Map is different

There is a few weird “common sense counter-examples” I’ve been thinking about. Take them with a grain of salt.

The map is not the territory

“A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” Alfred Korzybski Science and Sanity (1933)

Abstraction of a thing is not the thing itself. All models are wrong, the menu is not the meal.

More is different

“At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear.” Philip Warren Anderson More is Different (1972)

Different levels of abstraction depend on different types of complexity. More often than not, scaling up doesn’t solve problems, but shifts the complexity elsewhere.

Maybe the problems it solves will be worse than the problems it creates, but the point is that generally putting abstractions on complex systems does not necessarily reduce complexity, it only shifts it elsewhere. To me this one is very close to “every abstraction is leaky”.

The purpose of a system is what it does

Intentions of a system become irrelevant after some time. This can be as harmless as living with “technical debt”, or as harmful as institutional oppression.