The Map and the Territory
To start, beliefs are just predictions about reality. Predictions of outcomes. Beliefs are just predictions of outcomes.
When you say that you think LeBron James is the best basketball player in the world, you’re predicting that he will do the most to help his team win. Or he’ll do whatever else it is that you would expect the “best” player to do. When you say that you think trust is the most important thing in a relationship, you’re predicting that trust will play the biggest role in determining whether or not the people in the relationship end up happy.
Consider the classic dilemma: “if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?”. Person A says, “yes, it produced vibrations of air molecules, which is what a sound wave is”. Person B says, “no, no one heard the sound wave”. Both of these people have the same beliefs: they both believe that sound waves will be produced, and that no one will hear them. They just define “sound” differently.
Consider a stocks price. It’s determined by like a trillion different things. How all these things relate to each other to determine the stocks price is probably pretty complicated. But the point that I’m making right now is that there does exist a set of things that determine the outcome (the stocks price). If you knew all these things, you’d be able to predict the outcome with perfect precision.
And it works the same way for all outcomes (best basketball player, most important thing in a relationship…). Our world is very complicated, and any given outcome is sure to be determined by trillions of different factors that relate to each other in complex ways. But still, even if you can’t find and understand it, there always exists a perfectly precise model that’ll allow you to predict outcomes perfectly.
Let’s consider another example. A lot of people say that, “school is the priority”. They’re predicting that “trying really hard in school will make you happy”. Your effort in school has a complex relationship with your happiness (like a stock price). And, like a stock price, there is “an answer”. There exist a set of factors that determine how your effort in school relates to your happiness. If you knew all these factors, you’d know exactly how hard to try in school. The set may be large, and it may be complicated… but it exists!!! And it surely isn’t as simple as, “school is the priority”. People often have simple beliefs like this, they stop thinking about alternatives, and they think that their beliefs are “the answer”. They’re not. The large and complicated set of factors is the answer. This large and complicated set tells you exactly how your effort in school will relate to your happiness in every situation; and thus, it tells you exactly how much effort to apply in school.
Point number 1 was that this perfect model does exist.
Point number 2 is that we use (relatively) simple and generalized models. Remember how the stock price was determined by like a trillion things? If the perfect model would use all trillion, we use… maybe 100. We use a small chunk of what the perfect model uses.
Actually… saying that we use “maybe 100" was a generalization (to make the point more clear). Now I’ll elaborate.
Most outcomes depend on, say, a trillion factors. Maybe 5 of them have a notably strong impact on the outcome, 25 have a moderate impact, 1,000 have small impacts, and the remaining trillion have even smaller impacts.
We might be vaguely familiar with like 100 of the factors. And in reality, only a few of them really influence the models that we build. So the models we build are usually based off of the big trends, but it’s still important to remember that they’re not perfect, and that they could be more precise if we used more factors.
This all is similar to how a map is a model of its territory. Like how a map of New York is a model of New York itself.
The map is analogous to using 10 of the trillion factors to predict the stocks price. The territory is analogous to the set of all trillion factors that would allow you to predict the stocks price with perfect precision.
What a map does is it models its territory by removing information from it. For example, if a simple street map had every side street on it, it’d probably be too complicated to be useful. It’d have all the information, so you could technically sit there and sift through it all and make a perfect decision as to how to get to your destination fastest, but the benefit to your decision probably isn’t worth the extra time and effort that it’d take to read that complicated map. This is why there are varying levels of maps.
Sometimes you want a lot of information, so you use a map that only removed a little information. Sometimes you need to make quick decisions, so you use a map that removed a lot of information and left you with the essentials. And most of the time you’re somewhere in between. There is a trade-off when you add/remove information from a map: speed vs. precision.
And remember, maps are analogous to our beliefs. Beliefs that remove a lot of factors and just focus on the key ones are easy to make quick predictions with. But beliefs that retain a lot of information and factors take a little more time to make predictions with. You have to process the information that you have and fit it in to your model properly to make the right predictions.
This isn’t to imply that you should use as precise a map as possible in your decision making. Often times it’s worth it to be less precise and make easier and faster decisions. People are probably a good amount biased towards using easy maps, but that isn’t the point. There’s basically three things I’m saying here:
- We use maps to make decisions. Not territories.
- Maps vary by how precise they are.
- Territories exist, and they provide the right answer.
