The past few days, my girlfriend and I have been driving all around Illinois, and the Garmin GPS system in the car (a rental) has been a real lifesaver, but at the same time it's reminded me once again of that old maxim of Korzybski: "The Map is not the Territory". If you've never taken a road trip with a GPS system, it's something you've gotta try. When my girlfriend added it to the rental car, I was thinking "oh boy, yet another unnecessary gadget," but 30 minutes after we hit the road I found myself wondering why the thing isn't standard with every new car. It worked great, matching up perfectly with the roads around us, until I was looking more at it than at the highway signs; where it failed was when we tried to stretch it where it wasn't programmed. Faced with a desolate 10pm downtown Chicago business district, two hungry stomachs surrounded by unwelcoming steel skyscrapers, and a car stuck in a parking garage, we grabbed the navigating system off the windshield and took it, on foot, onto the sidewalk.
I'd grown so in love with that little device, my mind was fuzzily glossing over the map-territory relationship; I was confusing the former with the latter. The Garmin, packed as it was with restaurant addresses, was not programmed to handle human walking speed, walking on sidewalks that weren't included in its street-only database. To cut a long story short, we ended up wandering about twenty minutes in the exact wrong direction, going in circles numerous times, and finally giving up on the thing and navigating the city streets with old school tools-- street signs and a cellphone. Map and territory had clashed head to head, and the latter emerged the clear winner.
So what is this phrase I keep referring to, after which the current article is named? It is a two-sided proverb, a truth which hindered me in the above situation, but one which can also help us. Because our models don't have to perfectly capture reality, this gives us freedom to choose the most convenient representation of the world, the picture that will make things easiest. Just like the rental Garmin helped on the highways but bit me on the sidewalks, a model of reality can be convenient in some contexts and inconvenient in others. The prototypical, textbook example is the New York subway chart. Long ago (the NLP literature claims), New York City endeavored to make its subway charts highly accurate, with edges between stations carefully measured to reflect the real distance between the stations, and curved to reflect the real curves of the tracks. The result was that subway users had to make sense of incomprehensible tumbleweeds of tracks. Then some Einstein realized that commuters didn't care about the physical distances or curves, and that genius replaced the charts with simplified diagrams, and everyone lived happily ever after.
I've come up with my own example to illustrate T.M.i.n.t.T. Suppose you want to navigate your city; do you want a streetmap, or a satellite photo? The photograph is far more "accurate": the streetmap is covered with borders and colors and symbols which, if you check, you'll find are completely missing from the real life locations. On the other hand, it's no surprise that most people would have a much easier time with the Rand McNally. (Of course, when I was an Air Force weather forecaster, I used satellite imagery and radar snapshots all the time-- there's a context for every map)
The truth is, the territory is something we can never directly access. Even the most pedantic, old school New York subway mapper can't measure the tracks perfectly: human instruments don't achieve perfect precision. When I look around at the hotel room where I'm writing this article, the sights I see are really just an approximation of my world: light is distorted by the oxygen in the room, my brain interpolates to fill in the "gaps" where my eyes have blindspots, and so on. Descartes argued that we can be certain of absolutely nothing-- he acknowledged that what he percieved as real and true, could all just be a hoax played on him by some sinister captor. Since we cannot hope to get our hands perfectly on our "territory", we shouldn't even try. Instead, we should try to make our maps as useful as possible. I discuss this in much more detail in my article: Models of Reality.
FURTHER READING
Models of Reality
The Reticular Activation System
10 Metaphors For Life
I'd grown so in love with that little device, my mind was fuzzily glossing over the map-territory relationship; I was confusing the former with the latter. The Garmin, packed as it was with restaurant addresses, was not programmed to handle human walking speed, walking on sidewalks that weren't included in its street-only database. To cut a long story short, we ended up wandering about twenty minutes in the exact wrong direction, going in circles numerous times, and finally giving up on the thing and navigating the city streets with old school tools-- street signs and a cellphone. Map and territory had clashed head to head, and the latter emerged the clear winner.
So what is this phrase I keep referring to, after which the current article is named? It is a two-sided proverb, a truth which hindered me in the above situation, but one which can also help us. Because our models don't have to perfectly capture reality, this gives us freedom to choose the most convenient representation of the world, the picture that will make things easiest. Just like the rental Garmin helped on the highways but bit me on the sidewalks, a model of reality can be convenient in some contexts and inconvenient in others. The prototypical, textbook example is the New York subway chart. Long ago (the NLP literature claims), New York City endeavored to make its subway charts highly accurate, with edges between stations carefully measured to reflect the real distance between the stations, and curved to reflect the real curves of the tracks. The result was that subway users had to make sense of incomprehensible tumbleweeds of tracks. Then some Einstein realized that commuters didn't care about the physical distances or curves, and that genius replaced the charts with simplified diagrams, and everyone lived happily ever after.
I've come up with my own example to illustrate T.M.i.n.t.T. Suppose you want to navigate your city; do you want a streetmap, or a satellite photo? The photograph is far more "accurate": the streetmap is covered with borders and colors and symbols which, if you check, you'll find are completely missing from the real life locations. On the other hand, it's no surprise that most people would have a much easier time with the Rand McNally. (Of course, when I was an Air Force weather forecaster, I used satellite imagery and radar snapshots all the time-- there's a context for every map)
The truth is, the territory is something we can never directly access. Even the most pedantic, old school New York subway mapper can't measure the tracks perfectly: human instruments don't achieve perfect precision. When I look around at the hotel room where I'm writing this article, the sights I see are really just an approximation of my world: light is distorted by the oxygen in the room, my brain interpolates to fill in the "gaps" where my eyes have blindspots, and so on. Descartes argued that we can be certain of absolutely nothing-- he acknowledged that what he percieved as real and true, could all just be a hoax played on him by some sinister captor. Since we cannot hope to get our hands perfectly on our "territory", we shouldn't even try. Instead, we should try to make our maps as useful as possible. I discuss this in much more detail in my article: Models of Reality.
FURTHER READING
Models of Reality
The Reticular Activation System
10 Metaphors For Life
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1 comments:
So true about the GPS being useless in certain situations. I live in a neighborhood that, although part of the city, is off the map because it does not have official street names. Neither MapQuest nor any GPS can find my house.
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