When the map does not correspond to the territory, there is a certain category of fool — the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic “scientist”, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call “epistemic arrogance”, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved — who enter a state of denial, imagining the territory as fitting the map.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Postface” (2010)
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