Mini Blog Post 12: The Map is not the Territory
One of the most important concepts I’ve ever internalised is the phrase “The map is not the territory”. The map refers to my mind and my internal experiences: my beliefs, my intuitions, my feelings, my memories, my sensory experiences. And the territory refers to objective reality, the world outside me. “That which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
As with all of the most important insights, this doesn’t feel like an insight - it’s incredibly hard to talk about without seeming obviously true. Obviously reality exists outside of my head, and my perceptions aren’t perfectly accurate. The part that feels key to me is that I only have the map. Objective reality exists outside of my head, but I can only see my internal experiences. But everything I care about lives in the territory. So, my goal is to infer what I can about the territory from my map. And the map does not automatically correspond to the territory, so this takes careful thought and effort.
And the key difficulty is that, from the inside, it feels like the map is the territory. My beliefs don’t have labels attached saying which ones are biased and which ones are not, they all just feel like truth. And if I care about finding objective truth, I need to train the skill of looking past this, and trying as hard as I can to understand the true territory.
This is perhaps clearest with the example of vision. When I look around me, the world is full of objects. But all I have is my map - light bounces off objects, hits my retina, and is converted to signals in my brain. And there’s a pretty strong correspondence here, so often I can pretend the map is the territory. But this is not automatically true, and my mind is doing a lot of things behind the scenes. This is made clearest with optical illusions. And this has genuine, real-world consequences when combined with our memories, if we forget how unreliable eye-witness testimony can be.
But vision is an easy case. There’s an obvious entanglement with reality, via light bouncing off an object. This is far more interesting with our intuitions, and beliefs about the world. To get anything done in life, I need to have an accurate view of the territory, understanding what is true and what the consequences of my actions will be. And it often feels like I have a clear view of the territory, when really I’m looking at it through the flawed lens of my biases and assumptions - a map with a lot of scribbles on it. Intuitions and assumptions can be important, and can contain a lot of information, but this is not automatic. It’s something that needs care and attention.
I find I get a lot of conceptual clarity from saying “X lives in the map” vs “X lives in the territory”. This is a good way to track subtle errors, and is the fundamental insight upon which the entire heuristics & biases literature is built. A lot of my previous posts click into place when phrased in terms of this insight:
We’re bad at being nice to others, because the goal is to make other people happier, which lives in the territory. But our intuitions for how to do this live in the map, and misses a lot of creative options
My intuitions are a poor guide for optimising things, because my goals live in the territory, while my intuitions live in the map.
Morality is hard, because what I truly care about lives in the territory, while my sense of caring and altruism lives in the map. To me, this is one of the core insights of Effective Altruism
I feel helpless about problems in my life, but they’re fixable if I’m creative enough. Because “this is solvable” is a fact about the territory, while “this seems solvable” is a fact about the map
I often perform far below what I could, because “what could I do” is a fact about the territory, which gets confused for the question “how can I try harder at this” in the map
I can often detect misunderstandings by paraphrasing, because “did I understand what they meant” is a question in the territory, while “does it feel like I understood” is a question in the map
I often fail to take action, because “will acting now help my long-term goals” is a question in the territory, while “does now seem like the perfect time to act” is a question in the map
I often fail to take deliberate, purposeful actions, because “does this action help my long-term goals” is a question in the territory, while “does this feel like something I should be doing” lives in the map
I never do enough experiments, because “will this experiment teach me something” is a question about the territory, while “does it feel like I have something to learn” lives in the map
This may not be very clear for the posts you haven’t read, but hopefully it gives some flavour of just how important this insight is. A few common trends are that my map is systematically bad at tracking some important things: abstract ideas, like opportunity costs and the value of information; creative ideas I haven’t thought of yet; overweighting risks and underweighting rewards; uncertainty about my beliefs.
A warning: This is a leaky abstraction - the lesson of this post is not to throw away whatever is in the map. One of the key features of my map is my emotions, and what I feel. Noticing “this makes me happy” is valuable information, because “I am happy” is a fact about the map and the territory. My mind lives in the real world, and I care about what happens inside of it. But even here, it’s important to distinguish this. When choosing a career, I care about what will make me happy in the longterm, a question of the territory. While the map substitutes this for the question “what feels like it’ll make me happy?” I think this is the key error behind the countless people working soulless jobs for money, that isn’t really making them happy.
I think the distinction between the map and the territory is something that almost everybody in the world gets wrong. And this is not because people are stupid! This is a difficult insight, and it’s hard to keep track of. It’s easy to understand a bias in the abstract, but from the inside a bias feels like just another belief. So you need to look past these intuitions, and craft tools that can distinguish these things. Some of mine:
Noticing subtle cues, like confusion or overconfidence
Talking to others and asking for advice and criticism
Seeking out opposing views and genuinely listening
Challenging your beliefs, and trying to figure out why you’re wrong
Looking at evidence, and things that are more grounded in the territory
On a more practical level, I sometimes find this very useful when processing emotions, especially insecurities. From the inside, an insecurity is a niggling voice of doubt at the back of my mind. Always thinking the worst - do people dislike me? Is this good enough? Should I stop doing things? Am I being weird? And from this initial seed of doubt, it’s easy to start on a spiral of paralysing insecurity and self-doubt, from which it’s hard to escape.
The standard thing to try is to ignore this, by applying willpower and distracting myself. But this works badly on me, because it could be true. I can’t make myself believe a lie by sheer force of will. But insecurities live in the map, while the doubt is about a question of reality, of the territory. Insecurity is a systematic flaw in my map - seeing the worst, a lack of calibration. And so to overcome it I find something stronger, and seek something better connected to reality. Because the impulse to notice flaws and question myself is one I respect, and will not remove from myself. And part of me will rebel if I try to ignore it with force of will. But all of me can align behind finding truth
My process in practice:
Notice the fleeting of insecurity at the start, before the loop begins
Remind myself that “an insecurity is just a cognitive bias”
Seek something better connected to reality
An opinion of a trusted friend
Historical evidence
I keep a private list of the things I’m proudest of, my happiest memories, and the most meaningful compliments I’ve received, and this can serve as an excellent way to ground my self-esteem.
If there’s one thing you retain from this article, let it be this. The map is not the territory. And everything I care about lives in the territory. But all I have is the map, and from the inside it feels like the territory. And I need to always be careful to keep track of the difference.
