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In a world the place GPS is a thumb stroke away, most individuals take maps without any consideration. It is onerous to fathom that the oldest surviving maps had little to do with actuality. The Babylonian Map of the World, for instance, was a clay pill concerning the dimension of a first-generation iPhone. Created between 700 and 500 BC, the map exhibits Babylon within the center, with the Euphrates River chopping by the middle and the ocean on all sides. As Smithsonian Journal explains, it wasn’t a map for navigation — extra of a means for the map-holder to grasp the thought of the world round them. Accuracy was an afterthought.
It will be centuries earlier than an astronomer and astrologer named Claudius Ptolemy tried the primary sensible map — a two-dimensional depiction of what Ptolemy understood to be a spherical Earth. It is a prime instance of when an important thinker applies a brand new psychological mannequin — primarily, a brand new mind-set about issues; a heuristic for decoding the world. Slightly than accepting earlier, extra symbolic photos of the Earth, Ptolemy ventured to create a true-to-life illustration. He shifted the mind-set from storytelling to describing actuality.
Psychological fashions assist us to grasp issues extra absolutely and provide you with smarter, extra progressive options. However as Charlie Munger, former vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., used to say, it’s important to construct a “latticework” of psychological fashions, using numerous fashions to maximise your understanding of various conditions.
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