trying to understand reality is futile, and will lead to either increasing mismatch of the map to the territory
How the hell do people come with ideas like these??
That's actually a position of reasonable people who engage in non-greedy reductionism, mostly replying to greedy reductionists (to use Dennett's terminology).
To give an example, suppose you're trying to get better at playing chess on a chess program running on a computer. Further suppose that the computer you're using is a Turing machine being implemented in Conway's Game of Life. Does understanding the behavior of a turing machine, or gliders and spaceships, or the basic rules of the Game of Life, increase your understanding of how to get better at chess? Will focusing on such things make you better or worse at playing chess?
That said, I agree with you about the above quote.
That's actually a position of reasonable people who engage in non-greedy reductionism, mostly replying to greedy reductionists (to use Dennett's terminology).
Trying to understand reality is futile is a narrow and trivial sense: the map will never completely match the territory. That's not the notion I'm criticizing.
In the case of Boyd, when he says "any inward-oriented and continued effort to improve the match-up of concept with observed reality will only increase the degree of mismatch," he seems to imply that the harder we work to create a m...
(Since there didn't seem to be one for this month, and I just ran across a nice quote.)
A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.