Shared by JohnH
With NNT on hiatus as it were, my attention is being drawn to people who are talking about his ideas. I don’t really have the time (or smarts really) to do point by point analysis of each individual’s application (or criticism ) of NNT’s ideas, but I do think it’s interesting to see how these ideas are spreading.
Epistemocrats make maps.
It’s m=1/n=1 cartography.
Aaron Blaisdell knows: his pigeons and rats build cognitive maps for foraging, among other things.
Beliefs are our decision-making heuristics–myths–embedded within our cognitive maps (encoded in our neural circuitry networks) that we develop iteratively, as recursive and nonlinear updating functions, across time as a result of thinkering (thinking + tinkering) in our local ecologies: we are, after all, local animals inhabiting an increasingly global world. As organisms, we respond to the textures of our environments–stimuli–in our own unique ways, and we interact with time-sensitive feedback in this manner each and every day. Upon reflection, we quickly realize that this bottom-up process produces vast complexity almost instantly, so what do we do to sort through this fractally-dense forestry effectively: we make maps.
We act as cartographers, as mapmakers, in the face of uncertainty, in the face of opacity.