Resource One Transcript:

This is a map.

This is also a map.

What makes these two maps similar is that they both represent the terrain. If you see a street on the map, you would expect to see the same street out there in the city. What makes them different is that they have different levels of detail. One map only shows a couple streets and houses while the other one is much richer and gives a better representation of what actually is out there.

But even the more detailed map is not perfect. It doesn't contain the smell of freshly baked bread from the bakery, or the sounds of cars and birds and people. It is accurate enough, but the map is not the territory.

[Movie Clip] Please. The only thing is the map, the map, the map. The map is not the territory.

Just like maps model terrain, minds model reality. But in the same way even high fidelity maps don't reflect everything out there, they just have a good model for it. Minds, even well developed minds, don't reflect reality perfectly. For example, what do you see here? Obviously, it's a chair. Maybe you add some more detail to it and say it's a wooden chair, or a green chair, etc.

But that is not what is actually out there. As far as we can safely tell, there is no chair there. There are many atoms and waves interfering with each other, and photons bouncing off these atomic and subatomic particles. The only reason that you see a chair is because you're human, and your mind models reality at that specific level.

You cannot model reality at the level of atoms. Imagine if you saw or felt individual atoms and their movements and how they interact with each other. This would be very resource intensive. You would need to have a supercomputer in your head just to keep track of all the individual movements and motions and behaviors of these particles.

But instead, you get a chair. And a chair is a good enough approximation for what actually is out there. At least for humans. Finding out if a chair is there is easy. You can easily confirm its existence by seeing or touching the chair. This means that your map of reality, your model, is correct. It accurately represents what's there, even though it's not high resolution.

Where does rationality fit in here? Well, the art of rationality is all about making accurate maps. And how exactly this works. Well, that's for another video.

Resource Two Transcript:

Transcript from Episode 272 of the 99 Percent Invisible Podcast titled Person in Lotus Position.

Jeremy Burge:
My job is keeping on top of any new emojis and sort of documenting how they change over time. So for a real quick sort of history lesson on emoji, they started in Japan in the nineties.

Mark Bramhill:
The first set of emojis was designed for a Japanese cell phone company, by this guy named Shigetaka Kurita, in 1998. When texting was still really new, there were only 176 of them and they were 12-by-12 pixels each.

Roman Mars:
So that’s really low-res for an emoji, that’s super-low res.

Mark Bramhill:
Yeah, but these were like the first images that could be sent via text message, before photos or anything like that.

Jeremy Burge:
If you see the Japanese ones, they’re borderline no resemblance to what we see today. That was sort of very basic abstract pixel art.

Mark Bramhill:
So these super low-res emojis became really popular in Japan. And quickly, almost all Japanese text messages became dotted with these cute little pictures, but they were still only available on Japanese cell phones. And depending on which carrier people in Japan were using, these emojis could be different from phone to phone.

Jeremy Burge:
I might send you the hamburger and you might get the poo.

Mark Bramhill:
That’s a problem.

Jeremy Burge:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Roman Mars:
It seems like in our modern world of computers, this should not be happening.

Mark Bramhill:
Right. But the reason that this was happening, was that when different cell carriers in Japan added these images for their customers, they included them differently.

Mark Davis:
So let me take just a minute to explain what a character encoding is.

Mark Bramhill:
This is Mark Davis.

Mark Davis:
Every time you see a character on the screen, on your mobile or laptop, it’s always represented internally by a number. So there’s some number associated with the letter A.

Mark Bramhill:
So the problem in Japan, was that the companies weren’t coordinating about what emojis were assigned to what number. So one company might have the hamburger encoded as 46,790, while another carrier would have the poo encoded as 46,790. So when American cell phone companies decided that they wanted to enter the Japanese market, they knew that they needed the coding for these emojis to become standardized, and they turned to Mark and his organization, a group called the Unicode Consortium.