Expanding on the map VS territory divide: talking to people who are always in their narrow mind-worldview while you have to directly interact with the territory is like being a mountain climber and having to talk to people who have no concepts whatsoever of what a mountain is, and who think that everything shown on a map can be traversed in a straight line.
This is an incredibly common problem between project managers and those who actually have to execute, especially when there's a large gap in knowledge, for instance in programming. The world inhabited by the project managers is one where everything is simple but things don't get done because people are lazy, whereas the one inhabited by the workers is one full of constraints, technical, social and monetary, but which are incredibly difficult to convey to those who don't have the hands on experience.
The divide between those who take decisions and those who have to execute on them is probably one of the most toxic aspects of the modern world, because it systematically creates scenarios where decisions are out of touch with reality, and also ones where personal short-term interests prevail over long-term decisions that would benefit the health of larger collectives.
Personally, I don't hope that this will ever get fixed in my life, and fully expect that society will go through a lengthy phase of decline, if not straight up collapse, within my lifetime. In the meantime, I want to move away from environments that have this divide, as much as possible.
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2024-08-05