“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
I sent an email about putting my habits on a range instead of a single number. My meditation runs 55, 89 and 144 minutes, a Fibonacci sequence, more on a smooth morning and less on a tight one.
A reader hit reply. “What’s so special about the Fibonacci numbers? Why not just use 15, 30, 60, 90 or something like that?”
Sure, 15, 30, 60, 90 could work. My range is a model. So is that set. Some fit better than others. The reader is treating my range like a law of how meditation works.
Ride a subway and you’re trusting a model. Harry Beck drew the London Underground map in 1931 with straight lines and even spacing, the stations placed for legibility instead of location. The map is a distortion.
- The distances are off.
- The angles are invented.
- The real city underground looks entirely different.
Riders use it anyway. It answers the only question you have down there: which train, which direction, where to change. Beck traded accuracy for something you could read at a glance.
Newton didn’t know he was wrong. For two centuries his laws looked like the truth, until Einstein showed that mass bends space and Newton’s version misses it.
We flew to the moon on Newton’s model anyway. The math is simpler, faster to run and close enough to land a spacecraft. A wrong model still did the job.
Check tomorrow’s weather and you lean on another model. The weather is too chaotic to pin down. Forecasts often miss. You check it before you leave the house anyway, because a rough read on the weather beats walking out the door blind.
Phil Libin, who built Evernote, uses a model of his own at company scale. He calls it the rule of 3 and 10: three people become ten, then thirty, then a hundred. At each jump the way the company runs breaks and gets rebuilt. He says that the numbers aren’t a law of physics but a way to see the breaks coming.
The subway map, Newton’s laws, the forecast, Libin’s rule: each is useful without being true. Derek Sivers wrote a short book on the idea and named it Useful Not True. A belief doesn’t have to be accurate to be worth holding. It just has to pay you back more than the accuracy it costs.
Most models are wrong. Some are useful. The skill is knowing you’re holding a model instead of absolute truth. Don’t mistake the map for the territory.
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What useful model could you put to work even if you can’t prove it’s true?
