It's hard to discuss "the map is not the terriory" without a reference point to the person who coined the term, Alfred Korzybski. I don't know General Semantics enough to guess whether he and Alex Karp would be besties today or not.
On the subject I also really like a story by Borges titled "On Exactitude in Science." In it depicts an empire so precise its cartography is 1:1 with the empire itself; hilarity ensues. Now, who hasn't felt that way about [insert whatever SDLC] from time to time?
The guy who coined this phrase had more on his mind...
//
Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics is a 1933 philosophy book written by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950)
Humans' knowledge of the world is limited by both the human nervous system and the languages we have developed, and thus no human can have direct access to reality, given that the most they can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality.
His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory": He argued that most people confuse their language with reality.
//
Korzybski's science, unlike the ruminations of philosophers, was not troubled by the Allegory of the Cave: he approached reality as a naturalist, implicitly recognizing Bertrand Russell's tenets of human knowledge "scope and limits." Korzybski's approach takes reality as a gradient from the world beyond human experience through what we choose to make of it. He made numerous conjectures based on empirical observations about how we think, and proposed a hygiene of thought rooted in these observations. His analysis steered clear of religion and dogma, and handles ideology as an Nth order effect of the mind, which can learn of itself and develop tools for understanding, while respecting mystery's eternal veil.
It's hard to discuss "the map is not the terriory" without a reference point to the person who coined the term, Alfred Korzybski. I don't know General Semantics enough to guess whether he and Alex Karp would be besties today or not.
On the subject I also really like a story by Borges titled "On Exactitude in Science." In it depicts an empire so precise its cartography is 1:1 with the empire itself; hilarity ensues. Now, who hasn't felt that way about [insert whatever SDLC] from time to time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science
Timeless and seemingly relevant again when reasoning about how and where humans will always have an advantage over super intelligent agent swarms.
The guy who coined this phrase had more on his mind...
// Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics is a 1933 philosophy book written by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950)
Humans' knowledge of the world is limited by both the human nervous system and the languages we have developed, and thus no human can have direct access to reality, given that the most they can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality.
His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory": He argued that most people confuse their language with reality. //
Korzybski's science, unlike the ruminations of philosophers, was not troubled by the Allegory of the Cave: he approached reality as a naturalist, implicitly recognizing Bertrand Russell's tenets of human knowledge "scope and limits." Korzybski's approach takes reality as a gradient from the world beyond human experience through what we choose to make of it. He made numerous conjectures based on empirical observations about how we think, and proposed a hygiene of thought rooted in these observations. His analysis steered clear of religion and dogma, and handles ideology as an Nth order effect of the mind, which can learn of itself and develop tools for understanding, while respecting mystery's eternal veil.