Map and Territory

Alfred Korzybski, 1931: “The map is not the territory.” A map of London is not London. A menu is not a meal. A model is not the system it represents.

This seems obvious. It isn’t. The failure mode is constant: optimizing the map instead of the territory, mistaking model outputs for reality, forgetting that abstraction loses information.

Maps are useful because they’re simpler than territory. A 1:1 scale map of London, including every atom, would be London — and useless for navigation. Abstraction is the point. The question is which details to keep and which to discard.

Every map makes choices. Road maps show roads, not buildings. Topographic maps show elevation, not roads. Political maps show borders that exist only in human agreement. The mapmaker’s purpose determines what appears and what vanishes.

The same territory supports many maps. None is “correct” — each serves different needs. The error is assuming your current map is the only possible map.

Goodhart’s Law is a map-territory confusion. The metric was a map of what you cared about. When you optimized the metric, you changed the territory in ways the map couldn’t see. The map diverged from what it was supposed to represent.

Financial models crash because traders forget models are maps. The model says risk is low. The territory (actual counterparty behavior in a crisis) doesn’t match. Long-Term Capital Management had Nobel laureates and models showing minuscule default probability. The territory defaulted anyway.

Science makes maps. Newton’s mechanics is a map of motion — astonishingly accurate for everyday speeds and sizes, wrong for relativistic or quantum domains. The map worked well enough that people forgot it was a map. Einstein’s revision wasn’t a rejection of Newton but a more accurate map of a larger territory.

All scientific theories are maps. They compress reality into usable form. They work until you find territory they don’t cover. Then you need a new map.

The practical discipline: notice when you’re looking at a map instead of the territory.

Financial statements are maps of a business. The P&L abstracts away customer relationships, employee knowledge, technical debt. The map says the company is profitable. The territory may be rotting.

Resumes are maps of people. The resume shows credentials and job titles. The territory includes judgment, integrity, how they act under pressure. Hiring on the resume alone is navigating by a map that omits most of what matters.

Words are maps of concepts. The word “love” maps a vast territory of experiences, relationships, and feelings. Two people using the same word may be pointing at completely different territories.

You can’t navigate without maps. But you can hold them lightly, update them when the territory surprises you, and remember that the surprise is information about the territory, not a failure of reality to match your model.

Go Deeper

Books

Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski (1933) — The source. Dense and eccentric, but contains the original formulation.
Language in Thought and Action by S.I. Hayakawa — Accessible introduction to general semantics including map-territory.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn — On how scientific maps (paradigms) change.

Essays

Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science” — One-paragraph parable of a map that achieves 1:1 scale.
Gregory Bateson’s “Form, Substance, and Difference” — On the map-territory distinction in systems thinking.

Fiction

Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893) — Contains the idea of a map at 1:1 scale, predating Borges.