Most mistakes in maps are inherited and a result of rational mistakes made by someone else. I say this because we have a map for anything we can think of no matter how vague. We implicitly inherit maps. And the maps we’ve inherited implicitly are far more populous than maps we modify or explicitly underwrite (which is a very cognitively intensive task).
Therefore, it is likely true that to make fewer rational mistakes ourselves, we must detect mistakes that others have already made and passed on to us.
If someone says “always pick the tomato that has a bit of ‘bounce’” and, for the sake of demonstration, one wrongly interprets this to mean a tomato, when thrown, should bounce off of a surface—leading to a very messy series of mistakes. When what the original person’s map of a ‘good tomato test’ was that if we press a tomato it should be firm to touch, but not too firm. Isn’t that a mistake that is our own—since it didn’t exist in the original map? Indeed have we inherited that map at all or created a completely new one?
we must detect mistakes that others have already made and passed on to us.
What does that look like in practice? How can you distinguish between another person’s mistaken map and a… less mistaken one? By the veracity of their predictions? By the amount of ‘success’ they have in navigating certain systems and domains? What can we attribute to their map of the system, and what can we attribute to other factors: for example—career advancement—is someone who before the age of 30 becomes preeminent in a certain company there because they have good ‘maps’ related to their duties, or because they have a good ‘map’ of the politics of their company? Or could it be they are married to the boss? They are a nepo-hire etc. etc.?
Most mistakes in maps are inherited and a result of rational mistakes made by someone else. I say this because we have a map for anything we can think of no matter how vague. We implicitly inherit maps. And the maps we’ve inherited implicitly are far more populous than maps we modify or explicitly underwrite (which is a very cognitively intensive task).
Therefore, it is likely true that to make fewer rational mistakes ourselves, we must detect mistakes that others have already made and passed on to us.
What do you mean by a ‘rational mistake’?
If someone says “always pick the tomato that has a bit of ‘bounce’” and, for the sake of demonstration, one wrongly interprets this to mean a tomato, when thrown, should bounce off of a surface—leading to a very messy series of mistakes. When what the original person’s map of a ‘good tomato test’ was that if we press a tomato it should be firm to touch, but not too firm. Isn’t that a mistake that is our own—since it didn’t exist in the original map? Indeed have we inherited that map at all or created a completely new one?
What does that look like in practice? How can you distinguish between another person’s mistaken map and a… less mistaken one? By the veracity of their predictions? By the amount of ‘success’ they have in navigating certain systems and domains? What can we attribute to their map of the system, and what can we attribute to other factors: for example—career advancement—is someone who before the age of 30 becomes preeminent in a certain company there because they have good ‘maps’ related to their duties, or because they have a good ‘map’ of the politics of their company? Or could it be they are married to the boss? They are a nepo-hire etc. etc.?