Don’t use map to navigate world #

Maps can be dangerous, by giving us false comfort and by fooling us that they are the reality where in fact they are always some reduction and deformation to some degree, since one big object cannot be compressed 10000 times and we expect then that’s identical than the big object. Or put a toy car next to real car, or architectural maquette of a building next to real one. You cannot live in the maquette building, you can’t go shopping in toy car, you know the difference, but why everyone , including me, mixes up models ( opinion of a thing vs real qualities that can be objectively measured). Why do we believe in dogmas then ( all sorts of, like economy , psychology, théorie de xyZ….) can be due to the fact it’s complex vs simple ( toy car vs theory of time travel) one easy to imagine the other not - but in primitive environment we didn’t worry about time travel speed. We wanted to survive. Now take this caveman into the Time Machine and tell him to go to work in Wall Street - he would go crazy - but both the caveman and the bankers have the same genes, except that the caveman maybe a lot more smarter then some of them, but that’s for another topic on if humanity gets smarter or not. But caveman would mistrust the maps and models , he would use reality heuristics. We are baffled by the noise like that caveman and make all sorts of mistakes on this complex system.

We use maps and models all the time without knowing

By maps I mean maps of terrain but also all kinds of mathematical equasions such as Black-Scholes forumula, theory of efficient market, Freud’s theories, etc. Basically the world is random and some theories can fit in for some time period by coincidence.

When cycling using a cycling computer with map function, one day a feature appeared where the device started warning of potholes on a roads - which can be useful for road cyclists. But also appeared warning of dense traffic and most bizzarly of a dog in a certain spot. Someone marked on a map that there is a dog, maybe 2 years back, the dog can be dead by now but you still get the warning of a dog in a certain spot. How much our models and maps are similar, we are using some economic previsions yet we don’t expect that one day instead of the dog there can be elefant running from the local circus, and in different spot.