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RE: Human History X: The Mapmakers

in #history7 years ago (edited)

Interesting. Never really followed Thiel's work, just hearing of him in asides from stuff about other people. It all seems to be negative; like some kind of petty vindictive billionaire supervillain. Interesting parallels on dominion and maps -- and yes, he makes a valid point about us thinking that because we have satellites now that the entire world is mapped and known. For one thing, the entire fricking ocean is still right there but even aside from that, there are many parts of the map that are bigger or smaller or out of position compared to the dirtspace equivalent. Then of course, there's the simple case of being misled by GPS to prove the algorithms are far from perfect.

Maps, much like our own cognition, are an imperfect but fortunately-good-enough hack for navigating reality. Treating them as truly perfect is folly.