Someone asked me via email:

How do you see the analytic/synthetic distinction relating to map/territory? I suspect I read the logical positivists with too much charity, because I fit their arguments into my conception of map and territory. Quine attacked the positivists' view with what I know you've said is a view much like what LessWrong holds.

I figured my answer will be helpful for others, too, so I'll post it here:

The analytic/synthetic distinction is quite different than map/territory. The map/territory distinction is a metaphor that illustrates the correspondence theory of truth which Eliezer endorses but I am unsure of.

The analytic/synthetic distinction was used by the logical empiricists to draw a strict line between sentences that were true in virtue of the relations between the meanings of words (analytic), and sentences that were true in virtue of the relations of the meanings of words plus extralinguistic facts (synthetic).

Quine argued that the distinction can't be made so easily. He gave several arguments for this conclusion. One of the easier-to-summarize ones that I'll use as an example is his argument against sentence-by-sentence meaning. He said that individual sentences taken in isolation from each other do not imply certain anticipations. For that, you need individual sentences plus larger chunks of theory in which the terms of the sentence are embedded. This is one part of Quine's "holism."

More generally, Quine said that Carnap (representing the best of logical positivism in The Logical Structure of the World, which was a masterful step forward for human thought even if it is flawed) and the logical empiricists had failed to provide clear and unambiguous boundaries for the analytic, and that the line between analytic and synthetic was instead quite fuzzy.

As for this: "Quine attacked the positivists' view with what I know you've said is a view much like what LessWrong holds." I don't think I said Quine attacked the positivists' view with a view much like LessWrong's typical view. What I remember saying was that many positive aspects of Quine's worldview resembled standard LessWrong positions, not that his negative work on logical empiricism made use of standard LessWrong positions.