I feel like this is correctly pointing at a thing. I would also like to try to put it into my words to see what Val thinks about them:
The map/territory analogy illustrates a way to eventually be able to engineer the territory. Engineering the territory is not a goal in itself though so we need to continuously Look to remind us of there being an actually desirable end state. That end state is there, always, we can access it even now. It's just that our current reality will not enable us to access it nonstop and accessing it too much will either kill us or detach us into a happy bubble, leaving everyone else in chaos.
Unlocking permanent access for all to the end state is only of instrumental value. But to those who cannot see the goal, freeing up the path becomes a wonderful thing to do. Only they will eventually not have anything to care for anymore, once the path is free and also they lack an experience that is beyond what they can imagine. But it still isn't bad. It's perfectly okay. It doesn't make their experience worse or less true. They just don't know what they are missing even though it's right there.
Or differently put:
We can always develop and acquire better glasses to see further, wider, in more detail etc. And for the most part that's crucial to create better maps of the territory. Only once we learn to Look without glasses (or blindly), though, will we understand why it is worth wearing them and why it's worth trying to create better maps.
The territory isn't perfect, so we need to understand how to improve it. But the actual goal is not to create ever better glasses to create ever better maps. The goal is to be able to take off the glasses one day and not have to worry about the territory because it'll be perfectly reengineered.
People get obsessed with improving the glasses and anxious when people aren't using the best glasses available, they lose sight of the goal. Only if we know that not wearing glasses is the goal, it is useful to put on glasses. Otherwise we will get attached to our glasses that will become outdated.
The lyrics platform genius.com used to want to branch out into education and its annotation function still seems like a valuable feature I would like to see on LW one day. This might ease constant discussion and development of otherwise static content by facilitating commenting, discussions and editing processes in very specified ways.