Tony C's Blog Posts about The map is not the territory

"By sitting down to make sense of their existing ideas instead of trying to invent new ones, writers at their computer mold the wet clay of experience into shape."
"The punch that defines good communication, and by extension, good art"
"To ship something excellent, you have to be willing to cut what may have taken weeks or months to produce."
"The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience - Einstein"
"The process of gathering ideas and distilling them into a smaller, more compressed form is the essence of creative excellence. "
"People move towards compression progress not by following their rational mind, but by following their intuition for what’s interesting."
You can't skip steps. Compression requires going through each step to get to the final output, otherwise the final output won't be accurate.
"Compression can conjure the essence of an experience, but never the real thing."
- "Whenever I’m nostalgic for that live show and long for something comforting, I’ll open my phone and re-watch the highlights. But no matter how many times I pray for a different outcome, that intense feeling is forever gone"
"A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness"
Good examples of compression:
- Just do it - Nike
- Antifragile - Taleb
- E = mc²
Disortion can be useful. E.g NY subway map. (Felt this was off-them and a weak ending)