The Map and the Territory
Like all of us, though few so visibly, Alan Greenspan was forced by the financial crisis of 2008 to question some fundamental assumptions about risk management and economic forecasting. No one with any meaningful role in economic decision making in the world saw beforehand the storm for what it was. How had our models so utterly failed us? To answer this question, Alan Greenspan embarked on a rigorous and far-reaching multiyear examination of how Homo economicus predicts the economic future, and how it can predict it better. Economic risk is a fact of life in every realm, from home to business to government at all levels. Whether we're conscious of it or not, we make wagers on the future virtually every day, one way or another. Very often, however, we're steering by out-of-date maps, when we're not driven by factors entirely beyond our conscious control. The Map and the Territory is nothing less than an effort to update our forecasting conceptual grid. It integrates the history of economic prediction, the new work of behavioral economists, and the fruits of the author's own remarkable career to offer a thrillingly lucid and empirically based grounding in what we can know about economic forecasting and what we can't.The book explores how culture is and isn't destiny and probes what we can predict about the world's biggest looming challenges, from debt and the reform of the welfare state to natural disasters in an age of global warming.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
4people
2013–2017years
50% recommend25% neutral25% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The conviction in his tone and how he wears rationality like a cape, the book helped me understand the meaning of rationality, the map and the territory and power of beliefs to predict and also acknowledge the existence of an objective reality. Its sort of a journey down the rabbit hole for me.
- Recently: "The map and the territory" by Michel Houellebecq. It's certainly not the kind of book that you'd think is inspiring in a literal way (ie. would make you want to go and achieve things etc.), but it's just such an extraordinary piece of literature that reading it shows how much a person (a writer in this case) is capable of when he applies himself.
- Not to take away from the specific challenges of blind people, but this is a broad problem whenever there is a mismatch between the map and the territory. The mismatch can come from sloppy work or just from the way the world changes over time and the map doesn't keep up.
I've seen plenty of cases in IT systems where bad documentation is much worse than no documentation. For example, there are the ubiquitous handover docs (demanded by project managers everywhere) filled with pages of cable connectivity, MAC addresses, WWNs, LUNs, etc in Word tables or manually-edited spreadsheets. They should all read "For historical purposes only" because you will inevitably trip over reality if you rely on them for live systems.
Similarly, there are those that insist on beautiful, meaningful patterns for naming all components. This works great until the pattern can no longer continue, or someone is sloppy, and then the pattern is just a tactile strip leading to a hole in the ground.
The solution I've settled on is live, automatic documentation in the form of scripts that generate a bunch of CSVs (or populate a table somewhere to drive a dashboard). CSVs are nice because they are easy to generate and version. I guess JSON would be more trendy these days.
I avoid manually-edited living documents and put clear warnings on any historical documents. And as much as possible I avoid patterns in naming and numbering, although that's a hard sell for a few clients.
Taking it back to the tactile indicators, I'm reminded of the (apocryphal?) story of what one university did when they landscaped their campus. In the first year they didn't put any paving down. In the second year they paved the worn-down paths in the grass. If only there were some universal way to "grow" tactile strips based on the actual movements of pedestrians.
- "Changed the world" can be for better or worse. Much as TIME's "Man of the Year" doesn't (necessarily) go to the person who had the greatest impact for good (Stalin (twice), Hitler, Khrushchev, Nixon & Kissenger, Ayatullah Khomeini).
The financial meltdowns of the mid 1990s and 2000s certainly had significant global impact, to the point of getting a lot of people to question what they thought they knew of economics. Fairly famously Alan Greenspan, who admitted that he was waylaid by the whole thing. I just happened across his recent book whose title is intruiging, though by reviews and what little of it I skimmed, the content is less than overwhelming: The Map and the Territory.
I'd need to find the backstory on the title, but it is strongly reminiscent of Robert Pirsig's Lila, the opening chapter of which starts with the author navigating a river by what turns out to be the wrong chart. Confusion over our mental models and reality being a major risk factor to current affairs.
