On that map lies everything you love, everyone you know, everything you’ve ever heard of. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every thought and feeling, every hero and villain, every creator and destroyer of ideas, every paradigm and perspective, every romantic notion, every parent’s love, every child’s wonder, every flash of insight and exploration, every moral framework, every friendship, every “universal truth”, every “fundamental principle”—all of these lived there, in a mere approximation suspended in consciousness.
Our mind is a very small theater in the vast unknown of reality. Think of the endless conflicts between holders of one corner of this mental map and the barely distinguishable beliefs of another corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to impose their models on one another, how fervent their certainties. Think of the rivers of ink spilled by all those philosophers and ideologues so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary arbiters of a fraction of a map.
It has been said that epistemology is a humbling and character-building pursuit. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human certainty than this recognition of our lenses’ limits. To me, it underscores our responsibility to hold our maps more lightly, to deal more kindly with those whose maps differ, and to preserve and cherish this precious capacity for understanding, the only world we’ve ever known.
(partially written by Claude because I was too lazy busy to write the whole thing by hand)
In this context, instead of using claude to write the joke and then posting it with a disclaimer, I’d love to move to a norm of just posting the prompt without bothering to send it to an LLM at all. Instead of the blue dot parody in italics, the post could just be “Claude please rewrite the pale blue dot story to be about looking at the map.” Same content, faster to read, arguably funnier!
I wrote about 1⁄3 of this myself fyi. (It was important to me to get it to a point where it was not just a weaksauce version of itself but where I felt like I at least might basically endorse it and find it poignant as a way of looking at things)
I’m putting in my reaction to your original comment as I remember it in case it provides useful data for you. Please do not search for subtext or take this as a request for any sort of response; I’m just giving data at the risk of oversharing because I wonder if my reaction is at all indicative of the people downvoting.
I thought about downvoting because your comment seemed mean-spirited. I think the copypasta format and possibly the flippant use of an LLM made me defensive. I mostly decided I was mistaken about it being mean spirited because I don’t think that you would post a mean comment on a post like this based on my limited-but-nonzero interaction with you. At that point, I either couldn’t see what mixing epistemology in with the pale blue dot speech added to the discussion, or it didn’t resonate with me, so I stopped thinking about it and left the comment alone.
Fwiw I mostly just thought it was funny in a way that was sort of neutral on “is this a reasonable frame or not?”. It was the first thing I thought of as soon as I read your post title.
(I think it’s both true that in an important sense everything we care about is in the Map, and also true in an important sense that it’s not, and in the ways it was true it felt like a kind of legitimately poignant rewrite that felt like it helped me appreciate your post, and insofar as it was false it seemed hilarious (non-meanspiritedly, just in a “it’s funny that so many lines from the original remain reasonable sentences when you reframe it as about epistemology”))
Look again at that map.
That’s here. That’s all we know. That’s us.
On that map lies everything you love, everyone you know, everything you’ve ever heard of. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every thought and feeling, every hero and villain, every creator and destroyer of ideas, every paradigm and perspective, every romantic notion, every parent’s love, every child’s wonder, every flash of insight and exploration, every moral framework, every friendship, every “universal truth”, every “fundamental principle”—all of these lived there, in a mere approximation suspended in consciousness.
Our mind is a very small theater in the vast unknown of reality. Think of the endless conflicts between holders of one corner of this mental map and the barely distinguishable beliefs of another corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to impose their models on one another, how fervent their certainties. Think of the rivers of ink spilled by all those philosophers and ideologues so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary arbiters of a fraction of a map.
It has been said that epistemology is a humbling and character-building pursuit. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human certainty than this recognition of our lenses’ limits. To me, it underscores our responsibility to hold our maps more lightly, to deal more kindly with those whose maps differ, and to preserve and cherish this precious capacity for understanding, the only world we’ve ever known.
(partially written by Claude because I was too
lazybusy to write the whole thing by hand)lol at the strong downvote and wondering if it is more objecting to the idea itself or more because Claude co-wrote it?
In this context, instead of using claude to write the joke and then posting it with a disclaimer, I’d love to move to a norm of just posting the prompt without bothering to send it to an LLM at all. Instead of the blue dot parody in italics, the post could just be “Claude please rewrite the pale blue dot story to be about looking at the map.” Same content, faster to read, arguably funnier!
I wrote about 1⁄3 of this myself fyi. (It was important to me to get it to a point where it was not just a weaksauce version of itself but where I felt like I at least might basically endorse it and find it poignant as a way of looking at things)
I’m putting in my reaction to your original comment as I remember it in case it provides useful data for you. Please do not search for subtext or take this as a request for any sort of response; I’m just giving data at the risk of oversharing because I wonder if my reaction is at all indicative of the people downvoting.
I thought about downvoting because your comment seemed mean-spirited. I think the copypasta format and possibly the flippant use of an LLM made me defensive. I mostly decided I was mistaken about it being mean spirited because I don’t think that you would post a mean comment on a post like this based on my limited-but-nonzero interaction with you. At that point, I either couldn’t see what mixing epistemology in with the pale blue dot speech added to the discussion, or it didn’t resonate with me, so I stopped thinking about it and left the comment alone.
Nod.
Fwiw I mostly just thought it was funny in a way that was sort of neutral on “is this a reasonable frame or not?”. It was the first thing I thought of as soon as I read your post title.
(I think it’s both true that in an important sense everything we care about is in the Map, and also true in an important sense that it’s not, and in the ways it was true it felt like a kind of legitimately poignant rewrite that felt like it helped me appreciate your post, and insofar as it was false it seemed hilarious (non-meanspiritedly, just in a “it’s funny that so many lines from the original remain reasonable sentences when you reframe it as about epistemology”))
Claude is plagiarising Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot”.