“Most people have a wrong map, therefore we should use multiple maps” doesn’t follow. Reversed stupidity isn’t intelligence, and in this case Aristotle appears to have been right all along.
If I’m out charting the oceans, I’d probably need to use multiple maps because the curvature of the Earth makes it difficult to accurately project it onto a single 2D surface, but I do that purely for the convenience of not having to navigate with a spherical map. I don’t mistake my hodge-podge of inaccurate 2D maps for the reality of the 3D globe.
No, but your “hodge-podge of inaccurate 2D maps”, while still imperfect, is more accurate than relying on a single 2-D map—which is the point I took from the original quote.
Note that Google Maps can be described as “a hodge-podge of different maps”; a satellite map and a street map (and sometimes a 3D map if you use Google Earth), and using that hodge-podge is indeed more convenient than using one representation that tries to combine them all.
I know that you didn’t mean hodge-podge in the same sense (you were talking of 3D-> 2D), but I think that Google Maps is a good illustration of how having different views of the same reality is useful.
Isn’t “convenience” also the reason not to use the territory itself as a map in the first place? You know, knowing quantum field theory and general relativity isn’t going to give you many insights about (say) English grammar or evolutionary psychology.
If you’re favoring hedgehogs over foxes, you’re disagreeing with luminaries like Robin Hanson and billionaire investors like Charlie Munger. There is, in fact, far more than one globe—the one my parents had marked out the USSR, whereas ones sold today do not; and on the territory itself you won’t see those lines and colorings at all.
Some recent quotes post here had something along the lines of “the only perfect map is a 1 to 1 correspondence with everything in the territory, and it’s perfectly useless.”
“Most people have a wrong map, therefore we should use multiple maps” doesn’t follow. Reversed stupidity isn’t intelligence, and in this case Aristotle appears to have been right all along.
If I’m out charting the oceans, I’d probably need to use multiple maps because the curvature of the Earth makes it difficult to accurately project it onto a single 2D surface, but I do that purely for the convenience of not having to navigate with a spherical map. I don’t mistake my hodge-podge of inaccurate 2D maps for the reality of the 3D globe.
No, but your “hodge-podge of inaccurate 2D maps”, while still imperfect, is more accurate than relying on a single 2-D map—which is the point I took from the original quote.
Note that Google Maps can be described as “a hodge-podge of different maps”; a satellite map and a street map (and sometimes a 3D map if you use Google Earth), and using that hodge-podge is indeed more convenient than using one representation that tries to combine them all.
I know that you didn’t mean hodge-podge in the same sense (you were talking of 3D-> 2D), but I think that Google Maps is a good illustration of how having different views of the same reality is useful.
Isn’t “convenience” also the reason not to use the territory itself as a map in the first place? You know, knowing quantum field theory and general relativity isn’t going to give you many insights about (say) English grammar or evolutionary psychology.
If you’re favoring hedgehogs over foxes, you’re disagreeing with luminaries like Robin Hanson and billionaire investors like Charlie Munger. There is, in fact, far more than one globe—the one my parents had marked out the USSR, whereas ones sold today do not; and on the territory itself you won’t see those lines and colorings at all.
Some recent quotes post here had something along the lines of “the only perfect map is a 1 to 1 correspondence with everything in the territory, and it’s perfectly useless.”