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Don't Trust Maps - Map is Not the Territory Explanation - FutureIQ

1,224 views Wait, is this logic right? • May 20, 2023
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Slog Reference: Map is not the territory

Description

The Map is not the territory explained. Maps are important. They squeeze and provide us with basic information about something quickly. But, there is a clear difference between the map and the thing the map represents. Most of the time, a map may not be able to accurately tell you the complexities of the underlying territory. And there are examples of misinterpretations of maps. Hence, you should not depend completely on a map to make important decisions.

This concept applies to many aspects of our lives other than the physical map and the territory. Let's try to understand what are those, how maps are lying to you and how the map is not the territory.

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS

Understand the Goodhart's law: https://youtu.be/OU5W-b_e8a4

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:20 The problem
04:03 Real life applications
04:24 Examples
07:50 The real problem
10:28 Day-to-day life applications
12:40 Goodhart's law
14:10 Are maps worthless?
15:18 The London underground subway
17:00 The other problem with maps
17:25 Do this

#futureiq

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Transcript

so today I want to talk about the size of Greenland and Africa and how that is related to your IQ and your marks this is this is unfair a lot of things are related to my IQ and my marks and all of them worry me but to compare it to Greenland and Africa what are you doing to me Naveen you're accused that big probably but okay let's see right um so look at this map of Greenland okay this here is Greenland it looks very icy and this looks very large also right here IQ and this is Africa right yeah so let's look at this north south distance from the north to the bottom uh of
Greenland and Africa which do you think is larger look it looks to me like Greenland is roughly like a knuckle and a half length and Africa is barely a knuckle length so I'm gonna say Greenland is uh taller and therefore longer from North to the South as compared to Africa it just that's look at so the important thing about today's episode is this that the map does not really correspond to reality okay that's what this episode is the map is not the territory let us look what is happening here is that the Earth is a globe and to flatten it out on a two-dimensional uh map you have to stretch it and the parts at the North
and the parks at the bottom they get stretched and the parts in the middle don't get stretched as a result Greenland looks far bigger than it really is okay so let us look at what really happens uh so now this is a map where the different colored patches are Greenland when it is moved to other parts of the globe I mean on this map the size strings perspective shift what you can see if you look at this thing here Greenland is probably the size of India yeah Africa is like way larger than Greenland wow I was so wide of the mark yes so it's as big as Australia Australia is that big so there is a lot of problems yeah okay
I can see um in fact uh the problems with maps are much more serious than just the size of Greenland and so on right okay so uh let's take a look at this mountain you can see here this is Mount select okay there was a Sukhoi jet in Indonesia which was on a demo flight um 45 people on it and you know the instruments the map that the pilot was using said that there is no mountain here Sukhoi jet with 45 people on it well it was a commercial kind of commercial yeah okay uh eight crew and 35 passengers and um so the map said there is nothing here and the mountain disagreed with them in fact
Mountain disagreed with them is a very very gentle euphemistic way of saying something truly horrible happened actually it was worse uh the instrument panel uh was indicating that there is something here there is ground here which is much very close and the pilot ignored the warning because the map said everything looks clear and the Jack crashed the pilot wasn't looking at the terrain I don't know I didn't read the details there but maybe it was just too fast by the time he noticed it uh it was too late yeah why don't you guys read the details and tell Naveen what he missed yeah so again important to keep in mind that the map is not the territory okay but
this isn't about Maps right this episode is about how this concept applies everywhere else in your real life yeah yeah so um but before that let's just take a few more examples with actual Maps right yes please there have been Major Impact on real life okay so uh here let's look at the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor yeah okay so Japan is here okay do you know where Pearl Harbor is Pearl Harbor is here at this other end right okay so a lot of people actually think that it was crazy for Japan to fly so far to attack Pearl Harbor I mean in fact yeah it is believed that a lot of actual military strategists also just saw
this and said I will never really imagine that Japan would be attacking uh Pearl Harbor yeah but you know what the problem here is yeah the problem is that the reality is looking literally the other way around in fact you know because map is not the territory let's change the map right if you look at the map like this now let us see this here is Japan and this here is U.S yeah and Pearl Harbor seems to be like kind of equity yeah right so um but because you are used to you seeing a map in a certain way you form a mental model in your head of the territory of the territory and most
of the time it works well but once in a while you forget that reality is different and that causes serious problems serious problems the map is not the territory right that yeah well just continuing with maps uh if you look at say let's look at Africa here right you can see there are probably I'm not sure how many countries but many countries 2030 uh countries and you I mean especially if you were a marketer and you you are going to go there you assume this country is like this this country is like this yeah in reality if you look at Africa linguistically it is hundreds if not thousands of little pieces right just because we
drew a certain map we created country boundaries now everybody thinks of all of Nigeria as one unit right same thing happens to India yes in India uh when India got free they did not have all of these states Maharashtra didn't exist and Gujarat didn't exist and yeah a lot of a lot of States didn't exist back then didn't exist foreign [Music] called the linguistic reorganization of States yes okay and states were broken up according to language and Maharashtra became the state of Marathi people now that's the map the territory is actually much much trickier if you go to the south of Maharashtra near kolapur there are lots of kannada speaking people there you cross the border into belgaum there are lots
of Marathi people there and now suddenly because there is a border Marathi people are on this side and kannada people are on that side and you're not supposed to speak kannada on this side yeah and it causes problems you massive problems if you've been reading the news yes and you go to the northeast of Maharashtra and if you assume that uh this is a Marathi place you will run into issues because a lot of them speak Hindi chhattisgarhi or whichever is the local dialect in that region but what starts happening is that suddenly this map has given everybody the permission to say okay Marathi is the only thing that works here right I'm not talking about Maharashtra in
specifically but all the states extrapolated to any state you want any state you are in right now I'm pretty sure in your state whichever State you are in right now except the state of denial you will find something similar happening yeah so uh over time the map starts influencing policies and uh if you are not careful you lose touch with the complexity of reality the point of the map is that it's a simplified picture okay it helps in taking understanding things it helps in taking decisions but you miss out on the complexity and so once in a while your decisions might be wrong yeah and extremely important if you are a marketer trying to Target people in those areas
keep that in mind no also forget areas forget an actual map okay right if you are a marketer or if you are a product manager you are in charge of a product like say uh you know Instagram and you create an understanding of your customers based on a lot of data that you are collecting and uh you say that you know young people in certain age are doing this with my product older people are doing this people in India are doing this and then you tend to forget that the analytics that you have collected the Excel spreadsheets you have created those are just the map the real people on the other side are complex people there is a
lot of complexity in all the reality and if you live only in your spreadsheets sooner or later you start making mistakes sooner or later you start missing out on changes that are happening I feel a Hindi dialogue coming on is spreadsheets yes so there is a world outside your spreadsheets if you are ever in that situation yeah which you will be of course you have to make sure that you regularly are in touch with the reality you need the Simplicity of your spreadsheets to make decisions but you have to be in touch with the reality to know when uh your spreadsheet doesn't apply for which decisions and when your spreadsheet is no longer mapping reality
well enough okay so give me an example of this spreadsheet being applicable in my say day to day life where where can I find the map is not the territory applicable in day to day life so um one thing is that a person's IQ or a person's marks right you use that to decide whether you are going to hire somebody to decide whether you are going to hang out with somebody yes a lot of people did that with me and the marks make it easier to take some of these decisions yes but the marks are the map the territory is the person and what they will do uh what they will do over a period of
five years working with you uh right so so many people have had experiences that the really uh you know the scholar uh turned out to be a dud in real life and the person doing badly uh turned out to be the star employee right that's because the map is not the territory there you go teacher look at me now in fact even simpler you look at Instagram right you look at what your friends and friends of friends are doing on Instagram and you assume that their lives are like that and you go around being very unhappy that so many people are having so much fun and you are a loser yeah right in fact there is a lot of research showing that
since the rise of Instagram teenagers especially teenage girls have had increasing mental problems because they compare themselves to their Instagram friends and realize that they are not as cool as the friends on Instagram the Instagram is the map and real life is the territory the map is not the territory right what is happening is that on Instagram what you are seeing is the highlights of their life you are comparing their highlights real with your behind the scenes bloopers right because you saw your full life 24 hours you saw including all the mess-ups that happened yes but you know this funnily reminds me of one of the other videos that we've done on on metrics and measuring them
and them not being uh what was that good heart's law yeah there you go so yeah it's basically of similar concept that good heart's law says that if you are using a metric a measurement of something to take decisions and people realize that this measurement is all that is being used to take the decision that measurement becomes a Target and then people start focusing on that instead of the reality so you look at the metrics metric as a map and you forget that there is a much bigger wider territory to look at correct in fact watch that video it has some excellent examples uh and you will notice all of them are examples of the map is
not the territory because whoever was in charge of that metric lost track of the reality but um yeah in fact I want to point out that once you understand this concept and just think about it in your daily life you will notice examples over and over again in fact what we are going to do there are just so many examples that we can't fit them in this video we are creating a different bonus video if you want to see that uh post a comment or tweet to us and we will send you a link yes do that comment or tweet to us and we'll get that done coming back to the topic at hand does this mean that there is no point in
relying on maps at all surely not right so there is a funny story jorgeous Burgess Burgess is an author it's gorgeous gorgeous yeah uh in one of his stories he mentions a map that is you know whose scale is one mile to one mile [Laughter] okay okay can you imagine that map being useful no it was as big as the territory right all the complexity that if you have a one as to one skill map you will not be able to use it for navigating you will not be able to use it for finding distances in fact you will not be able to use it at all which is why a lot of software developers swear by map reduce yeah because
okay somebody is going to come and beat you sorry uh um a very very famous example I want to show you I'm just showing here uh two maps Okay this is the what you see in the front is this very famous map or schematic of the London Underground uh the subway okay all right and this is considered one of the master pieces of design it makes it so easy it's a fairly complicated subway system compared to our Bombay locals right but it still makes it quite easy to know how to get from one place to another where do you have to do The Interchange and so on yeah but the reality is that London doesn't look anything like that
the map in the background that you are seeing here and you will see there's a one-to-one mapping between the colors that is the real map yeah and a lot of the stations in the middle here they're all smooshed together in the center of London and a lot of the stations at the side are like so far apart that they don't even fit in the map yeah if you used a real realistic map for this it would be unusable true because that was that is why this map was uh created okay so maps are important maps are necessary a reality has a surprising amount of detail okay we'll we have another video on that concept fascinating you
should watch it but it's a different concept so not going there different video but it is there yeah so for it reality has a surprising amount of detail and you wouldn't be able to function if you kept all of reality in your head at all times you need simplifications you need Maps which is why but make sure that you are using a map which is right for this particular purpose the other thing that happens to Maps is that they become Static they don't change when reality changes the map should change but that doesn't happen and because it's a capture of a specific Moment In Time reduced into available area exactly and when reality changes the map doesn't change
and then you miss out again one interesting thing that somebody told me is that you have one map you can lose track of the fact that the territory is different then you have two very different Maps like we saw uh Pearl Harbor from different angles right then you have two different uh maps that makes it easier to keep in mind that the app is not the territory ah which is why I always say that if you get a chance to spend two three years abroad you should definitely take it because your culture in your own country your culture your language the way uh you know what is polite what is not polite the way we deal with
things in general right yeah that is a map yeah created for us 3000 Years Ago by our ancestors when you go abroad you see a different map and you realize that it is not the territory in fact that's how you realize that a whole bunch of things you've been taking for granted but which doesn't have to be like that and you are able to take the best from both worlds so have two maps have three maps and take the best from each map travel broadens the horizons very literally like it broadens the map very literally oh but I'm not saying just about travel everything you do in life realize that you create a mental model
of some reality what you should do is have a multiple mental models and they help you to understand the reality better right multiple models multiple perspectives yes which is why fiction exists which is why you should read good novels because they give you a different model of the world from what you are used to which is why reading Harry Potter is as important as reading say Norm Chomsky or Friedrich Nietzsche or I don't even know any other thing whatever that's Naveen this is future IQ thank you thank you