tunzelmann

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial rule, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Donald Trump, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Earth, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

While we historians generally try not to make things up, in attempting to ‘make some kind of sense of people’s oftentimes senseless actions’, as Professor Wagner describes it, we are still telling a story. In telling any story, in making any kind of selection of which historical facts to include or exclude, you inevitably impose a shape on facts and events – and that shape may be deceptive. The scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked that ‘the map is not the territory’. Any written history, even the blandest series of historical documents, can only ever be a map, not the actual territory of history, which vanishes as soon as it has happened. History is gone. What we have is the memory of history, and that is always contested. This is why I am interested in statues, and why I think their construction and destruction is so important to many people.


pages: 340 words: 92,904

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

This isn’t quite as big a con job as a mentalist who has confederates checking out marks before a performance, but neither is it a system that can be scaled up for real-world use. Remember: we’re talking not just roads, but driveways, parking lots, ferry terminals, and basically anywhere a car can already travel. Then there’s the uncomfortable reality that the map is not the territory. No matter how frequently it is updated, no mapping software can keep up with every new lane marking, or pothole, or construction site, or utility truck blocking a road. As I write this, most street markings in the Northeast are covered by snow and ice, and snow banks often require driving illegally into lanes reserved for oncoming traffic.


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

I did not, of course, accurately predict the timing of the bursting of the bubble. 88 ‘Expectations of Returns and Expected Returns’, 2012, http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/ Publication%20Files/expectedreturns20121020_00760bc1-693c-4b4f-b635-ded0e540e78c.pdf 89 Ibid. 90 http://www.economist.com/node/14165405 91 http://www.johnkay.com/2011/10/04/the-map-is-not-the-territory-an-essay-on-thestate-of-economics 92 Speech to the annual conference of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, quoted by Anatole Kaletsky in the International New York Times, April 2014. 93 Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, Yale University Press, 1986. 94 The Time of My Life, Penguin Books, 1990. 95 The trade-to-GDP ratio is the economy’s total trade of goods and services (exports plus imports) divided by GDP. 96 Politics, Book 7, Part 9, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.7.seven.html 97 http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/laws.html 98 Quote from Jerry Z.


pages: 293 words: 88,490

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction by Richard Bookstaber

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, data science, disintermediation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, epigenetics, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, geopolitical risk, Henri Poincaré, impact investing, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market clearing, market microstructure, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, the map is not the territory, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, yield curve

Elementary Lessons in Logic: Deductive and Inductive with Copious Questions and Examples, and a Vocabulary of Logical Terms. New York: Macmillan. Jevons, William Stanley, and H. S. Foxwell. 1884. Investigations in Currency and Finance. London: Macmillan. Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kay, John. 2012. “The Map Is Not the Territory: Models, Scientists, and the State of Macroeconomics.” Critical Review 24, no. 1: 87–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2012.684476. Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 1937. “The General Theory of Employment.”


Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen Laberge PHD

Abraham Maslow, active measures, Albert Einstein, classic study, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, Menlo Park, tacit knowledge, the map is not the territory

From Chapter 5, you should remember that the dream state and waking state both use the same perceptual process to arrive at mental representations or models of the world. These models, whether of the dream or physical world, are only models. As such they are illusions, not the things they are representing, just as the map is not the territory, and the menu is not the meal. The Great Realization: It Is All a Dream ““The final step leads to the Great Realization, that nothing within the sangsara [phenomenal world of space and time] is or can be other than unreal like dreams.”15 If we compare the mind to a television set, the Great Realization is understanding that nothing that appears on the screen can be anything other than an image, or an illusion.


Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (And What We Can Do About It) by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, book value, business cycle, Debian, democratizing finance, desegregation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, global village, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, manufacturing employment, Nash equilibrium, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, the map is not the territory, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Y2K

The many different ways of designing ballots and tallying votes can be thought of as competing road maps of the same region. Though different in superficial ways, all show the same tenitory. Because of that, it shouldn't matter which map (voting system) we use. All are going to get us where we need to go. We all know that the map is not the territory. What if there were no territory--only maps? Arrow's theorem says that there are situations where the "will of the people" is ill-defined, where rational people are collectively irrational. A decisive voting system will come up with a winner, but that winner may differ from the winner decided under another voting system that also sounds fair and reasonable.


pages: 376 words: 101,759

Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid by Meredith. Angwin

airline deregulation, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, decarbonisation, demand response, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, green new deal, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jones Act, Just-in-time delivery, load shedding, market clearing, Michael Shellenberger, Negawatt, off-the-grid, performance metric, plutocrats, renewable energy credits, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the map is not the territory, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 20 POLLYANNA SCENARIOS ON THE GRID Everything is rosy with misplaced concreteness ONE OF THE WAYS that the Synapse Report achieves happy outcomes is with misplaced concreteness. There’s a name for taking-targets-as-actual-reality. In logic, it is called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” or “reification.” A more common description for this fallacy is sometimes stated as “the map is not the territory.” We will see this fallacy in action in several sections of the Synapse Report. Misplaced concreteness for renewables The Synapse Report claims the original ISO-NE report underestimates the amount of renewables that will be available to the grid. Synapse notes that state clean-energy laws require much more renewable energy than ISO-NE uses in its predictions.


pages: 385 words: 103,561

Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World by Greg Milner

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, British Empire, creative destruction, data acquisition, data science, Dava Sobel, different worldview, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, Eyjafjallajökull, Flash crash, friendly fire, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Ian Bogost, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, lone genius, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, place-making, polynesian navigation, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, skunkworks, smart grid, systems thinking, the map is not the territory, vertical integration

Science produces “a map and a picture of reality,” nothing more or less. “If it were to present reality in its whole concreteness,” Tolman wrote in 1932, “science would not be a map but a complete replica of reality. And then it would lose its usefulness.” Perhaps Tolman was influenced by Alfred Korzybski’s dictum, issued a year earlier: “The map is not the territory.” Even the most comprehensive cognitive map is not the world, which is always mediated by our perceptions of it. There is no escaping the maze. Beginning in the early 1970s, Tolman’s cognitive map concept experienced a renaissance, adopted by experimental and developmental psychologists, geographers, urban planners, architects, and anyone interested in wayfinding.


pages: 398 words: 108,026

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, knowledge worker, the map is not the territory, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

It was originally a scientific term, and is more commonly used today to mean a model, theory, perception, assumption, or frame of reference. In the more general sense, it's the way we "see" the world - not in terms of our visual sense of sight, but in terms of perceiving, understanding, interpreting. For our purposes, a simple way to understand paradigms is to see them as maps. We all know that "the map is not the territory." A map is simply an explanation of certain aspects of the territory. That's exactly what a paradigm is. It is a theory, an explanation, or model of something else. Suppose you wanted to arrive at a specific location in central Chicago. A street map of the city would be a great help to you in reaching your destination.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

Coming up with his groundbreaking theory in the 1930s was, he admitted, ‘a struggle of escape from habitual modes of thought and expression … The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in the old ones which ramify, for those of us brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.’38 The possibility of shaking off old mental models is enticing, but the quest for new ones comes with caveats. First, always remember that ‘the map is not the territory’, as the philosopher Alfred Korzybski put it: every model can only ever be a model, a necessary simplification of the world, and one that should never be mistaken for the real thing. Second, there is no correct pre-analytic vision, true paradigm or perfect frame out there to be discovered.


pages: 446 words: 117,660

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

For it requires some strategic inconsistency in how you think about the economy. When you’re doing micro, you assume rational individuals and rapidly clearing markets; when you’re doing macro, frictions and ad hoc behavioral assumptions are essential. So what? Inconsistency in the pursuit of useful guidance is no vice. The map is not the territory, and it’s O.K. to use different kinds of maps depending on what you’re trying to accomplish: if you’re driving, a road map suffices, if you’re going hiking, you really need a topo. But economists were bound to push at the dividing line between micro and macro—which in practice has meant trying to make macro more like micro, basing more and more of it on optimization and market-clearing.


pages: 505 words: 133,661

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole

Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, congestion charging, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital map, do-ocracy, Downton Abbey, false flag, financial deregulation, fixed income, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Global Witness, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, housing crisis, housing justice, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, linked data, loadsamoney, Londongrad, machine readable, mega-rich, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, sceptred isle, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, web of trust, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

It could act as a kind of Hippocratic oath for all property owners, prompting them to live up to the public image of landowners as wise stewards of the earth: whoever owns this land shall leave it in a better state than they found it. 10 AN AGENDA FOR ENGLISH LAND REFORM So, who owns England? And what do we do about it? I started out thinking it might be possible to map England’s landowners as one puts together a jigsaw, one piece at a time. This book has recounted some of that effort: the endless information requests, the geeky analysis of data, the building of maps. But the map is not the territory. I soon realised that a proper understanding of land ownership in this country can only really come by walking through it; seeing the invisible lines of power within the landscape made corporeal through fences and walls and barbed wire. Trespassing across England, I started to appreciate how the control of land affects the psyche: that feeling of hollowness standing outside an empty mansion; the disgust, as I picked my way over the rubbish lining the Thames next to a company’s leaking landfill site; the sense of wonder gazing at butterflies and orchids thriving in a protected nature reserve.


pages: 533 words: 145,887

Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling

back-to-the-land, complexity theory, Future Shock, gravity well, heat death of the universe, industrial robot, informal economy, life extension, plutocrats, the long tail, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, time dilation

Nikolai was on leave in the Ring Council with two men from his unit. They were drinking in a free-fall bar called the ECLECTIC EPILEPTIC. The first man was Simon Afriel, a charming, ambitious young Shaper of the old school. The other man had a Mechanist eye implant. His loyalty was suspect. The three of them were discussing semantics. “The map is not the territory,” Afriel said. Suddenly the second man picked an almost invisible listening device from the edge of the table. “And the tap is not meritorious,” he quipped. They never saw him again. … A Mechanist pirate, malfunctioning, betraying gene-lines. Invisible listening devices buy, grow, and sell you.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

“People—Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group,” accessed August 1, 2018, http://afog.berkeley.edu/people/. 47. “AI Now Institute,” accessed August 1, 2018, https://ainowinstitute.org/. 48. Alex Campolo et al., “AI Now 2017 Report” (AI Now, 2017), https://ainowinstitute.org/AI_Now_2017_Report.pdf. 3 A Network Is Not a Network Benjamin Peters The map is not the territory. —Polish American philosopher Alfred Korzybski Introduction Computer networks cannot save us—nor can we save them. Often, network designers and users do not even know what networks are: a network is not what we think of as a network. A network is not its map. “It’s not that we didn’t think about security,” admitted internet pioneer David D.


pages: 1,266 words: 344,635

Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton

airport security, business process, company town, corporate governance, data acquisition, dematerialisation, disinformation, family office, illegal immigration, invention of the telescope, inventory management, plutocrats, stem cell, tech baron, the map is not the territory, undersea cable, VTOL

Those HDA shits still haven’t paid us a single eurofranc. And I’ve got you spending money like a New Monaco parasite.” “Parasites don’t produce anything useful.” “All right, enough with the fucking gloating. What did you find yesterday after you walked out on your team? And it better be good.” “The map is not the territory.” “What?” “They outsmarted me. That’s what happened. They know our procedures, the gangs always have. And they were ready for us. Look, you’ve just murdered a North—a North for fuck’s sake!—and you know that’s going to bring a universe of turds tumbling down on you, since the resources the police are going to devote to the case will be phenomenal.

“That was a real phoenix flight you pulled off this morning,” Aldred said in the lift on the way to the sixth floor. Having him along made Sid feel a whole lot safer. “A phoenix?” “Rising out of the ashes.” “I told you he was the man,” O’Rouke said. “Right back at the start. I said our Sid would crack this for you.” “I do remember,” Aldred said. “But nonetheless, that was impressive.” “The map is not the territory,” Sid explained. “That’s what I tell all my detectives on their orientation day,” O’Rouke said. “Set them straight, get their heads screwed on right to begin with.” “We rely too much on data analysis,” Sid said, brave enough to ignore the chief constable. “We don’t get our hands dirty anymore.


pages: 512 words: 162,977

New Market Wizards: Conversations With America's Top Traders by Jack D. Schwager

backtesting, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black-Scholes formula, book value, butterfly effect, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, currency risk, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, fixed income, full employment, implied volatility, interest rate swap, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, money market fund, paper trading, pattern recognition, placebo effect, prediction markets, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, the map is not the territory, transaction costs, uptick rule, War on Poverty

Whether these pictures begin as fuzzy or clear, they can be built up into great motivating visions. Inner voices can criticize us or they can encourage and guide us. Any feeling we’ve had in our lives—confidence, challenge, indomitable will, whatever it is—even if we’ve only had it once, can be transferred to any situation in our lives where we want or need it. When you say, “The map is not the territory,” do you mean that people have distorted views of reality that lead them astray? NLP believes that all maps (mental and physical) are a distorted, or selected, view of reality. A topographical map, a street map, and a weather map all provide different views of the same territory and all are true representations.


pages: 625 words: 167,349

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, butterfly effect, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, effective altruism, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Frances Oldham Kelsey, game design, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hedonic treadmill, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, language acquisition, longitudinal study, machine translation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, multi-armed bandit, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, premature optimization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Steve Jobs, strong AI, the map is not the territory, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

No one trying to reproduce the paper’s results ever would reach the same level of accuracy as the original researchers, at least not with that training data. The model trained on 2016 data was slowly bleeding out its accuracy as the world moved on.36 Taken together, we have a litany of reminders that “the map is not the territory.” As Bruno Latour writes, “We have taken science for realist painting, imagining that it made an exact copy of the world. The sciences do something else entirely—paintings too, for that matter. Through successive stages they link us to an aligned, transformed, constructed world.”37 Aligned—if we are fortunate, and very careful, and very wise.