I agree with everything you’re saying. Probability, in the most common sense of “how confident am I that X will occur,” is a property of the map, not the territory.
The next natural question is “does it even make sense for us to define a notion of ‘probability’ as a property of the territory, independent from anyone’s map?” You could argue no, that’s not what probability means; probability is inherently about maps. But the goal of the post is to offer a way to extend the notion of probability to be a property of the territory instead of the map. I think chaos theory is the most natural way to do this.
Another way to view this (pointed out to me by a friend) is: Butterfly Probability is the probability assigned by a Bayesian God who is omniscient about the current state of the universe up to 10^{-50} precision errors in the positions of atoms.
Well, I guess you can say that, due to chaos, even the best map requires probabilities, which, in a way, makes it a feature of the territory, because it is common to all maps.
I agree with everything you’re saying. Probability, in the most common sense of “how confident am I that X will occur,” is a property of the map, not the territory.
The next natural question is “does it even make sense for us to define a notion of ‘probability’ as a property of the territory, independent from anyone’s map?” You could argue no, that’s not what probability means; probability is inherently about maps. But the goal of the post is to offer a way to extend the notion of probability to be a property of the territory instead of the map. I think chaos theory is the most natural way to do this.
Another way to view this (pointed out to me by a friend) is: Butterfly Probability is the probability assigned by a Bayesian God who is omniscient about the current state of the universe up to 10^{-50} precision errors in the positions of atoms.
Well, I guess you can say that, due to chaos, even the best map requires probabilities, which, in a way, makes it a feature of the territory, because it is common to all maps.