A phrase first coined by Alfred Korzybski. Alfred worked in the general semantics field in the 1900s. What does this phrase mean though? It means that our maps and models of how the world works will only ever be an approximate or an estimation of the ‘actual’ world. Of course, this makes sense at an intuitive level. An actual map of your city, state, or country, by necessity, has been scaled down to be practical. Specific elements have been filtered out in the process to create a “decent or useful” representation of the streets and pathways of the city for…
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