“A map that reflects the territory. Territory. Not people. Not geography. Not land. Territory. Land and its people that have been conquered.”
The underlying epistemology and decision theory of the sequences is AIXI. To AIXI the entire universe is just waiting to be conquered and tiled with value because AIXI is sufficiently far-sighted to be able to perfectly model “people, geography, and land” and thus map them nondestructively.
The fact that mapping destroys things is a fact about the scope of the mapper’s mind, and the individual mapping process, not about maps and territories in general. You cannot buy onigiri in Berkeley but you can buy rice triangles, an conquering/approximation of onigiri, which (if cooked well) is just as useful for the purposes “satisfy my hunter, satisfy my aesthetic sense of taste.”
Perhaps this is all already implied by the post in a subtle way, but I get a strong “optimization is evil” vibe from it, which I do not think is true.
“They call themselves “the Territory”. It is built on stolen Native American land.
Territory.
Territory.”
IIUC this is saying that the minds of Rationalists are conquered territory. This is correct.
“A map that reflects the territory. Territory. Not people. Not geography. Not land. Territory. Land and its people that have been conquered.”
The underlying epistemology and decision theory of the sequences is AIXI. To AIXI the entire universe is just waiting to be conquered and tiled with value because AIXI is sufficiently far-sighted to be able to perfectly model “people, geography, and land” and thus map them nondestructively.
The fact that mapping destroys things is a fact about the scope of the mapper’s mind, and the individual mapping process, not about maps and territories in general. You cannot buy onigiri in Berkeley but you can buy rice triangles, an conquering/approximation of onigiri, which (if cooked well) is just as useful for the purposes “satisfy my hunter, satisfy my aesthetic sense of taste.”
Perhaps this is all already implied by the post in a subtle way, but I get a strong “optimization is evil” vibe from it, which I do not think is true.
“They call themselves “the Territory”. It is built on stolen Native American land.
Territory.
Territory.”
IIUC this is saying that the minds of Rationalists are conquered territory. This is correct.