Comments on “Maps, the territory, and meta-rationality”

Really enjoyed this piece! I hear a “map is not the territory or whatever” at least weekly.

One question that might expand this further: are there non-cartographic maps that speak to the same thing?

I’ve found a lot of the map discourse (if you want to call it that) tend to avoid mental maps, system diagrams, and others for some reason. These tend to be the maps that people deploy to explain things to people that isn’t about physical locations. It ends up being the way people frame the problems they are solving and solutions they are recommending.

“Genetic pathways” and “signaling pathways (in cell biology)” are excellent examples of maps that aren’t maps. You may have seen them – biologists love to show big wall charts enumerating all the genes in the genome or all the proteins in the cytoplasm, with little arrows showing which ones regulate which other ones. The reductionists then define “pathways”, by which A controls B, which controls C, which controls D, …etc., whereas the anti-reductionists say that the whole mess is irreducibly a network, in which everything controls everything else, so trying to define “pathways” is arrogant, oversimplifying nonsense that tells you nothing real. Both are wrong. Pathways ARE illusory, in the sense that if you try to connect more than two links by using the map you will find that you can link anything to anything else (much like 7 degrees of separation in a human population), and if you try to use that connection you “discovered” you’ll find that it predicts nothing. On the other hand, pathways are REAL, in the sense that some things really do work together, or work in opposition, reliably, under a host of different environmental conditions, and across a vast range of species. So sometimes there really is something there. The usual meta-rational justification is to invoke the relative weights of the connections between elements; if only we knew these then the map would be predictive. Again, not true. The weights of connections are not fixed; they vary as a high power of the number of links in the overall map. That makes prediction, well, let’s call it problematic. BUT: to reiterate, it remains true that biology behaves as if some of these pathways really are there and really do act reliably. Which tells us that there are parts of the marsh that are almost always less liquid, others that are gooey all the time, and parts that can be drier or messier, depending on whether it has been more evolutionarily successful for the system to evolve to err on the side of variability or toward reliability, and under which conditions.

All of this is particularly relevant at present because the world of neuroscience is in the thick of recapitulating exactly this same process in the description of neural pathways, which are certain to have the same strengths as genetic and signaling pathways, and the same limitations. All of which is fine, and practical and interesting and incredibly informative - as long as one recognizes the inherent nebulosity.

“If create an Orbit account, or link to your existing one“ — missing “you”

Also, there’s a repeated “a a” in footnote 12.

Thanks – both for this post and the ‘novel ontologies’ you’ve provided everyone. I’ve had a lot of use of ‘reasonableness’ and ‘meta-rationality’ so far!

Hi David, I’ve found your writing on meta-rationality very illuminating, and have written an exposition of my understanding of meta-rationality and how it addresses a range of open problems in epistemology. I couldn’t track down your email address but I’d love to get your feedback on it - drop me a message if so!

You can find me at @richardmcngo on twitter, or via my homepage (richardcngo.com).